My fourth box from Mr Fothergill arrived, and the postman handed it over remarking cheerfully 'More plants!' so he has clearly got the idea. When I opened it I discovered I had ordered frost resistant Delosperma, or ice plants, not Gazania, and they were already in 9cm pots that should see them through the winter, so beyond standing them on the greenhouse staging I didn't need to pot them or do anything. Frost resistant or not, I think they might as well be planted out next March and not now.
I gave a woodland conservation talk to a gardening club last night. They are a friendly group, with thriving membership numbers, and I already knew them from a previous talk about gardening and bees, so I was fairly confident that it would be OK. I'm due to give another talk on Monday evening to a group in Billericay, so I'll have to take my equipment and trug of twigs with me to work, plus some clean clothes and a nailbrush, and go there straight from work, having tried to make myself look roughly presentable in the loo at the plant centre. As I'm working over the weekend as well it's going to be a bit of a marathon three days. Then at the end of next week I've agreed to go and talk to Braintree beekeepers about gardening and bees. When I agree to do these things, which is generally ages in advance, I think it will all be fine, and then as the hectic period approaches I begin to feel rather gloomy about it, and wonder why I get myself into such situations. And then it's fine.
I once saw a documentary in which people surfed up the Severn bore. The better ones stayed on the wave for ages. Getting into the mental and emotional state where you can stand up in front of a room full of people and entertain them, and then do it again after three days of solid physical work, and then for a third time in just over a week, is probably a bit like riding the bore. It's good to sometimes make the effort, but you couldn't do it all the time.
Once I'd got back from the talk, and unwound, it was quite late by my standards, but I had to set the alarm as I needed a haircut and the only appointment I could get was at 9.00am. Normally I wouldn't risk Colchester's traffic at that hour, but happily it was running freely. Then I went to Tesco, where the money off toothpaste voucher they'd sent me wouldn't work at the till. When I reclaimed my discount at the customer service desk I discovered that the entire mailing was faulty, and nobody's toothpaste voucher would scan. Somebody in an IT department somewhere is going to have some explaining to do. People who look askance at my downshifted status, compared to the intellectual stimulation of their own graduate level employment, forget how much of having a proper job consists of spending your days sorting out messes of unbelievable tediousness, like having sent entire batches of non-scanning money-off vouchers to customers.
Then, proving that I know how to have a good time, I went to the dentist. I quite like the dentist, who is a reassuring Swede who doesn't give out the disapproving vibes of some dentists. Also I don't generally need anything doing to my teeth. I shouldn't be smug about that particular health outcome, as doubtless genetics and lifestyle will find something else to go wrong if not my teeth. By the time I left the parental home and the ministrations of the Devon dentist I had four fillings, and I have never required another since. Makes you wonder about the drill and fill method of paying dentists in the 1970s, doesn't it?
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