Today was Open Farm Sunday, and the lettuce farm was taking part, but I missed it because I had to go to work. That was a shame, as I'd have liked to see behind the scenes and learn more about what they do. Oh well, maybe next time. When I got to work there was nobody about, although the car of one of my colleagues was already parked in the car park, and the office door was locked. My other colleague arrived, who has a key, and just as we were about to let ourselves into the office the owner appeared in her dressing gown, waving frantically, and unlocked the door. It occurred to me that living over the shop must be a bit like having chickens. You can never have a lie-in, because at eight you have to let the staff in.
It turned out that my missing colleague, finding herself locked out, had started righting the pots that had blown over. It took a very, very long time to stand all the pots upright, after yesterday's wind, and an age to water them. In the afternoon a customer asked if she could have a discount on a Myrtus communis, saying it looked so sad, and adding it was very dry. We politely declined, on the grounds that it didn't look that bad at all. A word of advice from the other side of the counter: if you are going to ask somebody to do you a favour, don't in your next breath criticise their work. I explained that the previous day's conditions had been extremely drying to plants in pots, that we had been unable to use the overhead irrigation to good effect because it was still windy, and that we had spend half the morning watering pots by hand and would start doing more of the same at five as soon as the customers had gone. She bought the myrtle anyway.
The boss's mother took me to see the puppies, which are living in a basket in the kitchen. The dog seemed quite pleased to have visitors, and didn't mind the puppies being picked up, and I was given one to hold for a while. The dog is brown all over, but the puppies are the characteristic Jack Russell light and tan combination. They are desperately sweet, with funny little scrunched up faces and tiny ears. When not being picked up they lie in a heap, presumably for warmth, and twitch. I wondered whether they were dreaming, and if so what a week old puppy would dream about. I would greatly like to have a dog, but the cats would hate it and are too old to have such a thing inflicted on them, and I don't have time to look after a dog. What I would really like is for the Systems Administrator to have a dog, and then I could play with it sometimes, but the SA does not have time to look after a dog either, and pointed out that the dog couldn't go to Lords or Trent Bridge, or curry nights in London. The puppies were all spoken for anyway.
The owner came out into the plant centre late on, and it turned out that she and the boss hadn't got to bed until three, which trumps my effort, since I was tucked up by two. Four and a quarter hours sleep is not enough to prepare one for nine hours of picking up plant pots, dragging hoses about, being nice to people and operating an archaic manual till and credit card machine without causing accounting chaos. I warned the owner that if the tills were wildly out she'd better blame me.
It was a nice party, though. I really can't see why we stopped seeing those people, except that two hours drive away is a long way, and they were busy having children while we were busy sailing and gardening, and the thirties are an age when you tend to be rather fiercely focused on your career. Now we've caught up with each other again I expect we'll stay in touch.
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