money

This morning was my day of reckoning for the Tendring Show beekeepers' stand.  I opened the first cash box and began to count the money.  I can only assume that counting change is something you get better at with practice, as it took me a lot of counting and recounting to be sure I knew how much was in each box.  The notes aren't so bad, but adding up piles of pound coins and columns of twenty pence pieces and devising a system for not muddling up the worth of different heaps, when five pounds is easy to amass in pound coins but would be totteringly unstable in ten pence bits takes a little doing.  Although I say the notes weren't so bad, when I eventually reached a total I was completely confident with and took it to the bank I was abashed at how quickly the woman behind the counter in Barclays flicked through them.

Things started very encouragingly, as the amount we'd taken for sales of honey sweetened fruit drink at 60 pence a cup was exactly divisible by sixty, after I'd deducted my original float from the money in the tin.  Net money taken for colouring in wooden bees at two pounds a go came to a round even number, 49 bees coloured in.  I saved the most difficult box until last, since that was for sales of honey, candles, cakes and the rest of it.  By the time I had to go out to lunch it seemed to me that there was about twenty or thirty pounds more in the tin than I could account for, based on sheets showing what items each member brought and what was left at the end.  The number was still approximate because the selling price of some items hadn't been written down.  I sent off hopeful enquiries to people who were on the stand and might know the answer, and had to defer that particular problem until later.  I remember from my early attempts to train as a Chartered Accountant (a misguided enterprise.  I was bored to a state of idiocy, and showed no particular talent whatsoever) that stock is considered one of the most difficult aspects of accounting.

Lunch was hosted by a great and gracious lady gardener I originally met as a customer at the plant centre.  I'd asked her to lunch a while back, since I liked her and thought she'd get on with my friends, and if you don't risk rebuff by asking you don't meet new people.  Today was the return match.  We had a lovely time sitting in her garden, which is an extremely good one.  She walked us around it after lunch for a brief tour, and the main lesson learned today was the importance of pruning and shaping shrubs.  She likes to keep views open between different areas of the garden, not wide open, but so that from each place you can look through or over each border to the next bit of the garden, and to this end a weeping silver pear was clipped to a neat umbrella, while a purple leaved Cotinus underneath was kept to a tidy dome, and you could see daylight and the view between the two.  The overall effect was extremely relaxed, despite the clipping, because of the quantity of airy self seeders like Thalictrum that were encouraged to drift around and soften the whole.

This evening's entertainment is a free course in organising musical events, run by the National Federation of Music Societies.  If I'm going to be on a music society committee I might as well learn what I'm doing.  Some of the advice will probably apply to the beekeepers as well.  The mystery of the honey sales will have to wait until the morning.