What a difference a day makes, or rather, a change in direction of airflow. Yesterday my car was iced by the time dusk fell, while this morning I woke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof. The rain had eased off by the time I arrived at work, but water continued to ooze out the atmosphere through the morning, even in the odd moments when the sun looked as though it was thinking about trying to break through.
There was a mouse in the traps under the bird food, bringing the total up to eight including the one caught on Saturday, when my colleague who competes in triathlons in his spare time declared that it was disgusting and that I would have to deal with it. I fixed him with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and said that I did not do dead mice, and our younger colleague got rid of the body. I think he has formed an exaggerated notion of my decrepitude, since later on when I offered to load a medium sized shrub into the car of one of our regular customers who walks with a crutch, he asked whether I was OK doing that. I was fairly sure he was being solicitous and not sarcastic, so reassured him that yes, I was fine, but didn't tell him that in my spare time I lift 20 kilo bags of chicken food.
There will be Christmas trees this year. The gardeners went to cut them first thing, and the older gardener warned me to reserve mine soon, since there wouldn't be a second cutting. There were quite a few trees in the first batch, mostly on the large side and rather odd shaped, but not noticeably worse than they have been for the past couple of years. They are an absolute bargain at twelve pounds a pop, provided that you have a high ceilinged room to put them in, since the majority of them wouldn't fit into most modern houses. The owner believes that this problem can be overcome by removing the top, but that ruins the shape of a tree. You have to keep an eye on the base as well, since some have branches coming from so low down they would prevent you from fixing it into its stand, and if you removed them you would find you had lost half the canopy. The gardeners had cut great hunks of mistletoe as well, and holly boughs, though there aren't many berries this year. Either they never set due to the weather, or the birds have already eaten them.
The morning was very quiet. I had a nice chat with a famous Suffolk based garden designer about which oaks and liquidambars we had in stock, and another with a charming old boy from Lavenham who wanted a clematis variety as a Christmas present for his daughter-in-law that we had never heard of and suspected didn't exist and that she had got her plant names in a muddle, and another with a second designer who sounded both elderly and posh, and was after a shrub we have been trying to obtain for her for months without success, and still can't get. She knew Hugh Johnson of Tradescant column fame, and thought she might try and beg a couple of suckers from his specimen, so I mentally filed away the information that Maytenus boaria suckers when mature. All of this scored highly on the quality of human interaction scale, while putting nothing through the till.
Later on things lot busier. The older gardener, bringing holly into the shop, warned us that there were a couple of diddicoys in the car park. Political correctness has not yet reached all parts of rural Suffolk. They did have a very scruffy van, which they had parked in a stupid place, but they turned out to be French garden contractors who spent over three hundred pounds on plants. They were followed by a not spectacular but steady stream of retail customers. While the manager was at lunch a man arrived wanting to sell us fence posts, imported from Estonia. He had brought in a specimen post, which he gave to me together with details of his business, but when he suggested that he could go out to his van and bring in samples of the other nine sizes of post as well, I persuaded him not to, saying that I thought we could get the general idea at this stage from the one.
The manager had had an unpleasant encounter with one of our customers when he was queuing for the checkout at Tesco with his wife and children. She barged past them to get to the front of the queue to ask the man on the till whether they had any consomme, and was very reluctant to believe him when he said he didn't know, since he only worked on the checkout. She did not recognise the manager, who nearly remonstrated with her for pushing his wife and daughter, but didn't in case she told the owners that he had been rude to a customer. I pointed out to him that she would never admit to them that she had been shopping in Tesco, and not Waitrose.
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