back to work

Blimey, three parties in 26 hours.  It's odd how we wait months for a party, and then three come along at once.  This morning it was back to work.  I don't generally mind working on Bank Holidays, now that I get double time, since if I hadn't been working we probably wouldn't have gone anywhere anyway, on the basis that it would be crowded.

It was a grey, cold, day, and difficult to get into the holiday mood.  I was wearing thermals under my cotton trousers, August or no August.  The manager, deceived by the weather forecast, wore shorts, and suffered all day from cold legs, but unfortunately hadn't brought any other trousers to change into.

My first job, after the watering, was to put away a half-full trolley of plants left over from Saturday.  I presume my colleagues yesterday left it where it was because they didn't know why it was there, whose it was, or whether the plants ought to be put back out for sale.  One of the last customers I served on Saturday, before leaving a quarter of an hour early, was an eyes bigger than tummy sort of chap, who had chosen more plants than he could afford to buy.  Also, some of the plants in his trolley were for his own use, and the others for a client.  At the till I had to unload the trolley, separate the contents between those for him and those for someone else, wait for him to rank each pile in order of desirability, and put each lot separately through the till up to the point where he decided he had hit his budget.  His client's limit was fifty quid, so several plants from that pile went into the discard heap.  His limit was a hundred, and he was incredulous that for that he only got seven plants.  I showed him his receipt to prove that I had really only put seven plants through, and pointed out that as a rough guide, a hundred divided by seven was around fifteen, and that as he had one shrub that was twenty-three pounds, and another that was nineteen, an average unit price of around fifteen was not impossible.  He apologised for appearing to doubt my till operating abilities, and went away grumbling, with some pretty rare shrubs, including something called Franklinia alatamaha which I think we have managed to get in stock once in the past five years.

Some customers complain that our plants are expensive.  Compared to, say, B&Q, some of the bedding is dear, but in general we don't charge above the local going rate for shrubs and herbaceous.  What the grumblers fail to appreciate is the choice we offer.  If you can get exactly what you want for £4.50 instead of £6.50 then that's great, but the chances of finding exactly what you want in a garden centre that only stocks a narrow range are low.  Is buying a day lily that you've chosen from twenty others because it was the one you liked the best equivalent to buying the same day lily because it was the only one they had?  I don't think so.  You certainly won't find Franklinia in B&Q, or any other garden centre within a hundred mile radius (OK, Beeches or Langthorns might have it, but I wouldn't bank on it).  It's not as if anybody working supplying ornamental plants is making a mint out of it.  One of our Dutch bulb suppliers has just gone under.

The owners were back from their holiday in Cornwall, and had had a nice time, including taking part in the Helston regatta, though it sounded as though they spent as much time capsizing as sailing.  Once they had checked what we'd been up to while they were away, the tills were pronounced to be spot on, which was gratifying.  They brought us a tube of Cornish ginger biscuits.  I ate one, and they'll all be gone by Wednesday night.

I found my Wellingtons in the tennis hut, and the manager gave me a small piece of a chrysanthemum which had broken off with a root already formed, to see if I wanted to try and strike it as a cutting, so I went home with more luggage than I arrived with.