One of the hens nearly went on her holidays last night. The Systems Administrator nipped out before we went to bed, to check that they really were locked in their house, and not just shut in their run. And didn't reappear. Minutes passed, and I thought that it didn't take that long to close the hen house door, so went out to investigate, and found the SA wandering about with a torch. One of the hens had managed to avoid going back into the run with the others after chicken exercise time, and had been sitting outside the pop hole to the run when the SA went out. At the sight of a human she disappeared into the herb bed. We looked for her for a while, but searching for a chicken that doesn't want to be found in a large and overgrown garden is a fairly hopeless endeavour even in broad daylight, let alone in the dark. We agreed that she'd have to take her chances, which weren't too bad in that the last time we had the motion camera set up on the chicken house we didn't see a fox over the entire week. The SA grumbled savagely that this hen was always awkward about going back in, and we went to bed, leaving the run open.
I went out this morning as soon as I got up and there she was, lurking among the undergrowth nearby rather than in the run, and extremely damp and pathetic. She is an odd-looking hen, having developed a strange random clump of feathers on one side of her neck, and as such is my least favourite, which does make me reflect uncomfortably on the visceral nature of negative responses to handicap. I regard myself as a civilised social liberal, treating people with facial disfigurements or missing limbs or digits with the same consideration that I myself wish to be treated. At an intellectual level I believe that such things are not important. And yet, faced with a mildly deformed animal, I don't like it as much as the others. But she did look very frightened and unhappy, and I did feel sorry for her. With any luck it will teach her to flock better with the other chickens, but I'm not holding my breath.
At work somebody had placed a football at the base of the statue by a local sculptor of an etiolated man staring skywards, which has been at the back of the plant centre for the past couple of weeks (conveniently hiding a manhole cover in the lawn). That was a really good piece of conceptual art. (Last night the SA went out to get Chinese takeaways to eat with our film, and came back reporting that the entire village was very quiet. I asked why that was, and was told it was because of the football on the TV. I said, oh, who was playing, and the SA snorted and said that I really was qualified to be a High Court judge. On learning that it was England-Italy I said that that was it, then, Italy were going to win. The SA said that England might make it through this round but I said that Italy would win, because they play very pretty flowing football. The Today programme this morning devoted ten entire minutes to developing the same thesis, Italy having won. I once read a survey of how different economic pundits' predictions had turned out, and the answer was that all economic predictions were rubbish, but those by experts marginally worse than would be expected by chance. This was said to be because the experts got bogged down in details and emotionally tied to their own theories. I know practically nothing about football, just enough to know that England aren't very good at it, and I'm completely indifferent to who wins or loses, which is probably a good basis on which to be a pundit.)
The owner was out for the day. As ten o'clock approached I asked the manager what we were going to do about the tea room, and putting the cakes out, and so on, and he said Good point and washed his hands and started searching for plates, and discovered that the plastic covers were still wet from being washed last night. The trouble is, the tea room is very much the owner's project, and the manager is mainly interested in plants, and doesn't feel any 'ownership' of the tea room at all. My colleague and the manager had to make the tea and dispense cake, since after I'd got compost all over the front of my shirt cleaning up some very weedy pots of Rhodotypos scandens I put my foot down and said that I simply could not go into the kitchen of a commercial catering operation in those clothes.
The door at the back of the shop wouldn't open and close automatically at first, and we were beginning to imagine the boss's reaction if we had to tell him that the door, which was mended at enormous expense less than a couple of months ago, had broken again. Then the manager tried switching it off and switching it on again and that fixed it.
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