I counted the beekeepers' cash from the Tendring Show with the neurotic care of someone dealing with somebody else's money. First of all I totted up the contents of each box, recording how much there was of each denomination of notes and coin, and calculated how much I ought to pay into the bank after deducting my floats. Then I took the amount of the original sub back, putting it in another box so that if there was a discrepancy later on I could check I hadn't taken too much, and recording what denominations of note and coin I'd taken from each box. Finally I calculated how much I ought to be paying in to Barclays in £50 notes (one of those), twenty pound notes and so on right down to the one pence pieces, information I needed to complete the paying-in slip, and counted and bagged up every denomination in the correct amount per bag, twenty pounds in coin for £1 coins but only one pound per bag for pennies. I confused myself briefly about whether a stray 10 pence piece still in a cash box had been counted first time round, but apart from that it all miraculously balanced. That was a better result than last year, when it took me hours to count and I kept getting to a different total each time.
It was still incredibly long-winded, and the owner at work who has to till up two or three tills every day must be faster at it than I am, otherwise she'd spend half her life chasing coins around her desk. But I am not used to adding up cash, and as it wasn't my money I was very anxious to get it right. The teller at the Colchester branch of Barclays seemed to take almost as long to check it as I'd taken counting it, despite the fact that she could flick through the notes as quickly as a croupier handling cards, and had scales to weigh the coins. I became worried when she started weighing the bank notes, in case we'd accepted forgeries. At the Manningtree and Brightlingsea branches they aren't nearly so particular, just counting the notes and stamping your book with a gung-ho flourish. Eventually she returned my paying-in book, duly stamped and without rejecting any of the notes, and I was relieved no longer to be carrying £1,280.92 of beekeepers' funds on my person. It isn't all our money, a great hunk of it is owed to those beekeepers selling honey at the show, and there are expenses to pay, but we did do very well on the fruit and honey drinks this year.
I was due to have lunch with a friend who e-mailed apologetically yesterday to say that her daughter had borrowed her car again, and could we possibly meet in Colchester where she lives as she had no transport. I was able to tell her truthfully that as I had to go to the bank (actually two banks, mine and the beekeepers') and needed a new watch battery, Colchester would be quite handy for me. When I arrived at her house she lamented that as well as the car, her daughters were in the habit of borrowing her clothes, and she was not entirely sure whether she had a front door key as the children kept taking those too. I began to think that her maternal lot compared unfavourably even with that of the pelican, which chooses to pluck out its feathers to line its nest, while in her case her (grown up) children were doing the plucking.
She did find a key, and we went and had a very pleasant lunch in a cafe I hadn't visited before, and whose name I have already forgotten, though I could find it again. I almost never lunch in Colchester, there's no need. In fact I almost never do lunch, in the absence of an art gallery or garden visit that means I'm out at lunchtime and need sustenance. I put on a dress in honour of the occasion, one I bought last year and then never had a single chance to wear because the weather was so wet and cold. After lunch we went and drank tea in her garden while I waited for the watch repair stall at Colchester's best department store to fit the new battery, and she sprayed her pug dog with water to help him cool down. He seemed initially uncertain about this, then grasped the idea, and lay flat out on the patio, pink tongue showing and his extremely thick and soft fur glistening with tiny droplets of water as if he'd been dusted with glitter. Pugs are not built for heat.
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