I should be at work, and am not.
There are a couple of reasons for this, not least because we have got to get up very early tomorrow morning. You will be surprised to discover that Mark has got another sort of job to go to. He is going to do one day, which is tomorrow, and then if he and the chap suit one another he is going to start properly next week, when he has finished clearing out his shed.
I do not know very much about this job at all, except that it is in some way related to the installation of rural broadband. More than that I have got no idea, and neither has Mark, despite several in-depth conversations about rural broadband with the chap whose business it is. He seems to be fairly sanguine about it, and so I shall have to wait until he gets home tomorrow before I know any further details.
In any case we are not earning much at the moment. There is nobody in the Lake District at all. It has become very quiet. We decided that we would like to have a sleep and wake up feeling revitalised and full of the joys of November. This seemed preferable to the alternative, which would be to earn about thirty quid between us and then wake up with eyes which felt as though the gritting lorries had been driving over our bed all night.
I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, of course, because of being unemployable: but I do have to get an awful lot of things done at home and then drive Oliver back to Yorkshire, before I go to my usual driving-a-taxi job, so it will be nice not to spend the day yawning and rubbing my eyes.
I like it when Mark is working. I can pretend to be a trophy wife.
I would have liked to be a trophy wife this morning. We sat in bed with our coffee contemplating our exciting Christmas adventure, which is our best, favourite time of the year. It is when we go off to Manchester for the pantomime and stay in the Midland Hotel, which is my spiritual home. When I get old I shall take a suite there, like Margaret Thatcher had at the Ritz. I shall live in it until they evict me. This probably won’t take very long so I had better wait until I am about to expire.
We were considering the journey down, because I wanted to go on the train. This seemed like an entirely sensible idea, because once we have paid for fuel and three days of valet parking it is not cheap to go by car.
It looked much cheaper to go on the train, until I remembered that the prices on display were for horrid horrid peasant class, and that a nice seat with a glass of wine and no yelling football supporters cost twice as much.
Obviously we needed that sort of seat.
That would have been a hundred and eighty three pounds.
I thought that was still not too bad, because it was for all four of us to go there and come back: and it would have been train travel, which I like very much.
We had a little think about it, because of course it is more sensible to go in a car. It is a proper sort of hotel, so you can arrive at the door and just give your keys and a tenner to the concierge and then five minutes later you are in the bar with a glass of wine, your luggage has been deposited in your bedroom and your car has gone off on a little holiday of its own.
They don’t unpack for you. You have to go to the Savoy for that.
All the same, I still like the train best.
We wondered why I liked the less convenient train idea so much better, and in the end I worked out that I don’t like going anywhere at all in my taxi. It is old and gritty and scruffy and reminds me of awful shouty passengers with vile-smelling kebabs. Mark’s is worse. It has all of the above-mentioned but with hairy mud from dogs and the farm swirled in as well.
Obviously we clean the taxis every week, but only in a quick-hoover-and-wipe sort of way. We don’t take the horrible carpets out and scrape the spilled beer out of them.
We thought that perhaps we could mend things a bit by giving my taxi a thorough clean, and perhaps getting some nice seat covers for it. This would make it feel nicer for work as well as the journey to Manchester, and also be tax-deductible.
This will be a much more sensible use of our finances. When we have finished moving out of the shed we are going to spend some time raking ancient chips out from underneath taxi seats, and making them look shiny and lovely again.
I would still have quite liked to go on the train, but you can’t have everything, it will be very lovely to have a gleaming taxi.
The lodger has got a horrible hangover today. She stayed at the restaurant until breakfast time this morning. The Chinese had a little party which accidentally trashed the restaurant and left the entire staff with unspeakable headaches and desperate urges to rush regularly to the loo.
I think their lunchtime opening today was not much fun. The lodger crawled home with bleary eyes for the second time and went straight to bed.
I am glad I do not drink.
The picture is Mark’s field corner, slowly filling up.
LATER NOTE: Mark’s rural broadband man has just rung. He says that he has got a lot to do tomorrow, and anyway there is no point in doing one day by itself and would Mark please just turn up the Monday after when he is not trying to clear out his shed as well. This means that we should have gone to work. I am feeling cross about this, but suppose he is right really.
