I have had a day of anxiety.
Nothing actually troubling is happening to me really. There have been a lot of demands upon my attention, some of which I forgot about and remembered in horrified moments later, and I feel as though I have been running around in endless exhausting circles with no successful outcome whatsoever.
This is not true. Actually there have been several successful outcomes, not least that I am very pleased to announce that my literary effort Clive and the Dragon, written, as you might recall, by the genderly-unidentifiable Casey-Lee Shaw, is now out on Amazon.
You can read it for nothing if you have got Kindle Unlimited, or for £2.50 if not, or you could even purchase a paperback for £9.99.
You don’t have to do any of these things, of course, and really I do not imagine that you would want to, because it is the sort of story that I would have liked best when I was twelve, and although I still like that kind of story best, most grown-ups prefer a sprinkling of at least some mildly adult topics in their reading matter. There is no smut, and nothing truly terrible happens.
Actually, that isn’t true, there are some exciting moments when the dragon puffs out scary hot flames, which would be pretty terrible if you happened to be on the wrong end of them, ie, the not-dragon end, but nothing to make you look anxiously over your shoulder if you are going upstairs whilst by yourself in the house later. This is because I do not like books which make you do that, and find the current fashion for Insert Jeopardy Here quite tiresome. I do not like it when I am reaching the end of an otherwise good book and know that I am going to have to endure several chapters of upsetting worry whilst somebody is stalked by a dangerous lunatic on a deserted heath in the middle of the night, and might or might not be murdered.
Despite not reading or writing about murders, it has still been an anxious day, because, of course, of the nail-biting problems of licensing the new taxi.
I am pleased to say that the dog emptying trip over the fells was not anxious, although it was exceedingly wet and muddy. It had the extraordinarily happy moment of discovering some field mushrooms, which I have taken home to make into omelettes on a less troubled day.
After that it was all Difficult.
I have been racing round trying to collect together the paperwork which the council is demanding in order to licence the new taxi. As I might have mentioned, there is a very, very lot of this.
Today’s problems were the Engineer’s report and the insurance, which needed to be arranged in advance, and both of which, along with the MOT, a handful of application forms, the V5 and some photographs, had to be dispatched to the council before Monday morning.
The garage woke me up at nine o’clock this morning to announce that the latter had been done, and would I kindly get the car off their forecourt, which I couldn’t. The garage is in Kendal, and until Oliver woke up I couldn’t get a lift.
He had been working all night, and had called me from a deserted warehouse in the middle of the night to grumble about spiders setting alarms off, so it wasn’t going to be any time soon.
In the end I decided that I would leave Oliver to sleep it off and make my own way. It occurred to me that this could fortuitously be combined with telephoning the insurance company, and occupied an extraordinarily frustrating train journey to Kendal in listening to their Hold music, after which they cut me off.
I tried again, which took me the whole of the long, wet scurry to the garage before cutting me off again.
I collected the car and its engineer’s report and tried again. This time the Hold music lasted until I had purchased dog food, and then somebody answered and said that they couldn’t promise anything and maybe they would or maybe they wouldn’t, nobody cares, get over yourself, muppet, which was not reassuring.
I drove home very carefully, because a stone chip at this stage would be a disaster. I was taking the car to be valeted in Bowness afterwards, and rousted Oliver out of bed to bring me home, because of the endless torrential rain.
We had just got back when the insurance company called back, five minutes before they closed for the weekend, to tell me that they had the certificate and would send it immediately, to my colossal, spine-relaxing relief.
I have now gathered all of the necessary paperwork, except the photographs, which might be better taken after the valet service.
All that is left to do is not crash it until the council have seen it.
That is not until the second of October.
I am going to park it somewhere very, very quiet and put a sheet over it.
I do not need any last minute jeopardy in my own life.
