Flicking the kitchen radio on as I dished out cat food this morning I was surprised to hear the Today programme announce that police were hunting a reported lion in Essex (Nobody said there would be lions. The children were startled). Essex is a large county, so I was more surprised when they said that it had allegedly been seen near St Osyth. That is quite close to home. Apparently several witnesses claimed to have seen it, and there were photographs which an expert from the Colchester zoo had looked at and pronounced genuine. Today also mentioned that the lion already had its own Twitter feed. I thought that on balance there was probably not a lion, but you never know.
At work there was a more tangible animal disaster in the making. The peahen was wandering about alone, without her chick, honking terribly. She has always been a diligent mother, keeping each chick with her until it is nearly a year old and time for her to move on to the next clutch of eggs, and you never saw mother and child apart for more than a couple of minutes. As the day wore on and the chick failed to appear the peahen's cries diminished, but we all thought the fox must have had it in the night. Poor thing. It had grown to about the size of a chicken and was just starting to show a little blue in the feathers of its neck, and we were saying only yesterday how much it looked like its mother in miniature. Still, she has already raised two chicks to adulthood, one male and one female, so in evolutionary terms she has done her quota to keep the world peafowl population stable. I'm sorry for her, though, and it's a shame about the baby. It was a jolly little thing, perching on the big flowerpots outside the shop and coming in to steal cake crumbs.
The tea room franchisees can arrive not a moment too soon. They take over on September 10th, when it will be like the relief of Mafeking. My colleague who knows how the cappucino machine works had just set off for her (unpaid) lunch break when I had to call her back to serve in the tea room, then twenty minutes into her lunch break I had to call her again, and a third time before her half hour was decently up, given that she'd already been interrupted half way through. The manager doled out some cake at various points, but couldn't work the machine, and I have never been trained to work it either, and went on strike today about participating in the tea room at all, on the grounds that I had so much compost on my clothes that it was simply preposterous. One couple got so bored of waiting when the designated tea room operative of the day went up to the office to send a fax that they gave up and left.
Their plans sound great. They are going to do quiche of the day, and panini, and soup, and cream teas, and get a freezer and do ice creams (which the staff have suggested to the owners several times but they've always refused point blank). The owner is apparently talking about installing a wooden floor by Christmas, which would make the whole thing look more welcoming and cut down the noise, which is a problem at the moment. I hope the handover is not too fraught, since I gather from the manager that the new people were under the impression that they were taking the sparky girl on to cover weekends, whereas she doesn't seem to have been offered the job, and in any case has got herself a full time job at the new Patisserie Valerie that's opening in Ipswich. Given she has spent three years at catering college and has ambitions, a full time job with the national roll-out of a successful chain is going to be much more use to her than being the Saturday girl for the garden centre outlet of a very small family catering business.
There was no milk first thing in the tea room fridge, and my colleague went up to the house to raid the kitchen. She thought she had shut the door behind her, since the dogs were locked in there, but she couldn't have latched it fully, and both dogs escaped and ran round the house for the rest of the day while the owners were out. The puppy is not house trained, and late in the afternoon the boss came on the radio wanting to know who had let the dogs out, because the puppy had weed over the carpets. It escaped into the plant centre later on, but I took it back inside, since it hasn't had all of its vaccinations and shouldn't meet other dogs, or wander about in the car park by itself. Also it shouldn't wee in the tea room. It is a very cute little thing, with great fringes of hair round its ears.
Trade today was surprisingly brisk. I say surprisingly because August is generally quiet, and Saturday was dire. We all did our bit running around and helping people find things. I reckon my efforts sent a large holly and a Callistemon past the till and out of the door that otherwise wouldn't have been sold, but as always the big variable is footfall plus stock availability. On Saturday people just didn't come in. Today they did.
The manager was busy stock taking various categories as the boss is gearing up to place our orders for next spring, which meant that as the day went on we had to write down more of what we sold. This creates delays for customers, but they were all very nice about it. I recognised one couple as having one of the spraunchiest gardens at the Chelsworth Open Gardens, and asked them if that wasn't their garden I'd seen. They demurred and said it wasn't that good, but anybody who lavishes that much effort and expense on a garden can surely only be pleased to hear it remembered and praised when they go shopping for plants, and they called a cheery goodbye to me as they left. They bought the last of a line of really rather nice small Clethra that I'd been quite tempted by myself, after taking it along to last week's talk and getting no takers for it.
In the car on the way home I learned that the police had decided that there probably wasn't a lion. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something, though. We've had reports in recent years of some kind of large cat at Wivenhoe, and sightings of a beast at Elmstead Market. The witness to the beast of Elmstead was gloriously reported in the local paper as saying that My wife and children saw it using binoculars, a phrase which has passed into family use.
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