I am not at work.
It is six o’ clock on Friday evening, and instead of being on the taxi rank raking in income I am at home and writing to you.
This is because when Mark got up this morning he had finally worked out what was the matter with the key for his taxi. A bit of it which I think he said was caused a transponder, although I might be making that up, is broken and needs replacing. What we needed, he said, was an old key from a scrapyard, any Renault key would do. He would then take the bit that he needed out of that key and put it in ours.
He thought that if we managed to get his taxi going then probably we could manage to keep putting clutch fluid in it and I would be fine if I didn’t use the clutch. My taxi could possibly be steered about reasonably plausibly if he kept putting engine oil in the power steering to hold it together and steered it himself because he has got more muscle than I have.
This proved not to be the case because when he set off to the scrapyard in my taxi to buy a key that he could dismantle and use in his taxi, my taxi broke.
The fan belt snapped, and he gave up. He hauled it over to the farm to try and make it usable. As you know we have got a disabled version of my taxi lying helplessly in his shed, from which we are slowly harvesting all of the vital organs.
This is a magnificently good move from a budgetary point of view but dreadfully time consuming, because of course before he can put a new bit in my taxi he has got to take two bits out, the broken one out of my taxi and the replacement one out of the donor taxi. By the time he finally chugged into his shed, puffing out black smoke, it was already past lunchtime. He called me at teatime to tell me that he had got the replacement bit out of the donor taxi, was about to start on my taxi, but his phone battery was going flat.
I have not heard anything since.
All I know is that I am at home with a locked taxi for which we still do not have a bit for the key, and that my taxi just might, might be repaired some time during the evening. Or it might not. I do not know if I will be able to get to work later on. What I do know is that if Mark does not fix my taxi then he will not be able to get home. It isn’t as if I can go and collect him. He will have to sleep in his shed.
Sometimes this diary is full of suspense, I can imagine my readers biting their nails and on the edge of their seats.
My assistance was not required in taxi surgery. Instead I stayed here and cleaned up the massive mess in the loft after Mark and the fire brigade had tramped up and down the stairs in big boots, after buckets and buckets of cement and stones had been dragged up and tipped all over the place, and after a short but intensive spell of welding, to reattach the roof.
It was not my finest moment. These are not good activities to be undertaking in a bedroom, especially not one with a cream carpet.
I brushed and polished and hoovered and tidied, and thought that it was a lot easier to be carting a large welder down the stairs than it must have been to have carried it up. Then I straightened up and packed all of the children’s back-to-school trunks, which are also in the loft, and by the time I was finished I was ready for the start of the new term.
As it happens this is something of an irrelevance at the moment of writing, because as you know, we do not have a vehicle in which we can take either child to school anyway.
I thought you would like an insight into my life as it is at this present moment, so I hopped out of my chair and took a photograph of my desk.
Live action and suspense all here in Windermere.
What an exciting life.
