not according to plan

Now that it's March our working day starts at 8.00am instead of a quarter past.  I've moved the alarm clock a quarter of an hour earlier, but it takes a bit of getting used to.  By now I've got a set of timings for the point at which I need to stop doing whatever else I'm doing and start making my packed lunch, the time by which I need to start eating breakfast, the latest possible time at which it's worth starting a second mug of tea, the time by which I need to have finished breakfast and reading newspapers on-line and start cleaning my teeth, and the time to leave the house.  The journey to work is calibrated against the stages of the Today programme.  If I haven't got to Little Bromley by the time Thought for the Day starts that's bad.  And now all those timings are wrong and have to be relearnt, until the clocks change in the autumn and we revert to the winter 8.15am start.  We're finishing later too, 5.00pm instead of 4.15pm as of last month, and come April it will be a six o'clock finish.

A lorry arrived with various bits and pieces for the shop, and the driver, looking worried, disappeared under the cab, muttering about only having braking action on one side.  When he started the engine up again and depressed the brake pedal, a jet of liquid shot out of the front off-side brakes.  He made telephone calls and sat in his cab, looking resigned.  That was a rubbish start to his week.  Eventually a commercial-vehicle-roadside-recovery van appeared, and the engineer confirmed that whatever bit it was of the brakes had failed.  He could get the component, but didn't carry it with him.  The lorry was still there mid-afternoon, but by close of play had managed to get away.  I suppose breaking down in a quiet garden is better than by the side of the A12.

Last weekend a customer appeared at the till with a severely nibbled clematis.  At the time I couldn't think what might have done it, my mind running upon muntjac and it seeming unlikely that we'd had one of those in a polytunnel inside the plant centre.  Today we discovered the culprit, an enormous mouse (or vole).  It was running around inside the tunnel cover, having managed to get between two layers of polythene, but it made its escape before we could work out how to catch it.  Over the weekend it (or its friends and relations) had stripped almost all the leaves off a dozen Clianthus.  Before shutting the tunnel up tonight the manager set up a fearsome array of mousetraps.

(Folk music must be getting trendy.  Our plan to go and hear Cara Dillon at the Colchester Arts Centre has been scuppered by the fact that it is sold out.  At least I looked at the website before driving into Colchester, but I feel rather a prune.  Apart from Martin Carthy and Fairport Convention folk concerts are never sold out.  We had better bother to book in advance for Spiers and Boden.)