It was a grey morning, the cloud hanging low, and driving to work I passed a hawk sitting on a gate post. I presumed it was a kestrel that had given up hovering because it couldn't see anything. It had a dark back with barred markings. A colleague suggested it might have been a female sparrow hawk, which have bright yellow legs. I didn't see this one's legs, trundling past it at 30mph, but I'll try and remember that for next time. She recently saw some short eared owls on some rough grass by the river Stour, when she was out beating, but I definitely wouldn't recognise one of those.
An early phone call at work was from a woman who wanted a white flowered camellia. I described what we had in stock to her (not much, some tiny specimens of 'Silver Anniversay' and a couple of 'Alba Simplex' and 'Mathotiana Alba'. She then warned me that she was a wheelchair user, and asked if we still had the gravel in the plant centre, which is not wheelchair friendly. I had to confess that we did still have it, not least because we couldn't afford to replace it with paving over such a large area. We arranged that when she arrived she would ring us, and we would take the plants out to her car for her to have a look at them. I pointed out that it might be a good idea to bring enough cash, or we were happy to take a cheque, since if she wanted to use the credit card machine she would need to get into the shop.
She offered to tell me her pin number. I promised that if she wanted to do that I would never tell her bank that she had, and she said it was all right, she had to do it quite often, at petrol stations. That is something I never even thought of. I read Melanie Reid's 'Spinal Column' in the Times supplement when one of my colleagues brings it into work, and I had imagined the difficulty of getting into shops, especially small independents, but it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be able to do something as mundane as pay for petrol. I suppose the alternative is to carry a lot of cash, but that isn't ideal either. You would feel exposed even withdrawing it, then continuing on your way in your chair. When she arrived she liked one of the plants, and had brought enough money to pay for it in the car park. She had a beautiful and calm smile, despite the fact that each day of her life must contain enough aggravation and petty annoyances to keep the rest of us going for a fortnight.
The next customers ended up bewildered by choice. They had been to Anglesey Abbey, and fallen for the charms of the grove of white stemmed birches, which they had photographed. Unfortunately the name they had latched on to was Jacquemontii. When they discovered that there were several different named varieties of Betula utilis var. jacquemontii they became frozen with indecision. We didn't have the straight species in stock anyway. We had 'Grayswood Ghost', which has extra long catkins as well as the striking white bark, but having not seen catkins at Anglesey Abbey they didn't want them. I don't know why not, given that they weren't being offered a choice between bark and catkins but the opportunity to have both, but they had a set idea of what their birch trees should look like, and catkins were not included. They were very reluctant to believe that the brown stems of our young trees would turn to the glistening white they had admired, even after I had pointed out the white patches developing at the base of the trunk where it was thickest. It was a pity not to have sold them some 'Grayswood Ghost' on the spot, but I expect they'll be back, when they've done some more reading up and adjusted to the idea that there are so many different sorts of white stemmed birch.
Then we went on with the stock take in the shop. This is a job of such awful, mind-numbing tedium that if you let yourself think about how boring it really is you would lie down on the ground and refuse to open your eyes, or start howling like a distressed inmate of the Battersea Dogs' Home. The whole thing ought to be done using bar codes, on an electronic tablet, instead of by hunting manually through about 80 pages of printout of an excel spreadsheet for something that fits the description and price of each stock item. The spreadsheets are in no discernable order, and the things in the shop are artistically dotted around all over the place. Still, I've only got one day of that left to go, and then by Monday week they must have finished.
It got very cold later on. My colleagues at 4.00pm asked if anybody should stay late. I said firmly that I didn't think so. Nobody was going to come now. When I got into my car the thermometer read one degree.
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