working on Easter Monday

I was a bit surprised as the boss and my colleagues compared notes on their respective Easter Sunday lunches, which all seem to have involved special culinary efforts with roast meats, and relatives returning from afar to share in the repast.  Easter Sunday had rather passed us by.  We worked hard in the garden, and then ate penne with a vaguely Italian sauce while watching Oil City Confidential.  Still, each to their own.

I don't mind working on Easter Monday.  We generally avoid going anywhere on bank holidays, as the traffic will be worse than it is the rest of the time, and wherever we are visiting more crowded.  My normal work day is a Monday, so quite a few bank holidays fall on my watch.  It used to annoy me considerably that the full time staff who were required to work on bank holidays were given a day off in lieu, while the part-timers were just expected to turn up as normal.  Fortunately our legislators shared my view that this was unfair, and a couple of years ago employment law was changed so that part-time staff had to be treated the same as full-timers, so now bank holiday working for part-timers is on double rates.  In general I'm sympathetic to the view that small businesses need less rather than more red tape and regulation, but I was very pleased that the law ironed out that particular injustice.

The manager doesn't work on bank holidays as a rule.  There is a weekly van service from Norfolk, that calls on Mondays bringing assorted plants in flower, plus herbs and other impulse-buy oddments.  My colleague wondered if there was anything we needed, but my view was that without the manager it was better to give the van purchases a miss this week.  We could look at what is low on stock, but we wouldn't know if the manager had already arranged to get it from somewhere else, plus we would have to work out our selling prices based on the cost to us and our normal retail mark-up, and decide whether our customers would be prepared to pay them.  In my previous incarnation I coped with some large financial transactions, including once putting my signature to the order to sell around £250 million assorted mid-cap and small-cap equities in a programme trade, and another time buying about the same amount of B.P., so I could probably rise to the challenge of buying a couple of hundred quid's worth of bedding plants and herbs.  But there are basically two models for managing staff.  You can give them the power to make decisions, then back their decisions up, even if you have to explain why next time you would prefer them to do it differently.  Or you can not give them the power to take decisions, in which case you don't expect them to decide things while you're not there.  On the whole the place I work operates on the latter system.

The pea cock is still displaying his tail.  It is a pity that a couple of the long feathers are broken, but I don't suppose he'd appreciate it if we tried to pull them out to tidy him up.  The young pea cock is also raising his little tail, which doesn't have the coloured streamers yet.  He does this while following his mother around the plant centre, so the effect is positively Oedipal.  But he is no more confused than his father, who keeps displaying to the guinea fowl.

I was chatting to a very pleasant customer who turned out to be the head gardener at one of the Cambridge Colleges.  He was at the Chatto Gardens recently, and they said they were so busy, they were having to pull staff off garden work to help keep up with the volume of mail order.  It's reassuring that the industry sounds generally buoyant.  Certainly we're still very busy, despite the lack of rain.