It is a wet Sunday evening on the taxi rank, and I have taken so many drugs that I am feeling very contentedly mellow.
The drugs were not merely for recreational purposes, I hasten to add, although that might have been a pleasant occupation for a wet Sunday in the Lake District, but because of an excruciating migraine headache that has been thudding away in the side of my skull for most of the day. In the end I retreated to bed, and unfortunately the pain came with me, so I took a small handful of drugs, which worked beautifully.
One of the delights of painkilling drugs is that they do not only banish the target misery, the migraine in this case, but all of the other small niggling irritations that plague us elderly persons. I am sitting peacefully on the taxi rank without a stiff shoulder, sore fingers or indigestion, drugs are indeed a marvellous thing.
It is now very much later and I have not had chance to write very much more in these pages, largely because of taxi-driver wittering. We have had a recent influx of very dodgy-seeming Uber drivers into the area, and everybody has been very upset about it. They are wearing the ubiquitous Wolverhampton plates, so nobody knows where they are coming from, and they are being a complete nuisance.
It is impossible to explain their villainy without going into tedious detail about taxi legislation, a subject in which I am quite sure that pretty much the whole of my readership has no interest whatsoever, so basically you will have to take it from me that they are being a nuisance, picking up customers when they shouldn’t and generally being lawless. Several of them are very definitely not properly licensed, most of them will probably not have the right insurance, and we are all worrying about it, as if a Rochdale grooming gang had picked itself up and removed itself, en masse, to Windermere.
To give you an idea of our worries, one customer told the driver last night that he had been taken home by one the night before, and that he had discovered all of the door handles had been removed. He was trapped in the taxi and could not get out until the driver got out and opened the door for him.
I do not at all like the sound of that, and hence, for the first time, I am in heartfelt sympathy with taxi driver witterings, and have been standing on the taxi rank listening to the outrage.
They have arranged a meeting with our local twerp of an MP next week. I have explained that he is more or less powerless to do anything about it, given that he is a mere Liberal Democrat and nobody, anywhere at all, cares what he thinks, but the other drivers are not convinced. He is in charge of the Lake District, they have insisted, and so it is Up To Him to sort it out.
I have a mental image of our local MP turning up in a stab vest with a speed gun to sort the rascals out, that would show them.
In other, more interesting news, I have been slowly putting paid to all of the small tasks that have been queueing up for me whilst Mark has been at home and I have not been paying sufficient attention to my domestic responsibilities. Today I watered the poor, gasping conservatory, which has been slowly expiring, and swept and mopped the floors. The floors had become so horridly gritty that I no longer wanted to walk on them with bare feet, and the presence of the blackcurrant bush in the garden has been adding to their woes. We have eaten quite a lot, but by no means all, of the blackcurrants, and the remaining ones have been plopping steadily in to the yard, to be walked into the house by careless boots, and the floors have slowly become a faint shade of purple.
I have been eyeing up the purple wondering if I might get to like it, but I didn’t, and so today was Bleach Day.
I think that wraps it up for excitements to tell you.
I am going to go away and try and get the website to publish this. Fingers crossed.
