It was cold this morning, and I went to work dressed for the weather. A camisole, three long sleeved t-shirts, my uniform cambray shirt, fleece, thermal leggings, fleece trousers, fleece scarf, fleece hat. I was glad of them as I picked fallen petals off the camellias in one of the polytunnels and snipped little dead twigs off the acers. This is worth doing partly because the plants look fresher and nicer and so are more likely to sell, and also because the dead flower heads act as magnets for botrytis, while acers are vulnerable to coral spot, a fungal disease that starts as orange pustules on dead wood, but can then spread to living. Actually, acers aren't above a bit of botrytis either. It came as a surprise at around ten o'clock to hear rain drumming on the polytunnel roof. I thought we were in for a cold, bright day, but evidently not.
The phone rang, and it was a woman calling about our advertisement in the East Anglian Daily Times. Had I seen it? I hadn't seen it, since I don't buy a paper before work, let alone have time to read one. I expected her question to be a preamble to some underlying query about hedging, or fruit trees, but it turned out that she was calling to check that we knew that our advertisement for a Wreath Making Day had gone to press as Reef Making. I presume that the owner dictated the wording of the advert over the phone to somebody who could neither spell nor was prepared to bring an iota of intelligence to the job of advertising sales. I thanked my informant and promised to let the owner know, if she hadn't already found out.
Later on another woman rang wanting to speak to the manager, and then when I explained he didn't work at weekends, the person responsible for advertising. I think she was looking forward to teasing the manager, and it rather took the wind out of her sails that I already knew about the error. Later still the manager rang, having been told about the mistake and wanting to know whether anybody else had mentioned it. We ought to get several free ads out of that cock-up, though looking on the bright side at least people might have noticed the advertisement.
The owners were shooting, and had left us only two radios between three members of staff, so that when I tried to call today's tea shop volunteer to make a hot drink for somebody he didn't reply, and while I was hunting for him she left. My hands were filthy with compost from dibbling around in the camellias and acers, and cleaning up pots of herbaceous plants prior to tucking them away in a polytunnel for the winter, and I really didn't want to serve food.
Tonight I am heading out again for a friend's concert. She sings with a local choir, and I said ages ago that I'd go to her concert. Having not seen each other for a while we have ended up going out together two nights running, as yesterday we went to a jazz night. It is held in a local hotel cum golf club and health club, and I knew we must be in Suffolk because the main function room was occupied by a black tie dinner for the Turkey Breeders Association. It wasn't very good organisation to go for consecutive nights, but when we booked the jazz I didn't know when the concert was, and she only made the connection recently. Jazz is not really my thing, so when the task of choosing which gig to go to fell to me, I resorted to searching for You Tube clips of all the bands on the programme, and went for the one that sounded least like jazz. I chose Christine Tobin, an Irish singer touring her latest project, to put some of the poems of WB Yeats to music, with a line-up consisting of double bass, cello, piano, and guitar. The guitarist was rather good, as far as I could tell, and she had a gutsy voice. Odd sections passed me by, veering too far for my taste into Radiophonics Workshop territory, though I think at least one of those was accidental, because I could see the guitarist signalling frantically at the man on the sound desk. It wasn't my normal sort of music, but I wasn't bored. I am not at all sure where she ranks in the pantheon of jazz.
Tonight we get Mozarts's Requiem (I think). I like that, though not normally enough to drive all the way to Frinton on a Saturday night in a working weekend. But I said I'd go, and sometimes part of the function of friends is just to be there. When it gets to the interval, and the performers spill forward to say hello to their friends and relations in the audience, it is nicer to have a friendly face or two in the pews than to be left chatting to your fellow choir members until they are suddenly claimed by their families. At last year's concert a few of us from work made a party of it, but this time someone has a school concert to attend, and another was so scathing about the soloists last time that our friend didn't have the heart to invite her again.
I feel rather mean leaving the Systems Administrator for yet another evening, on the other hand if I stay in it will not make the toothache go away. The SA proposes to watch War Horse while I'm out, which I don't want to see.
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