Well, none of it happened the way it was supposed to.
Instead of doing any of the things I was supposed to do today I have blown almost the entire day fitting the shiny new seat covers to my shiny aspirational taxi.
This was a ghastly job which has left me with sore fingers and a decidedly disgruntled outlook on life.
In an effort to become marginally more up-market, for my own benefit, not the customers’, who are so little interested in the seats of a taxi that they will regularly tip kebab, pizza and chips all over them, try and smuggle and then spill, all manner of noxious alcohol, and then occasionally throw up, I had ordered some devastatingly expensive seat covers for the taxi. Made to fit this exact model, instead of the usual twenty quid chuck-in-the-washer generic nylon types, they are of cream and black pretend leather, and look splendid.
That is to say, they look splendid in the picture in the advert. They look considerably less splendid when unwillingly forced over my determinedly rigid car seats, and hooked on to nothing very much underneath with a complicated and useless system of bits of elastic and hooks.
It has taken me the whole of the afternoon.
I have not even hoovered yet, although I am rather hoping that I might just get to that. It is unlikely that I will, since I haven’t even made my dinner yet, and I have got to leave for work in an hour.
I have been crawling around and swearing instead.
Mark had volunteered to do the crawling around and swearing on my behalf when he comes home. He is good at this, but I am determined that nothing is going to stand in the way of his camper van modifications, and hence decided to get it over and done with.
I have regretted it all afternoon. It isn’t as if there was anything actually wrong with the original seats, they were perfectly all right, it was merely my own pretentiousness which has caused the problem. In any case, they are supposed to be wipe-clean, and very probably they aren’t, and will have to be chucked in the dustbin as soon as they get the first upended pizza or tub of curry sauce smeared into their creamily upmarket texture.
Still, the council will probably like them when it visits them for its entrance examination on Thursday. They rang to reassure me this morning, because I have been flapping about wanting to work on Thursday night, and hence in need of the new plates to be produced instantly, rather than waiting a week for them to be left behind the desk at the town hall, or three weeks for them to be posted out and then left on the doorstep because John the postman knows I do not like having to get up early to answer the door. They promised me that all I would have to do – in the event of the taxi passing – would be to pay their acceptance fees and then hang about waiting for an hour or so, and the new plate would be ready.
I paid the acceptance fees on the phone. The girl didn’t know what I was talking about and told me that the chap who has dealt with it all doesn’t work in licensing, so perhaps I have been conned by a wicked scammer and there won’t be any taxi examination after all, although she took the cash anyway.
I am now at work, and I didn’t hoover, nor dust, nor even put the clean sheets on the bed. They hadn’t dried properly, and so they are draped over the top of the stove, waiting for me to come home from work.
I am not looking forward to coming home from work.
I was rushing around in a frantic last-minute panic, hurling boringly healthy stuff for dinner into my bag when I heard some clattering outside.
When I took the dogs out to be emptied I discovered that the kindly builders had dumped a massive stack of firewood next to the bins.
This is very useful because I have got the fire lit all the time now, and so it is incumbent upon me to be grateful. Actually I wanted to yell with horror, because it has all got to be moved into the yard now before the traffic wardens come round tomorrow morning.
I will have to do it when I get home, before I wash the pots and change the sheets.
It is raining.
I still haven’t hoovered.
I don’t think I want to go home.
