There was a frost this morning, which came as a surprise to me since the overnight Met Office forecast for Colchester had suggested a minimum temperature of 4 or 5 degrees. My car had an extraordinary amount of ice on the windscreen, for a night that wasn't supposed to be frosty at all, and by the time enough of a hole had cleared for me to see out safely I thought I was going to be late to work. However, I arrived just in time to find a colleague unlocking the gates.
Following on from the clear night it was a bright and beautiful late autumn day, and the plant centre and arboretum, or at least the bits of it I saw over the wall and from the car park, looked lovely. The sunshine brought customers out, and there was a reasonable stream of people heading for the till carrying trees.
Ruby the white terrier from Clacton came in with her owners, recently bathed and wearing a smart red collar with white dots on it. However, although she looks every inch the pampered pet she still has hunting terrier instincts, and was a great deal too interested in the bird food stand. Her owner assured me that there had to be something hiding in there, but though I crawled on hands and knees to peer underneath and behind it, I couldn't see any mice whisking out of sight. There were two mousetraps, baited and set, but with nothing in them. I'm afraid Ruby's instincts are probably right, though. Unless she is modelling herself on the pair of terriers in the Kipling novella who used to pretend there were rats behind the wainscot, to upset a governess they disliked.
My colleagues agreed that they didn't mind if I clocked off half an hour early, so that I could scrub the worst of the filth from under my fingernails, get changed and arrive at the church by four in time for today's concert. I used to go to afternoon concerts that fell on my working weekends in my work clothes, dirty fingernails and all, when I first discovered them and didn't know anybody there, and would just sit quietly in a corner exuding damp and compost. Nowadays I would rather feel vaguely clean and tidy and in the same sartorial zone as the rest of the audience. Besides, now I am on the committee I have standards to keep up.
The chairman has subcontracted the teas to the ladies of the church at a pound a go for tea and a biscuit, in aid of church funds. I didn't mind pouring tea and then washing cups frantically, but it is nice to be able to be able to talk to people. And to actually get a cup of tea and a biscuit. When you are pouring out and washing up for the entire interval there isn't time. Now that we don't have the teas to occupy us the chairman has nominated three of us to be a working party to increase the amount of publicity for the concerts, and the audience numbers. I'm quite happy with that, since I like my fellow publicists. One of them has invited the other two of us to supper in a couple of weeks so that we can discuss it.
The concert was jolly good by the way, a string quartet plus clarinet, playing Mozart and Bliss. When we were originally discussing booking that quartet at the committee meeting I recall we had a choice between the clarinettist and a brass player, and that the brass player was going to play something very contemporary. I could see the committee striving to embrace the new and veering towards the brass, and as the voice of the middle brow I murmured regretfully how nice the Mozart clarinet quintet was. The sense of relief in the room was palpable, once somebody had said the philistine unsayable, and we went with the clarinet.
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