It sounded as though the open weekend went off OK. Saturday's miserable weather hit attendance a bit, but the new tea room was a success with visitors. It does suddenly look quite good. When I left work a week ago it had no tables or chairs, none of the catering equipment was plumbed in, and the two new windows were still boarded up. By the weekend all was finished, and the walls decorated with some reasonably attractive prints. It was unfortunate that the man who was supposed to come and fit the new coffee machine failed to show up at the appointed time, and staff training ended up being done late on Thursday afternoon, when everybody was exhausted, but the catering student the owner met at a village fund raising supper and recruited to help out turned out to know how the coffee machine worked, which was a stroke of luck.
I think they are looking for staff for the tea room, at least for the summer, as I took a phone call from somebody enquiring about the job. The owner ran it for today, but I don't think that's going to be a runner in more than the short term. She went out first thing, and as customers started to arrive we began to realise that we didn't know how much we were supposed to charge for any of the hot drinks or the cakes. Later on I had to summon her from her lunch to make two cups of coffee. I cleared a few tables in quiet moments on the till, but slunk into the very edge of the kitchen area, put the crockery down and slid out again. The owner pointed out where the sink for washing hands was, but I still don't think I should be in the kitchen. I'm quite sure the dog shouldn't have been there, but of course an open plan tea room and kitchen with the possibility of cake crumbs are going to act like a magnet to the dog.
At lunchtime I went for a walk round the garden, something I don't do very often. It still wasn't really warm enough to sit outside, but pleasant strolling about. I found the gardener dividing clumps of snowdrops, and we discussed whether it hurt them doing it at this time of year. There is a theory among some snowdrop experts that it weakens the plants, as normally they would be making leafy growth and storing up reserves for next year after flowering. The gardener's view was that it never seemed to do them any harm, and we agreed that if you didn't do it around now you couldn't see where they were, or where the gaps were in existing bulb plantings.
I sat briefly on a bench, admiring the blue sky and white fluffy clouds, and the buzzards gliding high overhead. There was a very beautiful magnolia in full flower, with great chalice shaped flowers flushed pink. I went and checked its name on the label, and realised when I got back into the plant centre that I had already forgotten it. It's a sign of age. Later on I had a very confusing conversation with a customer who was after a peony called 'Beauty of Livermere', since I thought that was a variety of oriental poppy. I was very relieved when in the end I appealed to the manager for clarification, and he said that there was both a peony and a poppy with that name, and that we only did the latter.
We are showing some sculptures in the garden, I discovered when I walked down there, which explains why we have leaflets about the sculptor displayed in the shop. They were all of skinny figures with exaggeratedly long limbs, and postures suggesting anguish, not bad as eye-catchers if you wanted a sculpture in your garden, but derivative. I heard the other day on the radio that Tatty Devine were suing Claire's Accessories for ripping off some of their jewellery designs, and Elizabeth Frink and Giacometti would have a pretty good case against this chap.
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