I have left it until ridiculously late in the evening to start writing this, and hence will probably not write very much.
The reason for this omission is that once again we have had a busy night.
I don’t really mean busy by August standards, where taxis are dashing about the village and out to campsites and over fells to pick up people who got halfway along their walk and whose feet got sore. It is busy by February standards, which means that by the time I have had a cup of tea, or possibly eaten a bread roll, somebody is standing next to the window, hopping from foot to foot in the cold, and asking if I can call them a taxi, which I always do.
In consequence, this has meant that the evening has been rather short of spaces for writing anything at all, either diaries of invasions of York, and not only have I done neither, I haven’t even read any of my book.
It is now quarter past one in the morning, and I am sitting outside the pub which is slowly disgorging its bleary-eyed occupants into the night time cold, and since nobody seems to have brought a good thick coat or boots along with them, especially the ladies, they are all getting in taxis.
It has long been a complete mystery to me that some women lose interest in getting dressed shortly after the underwear stage, especially in February in the Lake District, and even more of a mystery that their boyfriends don’t point it out and remind them to finish the job properly. I am quite sure that Mark would be very surprised indeed if I suddenly decided to go out wearing a bra, a very small leopard skin print skirt, and some high heels designed to stop a person from moving fast enough to be able to get warm. I have had one customer dressed exactly like this tonight. Her teeth were chattering.
The taxi drivers, the doormen on the nightclub, the man on the burger van, and the police are all wearing thick coats and hats and gloves and other items of February wear. I am wearing a sheepskin jerkin, woolly socks underneath my boots, and a large scarf, and even thus prepared, am not greatly inclined to hang about outside the taxi chatting to people.
The girl who got in the taxi whilst I was writing those words was not only mostly wearing underwear, but was actually barefoot, having put the excruciating high heels in her handbag. I have sympathy with this action although doubts about the wisdom of walking barefoot around a nightclub where the whole road is a sea of gravel and mud due to extensive building works. If it were not for people making sartorial choices that they couldn’t actually endure for a whole evening, I might quite conceivably be a great deal poorer than I am.
I am going to have to abandon this due to repeated interruptions. I will try again tomorrow.
It is jolly good to have a busy night.
How glad I am that we have got young people.
Mark took the picture. It was the early morning a couple of days ago. When we did an early morning.
