I don't understand the traffic at the Manningtree railway bridge on Monday mornings. I left extra time for my journey to work, after arriving on the late side a couple of weeks running, and sailed straight through the bridge this morning with scarcely any need to queue. This meant I was nearly ten minutes early, but there is a basic asymmetry in having a defined starting time for your job, which is that if you are ten minutes late your employers grumble, but if you are early you get no credit for it and just have to kick your heels for a while.
Mondays when I haven't been at work over the weekend start in a relatively relaxing fashion, as I can be fairly sure as the manager works his way through the accumulated pile of notes from the weekend and the owner appears to quiz us about till errors or garbled messages that none of it was my fault. I haven't been there for a week, and know nothing. A message from yesterday said that on Saturday somebody had told a customer that Clematis 'Etoile Violette' didn't exist, and he was so cross that on Sunday he came in with a book on clematis to demonstrate that it did (it does). There was another note from the owner to the manager saying that he must Find Out who had delivered this piece of misinformation. It wasn't me, Guv. I was in Harlow, and have witnesses to prove it.
The only job the manager could think of for me to do first thing was to dead-head the pansies. I like pansies, so that's fine. Dead-heading the violas is so fiddly it is almost an act of Zen meditation, as you trace each tiny stem to its base and snip it off with scissors. Then I had a look at the list of jobs for the weekend, to see what was left over, and saw that cleaning up the Dianthus and moving them into the tunnel on the far side of the car park (the Other Side) was still outstanding. My colleague tasked with moving herbaceous plants had done a lot yesterday, and I could see why she'd left the Dianthus until last. As the leaves lower down the stems die they wither and hang on to the plant rather than dropping, which looks unsightly, and they are liable to fungal attack if left on the plant, but you can't cut the whole thing down to compost level with one ruthless chop because they are evergreen, and don't respond that well to hard pruning in November. So the only answer is to snip out any dead stems, and pull the dead leaves off individually or in small groups with your fingertips. They are brittle plants, and if you pull too hard on the stems they break away in your hand. Finishing the Dianthus took until almost lunchtime.
I'd made some buns from a recently acquired book of cake recipes, but even allowing for the difficulties of translating normal cooker temperatures and times into an Aga method, I think the recipe overstated one or both. I ate a couple, because I was cold after standing outside for most of the morning, but they were definitely overcooked, and I don't see how fifteen to twenty minutes at 200 degrees could ever have worked for such small cakes (twelve of them from only eight ounces of flour). I checked them after twelve, alerted by the smell, and they had already caught. I expect my colleagues will eat them anyway, since they didn't taste too bad (lemon zest and mixed spice is a good combination) and frankly some of my co-workers will eat anything. If they really don't like them they can throw them away when I'm not there. As long as they don't lose the tupperware box.
It began to rain in the afternoon, and I took refuge in the small greenhouse while I cleaned up the geraniums that need to be kept dry, ready for them to come inside for the winter. One customer remarked to me that I should get an inside job. There were some customers, despite the rain, and in the morning by special appointment the friend of the owner of a largish and quite good garden that opens to the public. The manager was instructed by the boss to expect them both and be very helpful, but in fact while the friend seemed a perfectly nice chap he only bought a couple of shrubs. We did get some people buying reasonably large trolley loads. By this stage of the year they tend to know what they want and are on a mission. You don't get many people who just want to wander about and look at plants in November, especially when it's raining.
Addendum For all of you Lucy Jordans out there, who haven't yet ridden through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in your hair, you'd better get on with it, at least if you were hoping for a ride in a classic. I have just seen that the Mayor of Paris plans to outlaw the use of cars more than seventeen years old inside the A86 ring road by September 2014, in order to cut pollution.
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