Driving to work this morning I passed quite a collection of motor bikes and their riders in the lane where they congregate early on Sunday mornings. All were men, wearing full leathers, and while I didn't get a very close view driving by at 30mph I was left with the distinct impression that they were all over 40, if not 50. The bikes, as far as I could tell as a non-expert who has never ridden one and never intends to, were large and expensive. I wonder if they all know each other, or if it is free to anyone to turn up and join in, like a ramblers' group. Presumably there is a grapevine, since there is for every hobby I've ever had, and people involved in the motorbike scene pick up what's going on.
The watering took the three of us fully two hours. It hadn't been set to run overnight, so we were trying to run rather a lot of different bits of irrigation at the same time this morning, which caused the pressure to drop slightly, with the unfortunate effect that my hose dribbled disastrously over my trousers and shoes at the point where it clips on to the end of the hose. Or at least, I think it was mainly down to low pressure. The hose and lance connections are both lined with rubber rings, which are supposed to form a seal and can perish, but they depend on the pressure of the water to force them together. My trousers, being thin cotton, dried pretty quickly, but I trudged around in damp plimsolls for most of the rest of the day. I must put them in the laundry room now to dry them out fully before tomorrow.
The bosses had people staying with them, and apart from a brief conversation first thing, we didn't hear a peep out of them for the rest of the day. The tills from the previous day had not been reconciled, leaving us only one to use. I've now worked there for slightly over eight years, and nobody has ever shown me how to do the till reconciliation. Given my previous City incarnation I expect I could get the hang of it. A colleague who had not been trained by the management either, but had once been shown by a co-worker, said she didn't mind trying to reconcile yesterday's till and risk being told off for doing it wrong, but we didn't really see why she should. If we'd got desperate for two tills I suppose the answer would have been to tip the entire contents of one of the unreconciled ones into an envelope, or a saucepan, or whatever we could find, and extract a float of known quantity to start us off today. In fact we weren't that busy, and managed with one. This was partly down to luck as well as it being another quiet day, in that we didn't have any customers who midway through the transaction managed to cause a hold-up. Compared to Tesco we seem to get a lot of people who only discover after we have rung up their goods that their purse is in their car, or they have forgotten it and need to find their other half who is somewhere in the plant centre and make them pay, or their card doesn't work, or they need multiple goes at their pin, or they wander off to find just one more thing they meant to buy.
On the way home I came upon a horse and rider stationary on the pavement. The horse was ignoring its rider's urges to go forward, and after a bit began to go backwards, and then to go round in circles. I stopped the car and waited for developments. The horse moved on to the road, and swung around alarmingly. A car coming the other way stopped as well, and I began to wonder how much damage it would do to a Skoda Fabia being kicked by a large horse. The rider was a young woman, who looked jolly cross. Eventually the horse moved into forward gear, and they walked on up the road. I let them get a considerable lead on me, and the oncoming car let them get well past before either of us moved. The horse seemed quite placid once it had finished its hissy fit. I quite like horses, but when I see one misbehaving on the road always remember the warning heard once on R4, that the thing to remember is that a horse is a ton of muscle controlled by a brain the size of a pigeon's.
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