Finally, a day when I didn't have to go anywhere or do anything. No evening talk, or committee meeting, or urgent need to prepare for the next talk, or meeting. No promise to meet anybody for coffee, lunch or tea. Hair cut and optician's appointment not due until next week. A free day. A day, in other words, that I could spend in the garden. So it rained. Why wouldn't it?
It was forecast to start raining around lunch, and I suggested hopefully to the Systems Administrator that the morning could be a good time to mend my cold frames, so that I could spend the rainy afternoon potting up bulbs in the newly re-roofed greenhouse, and put them in the cold frames. There isn't going to be room for all of them in the greenhouse, and they don't need the heat particularly, just not to sit soaking wet all winter, or they will rot. The quid pro quo was that if the SA fettled up the cold frames, I would do the Tesco shop en route to B&Q to get compost for the bulbs, and in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered to cook tomorrow as well as getting something for today's lunch. By the time I got to Tesco it was already raining.
Shopping in Tesco took much, much longer than it need have because they had reorganised the ruddy vegetable section again. I had made a shopping list, as people wishing to follow a particular recipe tend to, and all of us are encouraged to do in order to cut down on food waste from random impulse purchases. On the shopping list was okra, which I needed for Claudia Roden's Meat and Okra (Bamia) Stew (the clue's in the name). Where okra used to be, ever since the last wholesale store reorganisation, was now a solid wall of bananas. God only knows why stores keep doing that. I am not going to impulse-buy bananas, just because somebody has put them where the thing I actually want previously was. I know that bananas exist. If I had wanted bananas I would have written bananas on the list. As I pushed my trolley round and round the vegetable section, searching for the ingredients on my damp piece of paper, and feeling the morning slipping away from me, I met a pensioner couple similarly engaged, the wife lamenting to her husband Why do they keep moving things? Why indeed?
When I got home, the SA had been forced to give up on cold frame refurbishment for the time being. I spent the afternoon potting up bulbs anyway while listening to the R5 Kermode and Mayo Film Programme, standing the filled pots in seed trays, which all managed to fit on the floor as a temporary measure. I have got three sorts of dwarf tulip, three different fritillaries, pink Chionodoxa, white dog's tooth violet, several alliums, a strange south African red and green affair called Dichelostemma ida-maia, some Tritelia, and five Eremurus 'Cleopatra'. They came from a Scottish firm called Kevock, that I have never used before, but who have staged very nice exhibits at the past two Chelseas, and the bulbs looked excellent as I planted them, just one shrivelled specimen among them, and no short packets. By the time I'd finished I'd filled over a hundred pots. I know it was that many, because I bought some plastic labels in B&Q, and started on my second packet of a hundred before I'd finished potting. I'm expecting another box of bulbs from Peter Nyssen any day now (at which point I really will need the space in the cold frames).
Unfortunately B&Q are pulling back on their large store format, because they are not trading well enough, and are going to close the Colchester store. I'm not entirely surprised, as it is a vast shed to stock, heat and light, and there never seem to be that many customers in there. People like me buying two bales of compost, two packets of labels, and resisting the urge to buy a Loropetalum on impulse, are not enough to keep it going. Pity, as it is a useful place to buy compost, and the SA goes there for odd plumbing parts, fixings, and electrical sundries. The good news is that it is rumoured that Sainsbury will take the site. That will provide some competition for Tesco, which might improve their offering (they only started stocking Prosecco when Waitrose arrived in town), or I could simply go to Sainsbury. My till voucher today told me that I saved 74 pence compared to Sainsbury, Morrisons or Aldi, but frankly I'd have paid an extra 74 pence for a less aggravating experience.
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