country pursuits

The dog was in disgrace this morning, because on Saturday she ate an entire plate of home made chocolate biscuit cake intended for the shoot tea, brought as a hostess present by one of the guests.  They were on a plate in the kitchen, and then they weren't.  Chocolate is not even good for dogs, it disagrees with their livers.  A vet who was staying with the proprietors checked her over on Sunday, and remarked that her eyes and mouth looked fine, and that by rights she ought to be dead.

The owner spent yesterday morning jump judging at some local horsey competition, and regaled us with highlights of the event, which included a broken leg and a broken collar bone.  Two small children both fell off without breaking anything, while the ambulance crew first dropped the stretcher with the broken leg on it, and then couldn't get the stretcher to fit in the ambulance, and the father of the broken collar bone pronounced himself to be still over the limit from the night before, and unable to drive his son to casualty.  It sounded like a field of carnage.

The boss suggested jovially that if the staff couldn't work the car park padlock, perhaps they too had enjoyed a good dinner the night before, and the owner insisted that it was not stiff at all, and she had opened it twice without difficulty.  The manager murmured that the middle wheel was quite difficult to turn, and the owner admitted that you did need to line the dots up very precisely, and promised to swap it for one from a gate on the farm that wasn't opened very often.  The owner is a few years younger than me, but she'll find out soon enough that as you age you lose some of the strength in your fingers, however active you are (and that's if you don't develop arthritis like my co-worker of yesterday).  The existing padlock is stiff.

After that I spent a quiet day, moving the campanulas under cover before they could rot in their pots, and fielding telephone calls.  It would be easier to answer questions about the status of outstanding orders that I haven't been dealing with if my colleagues who do look after customer orders would all follow a common system of paperwork, and leave the details in a folder where I could find them, instead of each following their own secret system and keeping the paperwork in a hidden place, but they don't.

Addendum  I am looking forward to Tesco's petrol station targeted advertising with a sort of gruesome fascination.  What sort of ads will the automated face recognition software think I'll be interested in?  Will it identify me as a person of taste and culture, who buys books and classical CDs, visits art galleries and museums, splashes out on the odd garment in one hundred per cent natural fibre from the Toast catalogue, and lavishes money upon my garden as a king upon his mistress (relatively speaking)?  I have a dark suspicion that it'll be ads for hearing aids, and health insurance for the over fifties.