This will be a short, not to say cursory, post, as I have only just finished the watering after getting in from work, and we are going to watch the Last Night of the Proms on the TV. And before that starts I need time to scrub the filth from under my fingernails.
The man who's taking over the cafe, his friend who's painting the walls, and his five year old were all in the plant centre today, getting things ready. The new colour of the walls, that looked depressingly like multi-storey car park concrete grey from the test patch, and equally dismal and grungy after only one coat, has come up quite well after the top coat was applied. It's a sort of greyish green, not as strong as sage, maybe lichen. They have co-opted two olive trees in cream glazed urns to go by the counter, and a bay tree. I suspect that the plants are going to have to be rotated inside and out again pretty regularly to keep them healthy, and I wonder if there's going to be an issue with the olives dropping dead leaves on the worktop, but it is starting to look quite Mediterranean and chic. And they've superglued soft feet onto the bottom of half the chair legs, to reduce the terrible scraping sound they make on the concrete floor, but they ran out of feet. The chiller cabinet hasn't arrived yet, which makes me think it won't be in use by Monday, since after moving it I presume the coolant needs time to settle, like the ice cream maker, but overall it's progress. And I have only one more day of having to potentially make pots of tea and dole out cake, before it is part of a separate business and nothing to do with me, and I can keep my compost covered shirt out of the kitchen.
The five year old was as noisy and rumbustious as five year old boys are. He had a go with a hose, and a radio, and got a lot of paint on himself, and pushed a sack trolley about. My young male colleague was so good with him, I thought he must have nephews and nieces of about the same age, and sure enough he did. The little boy latched on to him like a limpet, and was very disappointed to discover he wouldn't be working tomorrow. You read in the papers about the importance of adult male role models for boys, and the drawbacks of primary school teaching having become a predominantly female profession. I've read that and thought, yeah, OK. A couple of my female relations are primary school teachers and they are both brilliant with children. However, today I saw for myself how clearly and instinctively small boys, or at least some of them, really want to be around men.
The racks of seeds used to demarcate the cafe area from the shop had been moved again since the last time I was at work, and still weren't right, since anyone browsing though the seed packets would have been looming disconcertingly over the tables in the cafe, and half the racks of seeds had been moved to a far corner so they weren't in one section. The older of my two colleagues spent the morning shuffling racks and tables around, trying to fit everything in. Despite myself I got drawn into the sport. It is a good game, rearranging the shop, and I can see why they do it so frequently. In the end I decided that the task as being attempted was logically impossible, because he was trying to fit all of the seed racks into a space too small to hold them, no matter how they were arranged. I suggested that if we were to move the book cases and some of the display tables from the middle of the shop to the end where the odd seeds were, that would free up space to move the odd seeds to join the others, and to put the display of pots and seed trays that had somehow ended up with the gifts back with the seeds as well, and have all the gifts together, near the till and alongside the cafe. Then I left the chaps, including the five year old, to do the heavy lifting. I wouldn't dare try and shuffle the china cabinets around with all the mugs and things still on them, but they managed it without any breakages. I was relieved when they stopped trying to move the bookcase containing grass seed and lawn fertiliser while several bottles of lawn weed killer and a roll of galvanised lawn edging were still on top of it. It would be a ludicrous event to have to write in the accident book, if somebody was injured by a reel of metal lawn edging falling on their head.
Trade was better than it has been, with some expensive trolley loads going past the till, but it was still fairly quiet. On the other hand, it was very hot, and at least one customer said to me that she wasn't planting anything in her garden until we'd had some rain and the soil was a bit moister. I think lots of people were simply enjoying the sunshine.
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