day three in the plant centre

The turkeys were hanging around the plant centre first thing this morning, Mr Turkey fanning out his stumpy tail and making his strange gobbling noise.  I don't mind them myself.  I wouldn't choose a pair of turkeys as pets, but they seem quite amenable birds, gentle and on the timid side.  On the other hand, not everyone is going to feel that happy up close and personal with a gigantic black fowl half the size of a dustbin, and I shooed them from the back door of the shop.  They would have liked to come in.  They were trying to get inside yesterday as well, and the owner tried to coax them away with strange eldritch cries, which had no effect on the turkeys, but brought the dog trotting out of the house.

The gardener was pleased to find that the owner had managed to finish the salvage he had begun of a couple of woven straps that had, quite literally, fallen off a lorry.  He had come across them lying in the road.  The car ahead of him swerved to avoid them, while he stopped to pick them up, at which point a police car appeared.  The police advised him that if he were to take the straps that would be theft, and told him to leave them in a gateway.  So the person who removes a traffic obstruction from the road is not allowed to keep it, but the next passer-by can have it.  The gardener mentioned the straps to the owner, who went and collected them.  They did not have any identifying marks that would have let us reunite them with their original owner, but will come in useful as tow ropes for hauling bits of tree in the garden, being extremely strong.

It took the young gardener three hours to get to work, thanks to the lorry that crashed through the central barrier of the A12 last night, blocking the carriageway for thirteen hours.

We were without a teashop girl, and so I was stuck with the cafe until mid morning, when the owner returned from whatever she had been doing first thing.  Luckily nobody made a fuss about the fact that latte was off the menu due to my inability to operate the milk frothing machine or the espresso maker.  A couple of customers addressed me persistently as 'dear' which puzzled me.  People don't normally.  Intelligent ones rapidly intuit that beneath my thick spectacles and fluffy hair I am about as cuddly as a Siberian tiger cub, and proceed accordingly.  I think that one of today's culprits had been dropping off her CV and attempting to see the owner, only the owner was out.  I would be very surprised (and dismayed) if we took her on.  The other pretended to play his bamboo lawn edging as Peruvian pan pipes as he left the shop.

I was quite pleased when it got to quarter past five, and my three days of work were over for another fortnight.