Now that it's April our working hours have altered again, so that we finish at 6.00pm. When I worked in the City eight until six seemed par for the course. Nowadays it feels like hard work, especially on day one when it comes as a shock to the system. There again, I am older than I was then, and while sitting at my desk looking at the collapsing share prices of companies my clients were invested in, when they came out with rubbish results, was highly stressful, it was not as physically exhausting as dragging hoses around and lifting dozens and dozens of pots filled with compost. Also, working in the City I was habitually tired most of the time, in a low level sort of way, and learned to ignore it, helped by the knowledge that I was being paid ten times more for my efforts than I get nowadays.
One customer asked me if I'd worked there long. I replied that I'd been there since 2003, which she declared to be a long time. I asked whether she had been shopping there for a long time, and it turned out that she lived in the village and so had, although, as she said, our paths had never crossed. I explained that I was only part time, and she said what a wonderful part time job it must be, since it would be so tiring to do it full time, and there were so many other things that needed doing, like running one's house, cooking, and ironing. Ironing has truly never loomed very large in my list of things to do, but I agreed that it was indeed a very nice place to work part time, if you liked plants.
I don't have a good feeling about the tea room. The owner has gone on holiday for the week, leaving a rota of staff members who are supposed to do the tea room each day. Today's co-opted Nippy was not overly pleased, having already got a full workload before being given the additional task of running the tea room. Nobody knew how the dishwasher worked, and nobody could work it out, not even the gardener, who is good with machinery. The tea room conscript lacked any sense of ownership of the task, so trays tended to linger on tables or on the counter beside the cake, and her efforts to do all her other jobs as well meant that there wasn't always anybody behind the counter. That doesn't look inviting. If I'd been a customer wondering whether to have a cup of tea and some cake, and saw dirty crockery and no staff serving, I'd probably have decided not to bother. At one point I found myself obliged to dispense bottles of apple juice and chocolate cake to two customers who promised they were not environmental health officers, in the course of which I managed to knock the cake tongs on the floor. We need a dedicated staff member, at least during the hours when the plant centre is open.
I felt on safer territory with the plants, which are doing all sorts of delightful and interesting things at this time of year. There is a Cytisus called 'Porlock' which flowers in a bright, soft shade of yellow, with a fresh, vigorous scent, and the yellow flowers of Magnolia 'Elizabeth' are just opening. We have Japanese flowering cherries in almost every shade of pink, and a bright pink, double flowered peach which I think was got in as a special. I held off buying plants, since I have a little backlog to plant out already, and can only do so much at a time, and the weather forecast is iffy for the middle part of the week. Still, I was very tempted by a violet with white flowers speckled with blue, and the tray of Primula bulleyana. They are not doing anything yet, but there is a damp patch down at the bottom of the garden that might support some candleabra primulas, once I've hauled the nettles out and the Systems Administrator has built the new deck at the back (to give a sheltered, shady place to sit on hot afternoons when there's a breeze from the southwest).
Addendum The SA failed totally in the search of white Sandtex exterior gloss paint in Colchester. There was none to be had in B&Q or Homebase, but an awful lot of tins of Parisian Pink.
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