some more customers

It's been a good weekend for customers, from a people watching point of view.  One man told me at great length about the iniquities of Brussels bureaucracy and fishing bycatch, and gave me a leaflet for the UK taxpayers alliance.  A large, kindly bearded chap looking like a plain-clothes Father Christmas told me that he had just retired and had been looking forward to doing his garden, but his hips had gone, and he was so scared of a hip replacement operation he thought he would end up in a wheelchair.  He used to be a windsurfer, but he had let himself go, he regretfully concluded.  Eyeing up his ample girth I tried and failed to imagine him on a windsurf.  A woman had been erroneously told that we sold beehives, and turned out to have just been to her first beekeeping class with the same teacher I went to.  We don't sell beekeeping equipment, but I told her who did, and threw in some advice on choosing what type of hive for good measure. Someone rang up wanting to know if we sold garden smocks as she was trying to source one for a pantomime. We don't sell gardening smocks either.  Someone else rang up and wanted to know about stooling Paulownia: it seems to be the year of the foxglove tree.  There were some regulars in.  The retired long distance lorry driver from Clacton who had to move in with his mother a while back as she couldn't cope alone any more came with his wife and Ruby the terrier.  Ruby went for a walk along the seafront yesterday.  If Alan Bennett had run out of material listening to conversations in hotel foyers he could have tried working in a garden centre.