I was on the taxi rank last night when I noticed to my surprise that one of the very riotous drunks at the garden tables of the nearby pub looked remarkably like Number Two Daughter.
A moment’s observation led me to go and investigate a bit further, whereupon I made the discovery that she was not, after all, at home with the children, which was where she had planned to spend the evening, but was in fact swaying and hiccuping and laughing outside the Stag’s Head.
Her friends spotted me before she did, leading to one of the sort of silences where one person carries on warbling and singing and waving their arms about and everybody else hides under the table.
It turned out that she was too drunk to speak, so I took her home in the taxi and instructed Lucy and Oliver, who of course were not in bed, because of it being school holidays and also being unsupervised, to put her clean sheets on her bed and deliver her into it with a large glass of water.
Lucy phoned me up later and said that they had tried with the sheets but that it is hard to make a bed around a very intoxicated person. In any case things had gone awry with the quilt cover, and Oliver had got stuck in it like a ghost and they had been obliged to desist and leave her to sleep it off under the sheet. I thought this was perfectly sensible and said that I thought she would probably be fine.
Mark took the rest of her friends home afterwards, they were very penitent and also didn’t have enough money. When we got up this morning there was an apologetic bunch of flowers on the table, which I thought was jolly nice and quite right too. It is very wicked indeed to drink too much. I would never dream of doing such a bad thing.
We were going to go swimming tonight and then go to work afterwards, but we were just driving through the village when we noticed people frantically flagging taxis and an empty taxi rank, so that was the end of swimming and the start of being at work.
This was both a relief, because of being fairly idle, and a nuisance, because I was longing to stretch taxi-cramped muscles after several days of busy season.
We had already spent the day being almost completely lazy: we didn’t even stir until half past twelve, when the dogs barking at something outside roused me out of an awful dream about Mark deciding that he didn’t want to be married any more. I told him about it over coffee, and he laughed a lot, because all he had done was roll over and away from me in bed, and he thought perhaps I might be reading too much into it.
We washed up and hung the washing out and Mark played zombie-slaughtering games with Oliver for a while. We put our takings into the bank and I paid the mortgage and the Autoparts bill, and my world was all right again, because of having staved off the bailiffs for another week.
The Chinese restaurant has importuned Lucy until she reluctantly abandoned her holiday plans of uninterrupted idleness. Mark took her in to work at teatime: and then the two of us sloped off back to bed for another couple of hours.
It was swimming time when we woke up, and we dashed off leaving naughty Number Two Daughter to walk the dogs, but as you know when we arrived in Bowness the lure of hard cash was too much to resist, and so we will have to take the risk of heart disease for another day.
Lucy turned up at the taxi rank as it was going dark, with her pockets full of tips and feeling very pleased with herself because of having to fight off the undisguised admiration of waiters and kitchen porters all evening. She decided to walk the mile and a bit home in order to have had lots of exercise so that she could continue looking slim and charming even though she had got fried rice for dinner.
We had another busy night. Mark says that one of my tyres is going to need replacing this week, probably because of my joyful late-night rushing about. Certainly I made the surprising discovery whilst stuck behind a tourist this evening that the little sign which shows your speed as you come into the village does not always flash on and off in red, but can show your speed in mellow rewarding green as well. I genuinely had never had this experience and it was a salutary discovery.
As the old taxi-driver saying goes, if you learn something new every day, by the time you die you’ll have a head full of rubbish.
The picture shows the very first moments of the dawn coming up. I have seen it a lot lately so I thought I would share it with you.
