The lecture to the Braintree beekeepers about good garden plants for bees was OK in the end. The centre of Braintree is so densely packed with small streets that while I could see my destination, Great Square, on the map, I couldn't work out exactly how it connected with the other streets around it. I presumed that the Sainsbury's car park where I'd been told I could park would be signposted, and there was a superstore marked on the map close to Great Square, so the best thing to do seemed to be to leave plenty of time, follow my nose to Sainsbury (in a metaphorical psychogeographical sense), park, and wander about through any likely looking alleys until I found Great Square and the Constitutional Club. The car park had notices saying it was pay and display, maximum three hours, cost refundable if you spent at least £5 in Sainsbury, but the first machine was broken with a notice saying use the one in front of the store, and the one by the store turned out to be broken as well. I asked a security guard inside the store where I could get a car parking ticket. He seemed a gentle soul, maybe not an obvious candidate for a security guard (the ones at Colchester Hythe Tesco all look like nightclub bouncers), and he didn't know about car park tickets, but took me to the information desk who said the car park was free after six.
The Braintree and Bocking Constitutional Club reminded me of a provincial hotel of thirty years ago, with very patterned carpets, plenty of non-structural beams, and a strong smell of gravy and food that had been boiled into submission. The Braintree beekeepers meet in an upstairs room featuring an extraordinary wooden chandelier vaguely resembling a cartwheel. I arrived well ahead of my hosts, but the staff were very kind, and didn't grumble at all about having to unlock the front door to me several times, while I shuttled backwards and forwards getting plants from the car. It says something about the innate courtesy, or else sheer lack of curiosity of the English, that nobody seemed to notice as I carried boxes of plants and a fairly large Mahonia japonica through a supermarket car park. The only tables to put the plants on were wooden dining tables, so I covered them with the only thing I had, a pair of towels that normally live in the car to cover the back seats when I'm going to the dump.
I got the plants set out in the order I was going to speak about them, and was ready to roll twenty minutes before the meeting was due to start. With five minutes to go we still only had about eight or ten people in the audience, then the room suddenly filled. They seemed to enjoy the talk, and bought a lot of plants. Since I'm not on commission it doesn't make a great deal of difference to me whether they buy plants or not, but it meant that at the end with a couple of helpers it only took one run to put what was left back in the car. The tables had gone rather misty looking, towels notwithstanding, so I hope that polishes out and the beekeepers don't get into trouble over it with the club. I'm not entirely sure they knew what they were getting when they booked me. Most of the clubs I speak to meet in village halls, which generally have plastic topped tables able to withstand a few plant pots. The car had not picked up a ticket or been clamped, despite the lack of notices confirming that parking was free after six, so I trundled off home with a great sense of relief that I'd finished all my talks for now without mishap, apart from the tables. It turned out the Systems Administrator had recorded Monty, so we can watch Gardeners' World and The Sopranos on Sunday night instead.
Addendum The cats have forgotten that they don't like Haddock, and we have been able to palm off the two tins on them that were left over from the previous fish multipacks.
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