It was half past five before we finished work and collapsed into bed.
Having spent the entire evening relaxing peaceably on the taxi rank, sharing our flask of tea and thinking about the world, just after midnight everything erupted into noisy excitement and there were people everywhere.
Almost every taxi driver had got fed up and gone home by then, leaving four taxis in the whole of Bowness, probably the ones who had been most reckless over Christmas, and from that point onwards we were zipping about like characters in Grand Theft Auto.
There turned out to be three hundred people in the nightclub, all of whom wanted a taxi. If you divide that by four you will understand the perplexity of the situation, and by three o’ clock people were hurling themselves bodily over the bonnet of the car and then shouting noisy insults when this manoeuvre failed to gain them a ride home.
It entirely failed to gain them a ride home in my taxi, I make a point of not picking up passengers whom I already know to be complete idiots, it is far better to start from a hopeful point of view and then maybe just be surprised halfway through the journey. Therefore I did not pick up anybody who banged on the window, lay down in the road in front of me or who compared me to copulating livestock. I find this selection practice makes for a more tranquil evening.
By the end of the night everybody had somehow found their way home, most of them on foot, and we retired to feel relieved about the state of our overdraft. In the end I was woken up by the grandfather clock downstairs striking twelve, there must have been a small delay in my reaching consciousness because I woke up quite convinced that it had only struck eight.
This led to a small panic, because we had invited Mark’s mother for dinner this evening, and it is not good practice to be still in bed at lunchtime with yesterday’s unwashed laundry in the basket and last night’s unwashed pots in the sink when one is expecting company.
Mark refused to be flustered, and so we had our usual coffee-and-quiet interlude in bed before leaping out to dash about frantically collecting spilled towels and empty flasks and muddy shoes. I did this bit. Mark brought in logs and cleaned the hearth out.
It is a long time since we have seen Mark’s mother, and Mark thought that she would very probably not notice if there was still washing in the bottom of the laundry basket. I supposed that this would very probably be the case, but the point was of course that I would know, and my inner tranquil perfection would be quite ruined by such a thing: and so we tidied up.
The house turned out to be not nearly as messy as I had thought it was, and actually everything went very smoothly. I made a curry, with chicken because of not being entirely confident that goose curry might be a real thing that people eat. Chicken, on the other hand, is a tried and tested recipe and went splendidly, and of course there was still no shortage of pudding.
Mark’s mother ate everything and told us about her adventures, she is currently living in a caravan in a field in Wales with a chap who rides a motorbike, although is considering an upgrade to a cabin next to some chicken sheds at some time soon. She did not look in the bottom of the laundry basket and therefore never knew that I have got a growing collection of dishcloths waiting to be boiled.
When she had gone we dashed about washing pots up and tidying the kitchen and adding more dishcloths to the pile in the bottom of the laundry basket.
We are going to set off early in the morning, at least by our standards.
I am going to go and help Mark to tidy up, because it is getting late, and we are going to get some sleep.
We are all very excited.
The picture is the laundry basket and includes Roger Poopy.
