We are back on the road at last.

After a long and nail-biting week whilst Mark painstakingly dismantled and pieced back together our one and only source of ready cash we are - with sighs of great relief - about to become solvent again.

(I put that bit in in case our bank manager reads this.)

My other half and I are in the cheering position of running a joint business, being a shared owned-and-run taxi in Windermere which has been off the road for the last week (with a being-reconditioned gearbox and a broken engine mount and a bent piston and something depressing and troubling to do with cylinders), creating something of a cashflow problem.

We run it together, one shift in the taxi, one shift at home: the whole operation involves a constant relay of serial single parenthood (two kids, aged seven and two) alternating with long and occasionally tedious stretches of sitting hopefully in the taxi on Bowness Pier.

(It does not take a genius to work out that in our case by far and away the soft option is going to work. Who would not prefer three or four hours sitting peacefully by the lake with a flask of coffee, good book and tub of home-made biscuits to the alternate option of nappies, howling infant disputes over DVDs, school runs and stacks of dirty washing etc etc?)

Except, of course, for last week, when Mark was grim-faced and walked oil all over the carpets and I had to use the credit card in Booths (cash business of course) - who does not know that awful moment by the till when the assistant might just say: "I'm sorry..."

On the plus side we got our red wine consumption back up to a civilized quantity and watched some DVDs that have been hanging around for a while, and actually got to bed before we fell asleep rather than after, so it was not all bad, if only one could be wealthy as well as idle life would be marvellous, what a tiresome choice it is.

But I am (already) rambling.

This is an introductory bit to a blog I am to write for the Westmorland Gazette.

I would of course prefer to write in the paper, this last for purely financial reasons as I cannot imagine anything worse than being recognised and talked to (not true, of course, trapping your thumb in the car door is only one of a long catalogue of worse things, it is a figure of speech designed to illustrate that I am generally not very good at talking to people, tend to grin stupidly and be unable to think of anything sensible to say) - but obviously since I have never written anything more inspiring than a cheque for the electric bill I need to get some practice in. I can't write a book as I am utterly without the sort of inspiration that makes people dream up gripping plotlines, and the web page seems to be short of local people prepared to ramble at length so here I am.

Writing will keep my thought processes alive and help fend off early-onset Alzheimers (according to a fascinating but possibly flawed study on nuns in the US).

It will give me a decent excuse for being too busy to hang up the washing.

It might be fun.

Watch this space.