Once again it is Friday and the weekend’s labours are upon us. It has been an uneventful day, mostly occupied with getting organised for work.
Actually, after a week spent dashing about and swimming and painting we were not in the least sorry to be obliged to spend a great deal of day sitting idly in taxis.
We weren’t working during the day as such, of course, but we start in the late afternoon on Fridays and stay optimistically on the taxi rank until the collapse of the last reveller at around four in the morning.
This means, as regular readers know, advance preparation of salads and sandwiches and flasks of tea and sliced melon.
Of course overnight all the daylight possibilities for fast food vanish, and the only possible overnight alternative to this industrious virtue is regular visits to The Charcoal Grill Kebabs Burgers Pizzas. This is conveniently sited right opposite the taxi rank and advertises its presence with attractively tempting smells and a tasteful flashing neon sign.
The sign should really say: this way to obesity, because that is what would undoubtedly happen to me if I visited the shop regularly. In fact I have only been there on a handful of occasions, usually when I am extremely intoxicated, and inevitably I have been unwell the day afterwards. I think this should be sufficient warning to avoid dodgy kebabs.
Thus we preserve our figures at a manageable state of rotundity by making our own picnic to sustain us through the rigours of the night shift.
This was my job for the day, and Mark’s job was to bath the dogs, who have become smelly after a week of charging in and out of puddles at the farm and rolling in badger poo.
As it happened it was Roger Poopy’s first ever bath, and he was not at all enthusiastic at the prospect, possibly even worse than Oliver, if such a thing could be said to exist. He had to be fished out from underneath the table and carried up to the bathroom.
Once firmly pinned down in the bath he had a thorough scrubbing inflicted upon him. This improved his coarse wiry texture quite considerably, probably getting rid of the build up of sticks and sawdust and insect life helped. Afterwards he was so excited by his newly-cleansed state that he rushed about all over the place, barking his head off and jumping on and off things. Eventually everybody shouted at him to shut up, at which point he ran halfway up the stairs and fell asleep.
This inspired me and Mark, and we went upstairs and had a sleep as well. I think that the possibility of an afternoon snooze is one of the nicest things about working at nights. Outside the window we can hear the day carrying on around us, delivery vans trundling along and mothers collecting children from school and people getting in with their lives: and we are in the middle of it all, hidden and warm and sleepy, listening to the world passing until we drift off away from it: it is one of my nicest things.
I emailed Lucy with some pictures of the painted camper van to remind her about her promise to illustrate it, but she wrote back and said that she thought it was beyond her capacity to save: so I might have a go myself.
We can’t go back there until next week now, because of work, which is terribly frustrating but of course necessary.
It’s a couple of days.
