here comes the sun (for one day only)

Driving to work I noticed a lilac coming into flower in somebody's front garden, and had an odd feeling that I'd missed April.  With all the rain, I've seen so little of the garden in recent weeks that it came as a shock to realise that it was already lilac time.  At work it was a beautiful bright morning, and we exclaimed to each other about the novelty of seeing the sun.  The manager remarked that it would probably rain at ten, when we opened, and strangely, it did, though not very hard or for very long.

I saw a bird hopping around on the grass at the back of the plant centre that looked like some sort of wagtail, but was not a pied wagtail, being larger, and having a conspicuous flash of yellow over its rump (and it was on grass.  I only ever seem to see pied wagtails on tarmac and asphalt, to the point where I am almost convinced they must eat tarmac).  The manager and the young gardener are both keen on birds, and they thought it was a grey wagtail.  It was around throughout the day, and they first saw it (or one) last week.  There were also a couple of goldfinches flitting about the plant centre, perching on the potted apple trees.  I saw one disappear into a standard variegated Eleagnus, which prompted me to have a look inside the crown, and sure enough there was a little heap of moss and feathers, the beginnings of a nest.  I warned the manager that we potentially had goldfinches nesting in the plant centre, and showed him where.  I don't know whether goldfinches try out quite a few nest sites for size and abandon the less desirable ones early on in the building process.  I think some other birds do.  The plant centre is a slightly odd place to choose, being full of people throughout the day, but I suppose that acts as a deterrent to birds of prey, and there isn't a cat.

The garden was very wet, and there was some confusion about whether we were supposed to let people have garden tickets or not.  The answer seemed to be that determined visitors who were wearing proper shoes or boots could talk their way into buying tickets, and the less keen or more nervous allowed themselves to be put off.  The young gardener said that some of the hydrangeas were under water.  A pair of friends who'd driven down from Norfolk with a van to go plant shopping reported that it was looking beautiful.

The engineer came to mend the shop doors.  I felt slightly sorry for him, as the owner gave him rather a hard time about the fact they'd been playing up all winter, and he said that the last time he'd been called out it hadn't been to service the doors, but to report on what was wrong with them.  The door at the front of the shop was a clear-cut case.  It needed a new motor, and once that was fitted it worked perfectly.  The door at the back of the shop, that has given us so much trouble refusing to open, proved a harder nut to crack.  The engineer changed the lock in the door frame where you insert a key to open the doors from the outside first thing in the morning when they are set to shut from the inside.  That made them quite a lot better, but he said they still weren't quite right.  He changed a wiring loom, and then, after initial efforts to keep the cost down by not changing the sensor, he changed the sensor.  The customers found it fascinating, and hung around in little gaggles, watching.  It was still not absolutely right, in his view, and two hours after refusing the owner's offer of a cup of coffee he changed his mind.  Telephone calls were made.  Eventually he changed something else as well, and it seemed that two components, neither of which were individually faulty, were interfering with each other when both fitted as part of the same system.  I didn't gather what these bits were, not being an automatic door engineer, but eventually he pronounced himself satisfied.  I thought it was good at him to stick at it for as long as he did (though the boss will be paying for the privilege), since it is in human nature, once you have found one thing that is wrong and fixed it, to discount the possibility that something else might be wrong as well.

The coconut buns were well received.  I only made them because we had half a packet of dessicated coconut left over from a curry, and it seemed a shame to put it in the cupboard and just leave it there for the next year until it went off, and I thought that making buns would be something amusing to do while I waited for the first coat of gloss to dry (that is positively the last reference to painting the hall).

The gardener from one of the nearby large and expensive houses picked out three silver trolleys of plants, and told me the address, and that we invoiced them.  Her face was familiar but I couldn't place her until she said where she worked, at which point I remembered when I'd spoken to her before, and recognised the name of her boss as somebody I used to work with three City jobs ago.  I thought he must have done better than I had, to have a house like that, but then it turned out that nowadays the gardener's employer was actually his ex-wife, the pair of them having divorced, so he hadn't done so well as that after all, poor thing, having lost wife and house into the bargain.

Trade was rather quiet (though the invoice for the three trolleys will help), and my young colleague and the manager were cast down.  I thought it was a pity, but after the wettest April ever in the history of meteorological records (according to the six o'clock news on R4) it is a bit optimistic to expect that come one dry day everybody will immediately be ready to buy lots of plants.  Work on people's gardens will be badly behind, with areas that should have been cleared and ready to receive new plants not ready, and anyone with heavy soil won't be able to get on it at all.  As plants can sit in their pots, going out and shopping can be nice horticultural therapy on days when you can't do any actual gardening, but if you are doing or redoing part of your garden, planting comes very late in the process, and if you are still not even half way through preparing the site then plant buying may not have risen to the top of your agenda.

Addendum  We set the trail camera on the chicken house last night, but the fox never came back, and the only pictures the Systems Administrator got were me letting the chickens into the run this morning, followed by about 500 photographs of chickens.