admin and drill

This morning it was foggy, the wind turbine on the neighbouring farm invisible in the murk.  It's just as well my trip on the sailing barge Victor was yesterday and not today, since they might not have sailed in that much fog, and if they had we wouldn't have seen many birds.  I should add the caveat that the weather at Harwich isn't always exactly the same as it is here.  I should also add that we saw egrets yesterday.  They are very easy to identify, looking like gleaming white miniature herons.  Their natural range has been gradually spreading across Europe and into the UK, so that whereas thirty years ago, reports of an egret sighting would have brought twitchers running from six counties, nowadays they are nice to see but not something extraordinary.  They are very handsome, though, and not that common even now, so I don't know why I forgot to mention them, except that I was cold and my mind was already stuffed with bird names.  I forgot the heron as well, that perpetually derelict-looking haunter of garden ponds and estuaries.

Originally I was going to garden today, but by the time I'd been to Tesco for groceries the mood had passed.  It was so damp and chilly outside, and my chest was gently intimating that it would sooner not be crawling around out there.  The hideous canned music in Tesco has now ceased, thank goodness, so it was just for Christmas, not for life.  Tesco customer services did reply to my complaint, several times.  First of all they rang me, but I was out, so they left an answerphone message, and e-mailed to say they'd tried to ring me, and eventually sent me another e-mail explaining that the in-store music was only temporary, and was not supposed to be annoying.  It left me feeling quite relieved that I hadn't sent them a second e-mail complaining that you could only complain if you gave them your mobile phone number.

Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is not doing so well in the customer service stakes.  Friday's post brought us a letter addressed to one of the neighbours, which I finally remembered to drop off today when I was passing.  Yesterday, chatting about this and that with my friend on the way to Harwich, it transpired that she regularly gets letters and parcels addressed to another house with the same name as her house, but in a different village, and that they regularly get her letters.  In the evening, driving to Ipswich for a concert with another friend, she mentioned that since a new house was built in her village and given the same name as her house, they keep getting each other's mail.  Not just scruffy, partially addressed mail, but letters with the recipient's name, the street name, and the full postcode, none of which seem to make any difference to the Royal Mail sorting office or the postman.  Same village, same house name.  Good enough.  Who has time to read postcodes these days?

Instead of gardening I did all the inside jobs I could to put off the moment when I had to start on the beekeepers association accounts.  I don't know why, since the AGM is at the end of the month, and I'm going to have to do them very soon.  I wrote a long letter to my gardening friend in Japan and managed to print it using both sides of the paper and with all the pages the same way up.  I filled out the form and wrote a cheque renewing my beekeepers association subscription.  I wrote to somebody about the music society concerts, who had heard on the U3A grapevine that I'd been promoting them, and was so interested in the concerts she tracked us down via the phone book, banking on our unusual name, because she didn't have a computer or use e-mail.

I ordered church pillar candles for the holders in the sitting room, deciding to go for the premium version with a high percentage of beeswax from a firm of ecclesiastical suppliers.  Before you can order from the website you have to create an account.  The drop-down menu of prefixes starts with the following titles:

The Revd
The Revd Canon
The RT Revd
Fr
The Revd Prof
The Revd Dr

At the moment they have reductions on surplices, choir gowns in a range of colours, and birettas, the latter available in head sizes 58 to 62 centimetres, collapsible for easy storage and carriage.

I ran up a poster to put up in the shop at work advertising the snowdrop walk in February, lifting a nice picture of snowdrops from the internet, and e-mailed it to the office ready for the woman who works in the office to insert our logo, print and laminate.  The owner asked me to take on that sort of publicity, but has not entrusted me with a digital copy of the logo.  I noticed in passing that the website still hasn't been updated.

Then I made the supper, but I can see the beekeepers accounts creeping inexorably up the list of Things to Do, together with my tax return.