the worst day

The alarm clock went off this morning.  I lay in bed for a while, grumbling that I had to go and be fumigated with creosote, and that it was not fair, when I was a small fluffy person who ought to be fed ice cream with a spoon, but then I had to get up.  According to the Daily Telegraph, the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year, as the joyous effects of the Christmas break have completely worn off and people contemplate their credit card bills, the yawning distance until their next holiday, the cold, the dark, and the failure of their New Year Resolutions.  Being gassed with creosote didn't make it into the equation.

I pretty much gave up with resolutions a long time ago, though I have so far kept my one modest one for this year, which is only to eat cakes and biscuits made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour and other ingredients I would use if I were making a cake myself, and pass on those containing unidentified vegetable oils, palm oil, whey powder, stabilisers and so on.  This policy should be gently slimming in the long run while not depriving me of anything genuinely delicious, though I think I will make an exception for the Tate's muffins on days out in London.

There was a mild air of panic and chaos when I arrived at work.  The boss's horse is suffering from some horsey ailment, and is supposed to be resting in its stable.  When the owner opened the stable first thing this morning to give it whatever it is that horses eat for breakfast, the horse bolted.  And was very reluctant to be caught again and the owner had to summon the boss to help her chase it round the field.  By the time they had got it safely locked up again nerves were a little jangled.

This didn't stop us having an impromptu meeting about the garden guide.  I think we're working on the right lines now.  I wrote the text as a tour around the garden, but the map had numbered areas.  The numbered areas all have names, which I used as section headings  (the names are descriptive, and most are quite charming, like Primrose Hill.  The furthest part of the garden is known for historic reasons as Knicker Alley, and I did change that to The Lower Garden).  The round tour of the garden goes through some areas twice, on the out and back legs, and the tour narrative sat awkwardly with the descriptions of the block areas.  We've now agreed to drop the section headings (which will also save space in the printed version) and the block areas on the map, and just describe it as a tour, with the suggested route on the map.  It is essentially like writing reports in the City, only more flowery.  The difficulty is never really in finding the words, but in deciding what it is that you want to say.  Once you've established that, the words come.

The poor gardener spent all day creosoting, apart from fetching in some logs first thing, so it probably was the worst day of his year.  There were very few customers, so maybe they were having a bad day as well.  I'd expected to be scribing for the manager while he started the stock take, but the boss hadn't produced any of the paperwork, so we couldn't do that, and I spent the day cleaning up iris and messing around with fruit netting and bamboo canes in the relative warmth of the shop, instead of sitting in a plastic chair in a polytunnel with an ambient temperature of 5 degrees C.  So I didn't do badly at all, for the worst day of the year.

Addendum  Happy Birthday Liz xxx

creosote (substitute)

There was no frost last night.  I feel like a general fighting the last war, to have put the heaters on because there was a frost the previous night.  At least I remembered to switch them off this morning before leaving for work.

The smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre and permeated everything.  Occasionally I thought I detected a faint whiff of Sarcococca, but it was mostly creosote.  The herbaceous tables were dry enough for me to start replacing the pots that had been cleared off them so that they could be painted, so I cleaned up and moved Hemerocallis and iris, breathing the chemical stink as I did so.  I presume that creosote substitute is not so noxious as the real thing, which was pretty potent, and incidentally very toxic to cats.

The fuel for the tunnel heater is stored in an old container labelled - what else - 'creosote', which caused my colleagues a certain amount of head scratching as they set out to refill the heater.  They did put the right stuff in the tank.  There were three people working on painting the tables on Friday, and there are still five big containers of creosote substitute left in the pot shed.  When they're finished I guess that will be it for this year.

One of our customers today turned out to be a true, dedicated (not to say fanatical) gardener.  She bought a trolley full of shrubs and trees, which she seemed very pleased with, and it turned out that today was a red-letter day for her, and she was going out afterwards for a special lunch to celebrate.  She moved down here from Edinburgh, where she had a walled garden with perfect soil, and had spend four years struggling with her new garden, where nothing would grow.  She ended up removing vast quantities of builders' rubble and barrowing in twenty tonnes of topsoil.  Finally, she was ready to start planting.  Today's purchases were the first of the structural elements (although I did notice one hellebore had sneaked into her trolley) and as she departed, beaming, she promised that she Would Be Back.  It sounded like a long haul, and I gather there were some difficulties regarding access, and the neighbours.

The Systems Administrator suggested yesterday evening that maybe customers in January tended to be nice because the only people who come in at this time of year are the keen and knowledgeable ones.  Not so today.  (It is a good rule of thumb that when you greet anybody with a cheerful 'good morning' in the hour between noon and one o'clock, which still feels like morning if you have not yet had lunch, and they reply 'or afternoon', the conversation is unlikely to go well after that, because you are dealing with a picky so-and-so).  Today's pernickety old lady, pleasantries brushed aside, advanced on the till with a plastic bag containing a shrub, and announced that she had bought it a year ago and wasn't happy with it.  The shrub was a Spiraea, still with our label on it.  I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that it had never done anything.  I asked if the leaves had emerged normally, and she said that it had leaves and flowers on when she bought it.  She rummaged around in her purse for her receipt, and was surprised to find that she had bought it in July, and not a year ago.  You wouldn't expect to buy a Spiraea in full bloom in January.  I inspected the roots in the plastic bag, which looked absolutely fine.  Quite good, actually, as they had started to move beyond the confines of the original pot.  I scraped at a stem with my fingernail and, as I expected, there was green underneath.  I suggested as gently as I could that it was alive, and was in fact perfectly healthy, but she reiterated that she didn't like the look of it, and that her family hadn't liked it either.  I explained that as Spiraea were deciduous that was what they looked like in January, then played the 'weekend staff aren't allowed to give refunds' card, and we agreed that she would leave the plant with me so that the manager could look at it in the morning.

The owners' son rang up from his boarding school grumbling that he was bored.  I tried to be sympathetic, but really he ought to have been grateful that nobody was making him go for a cross-country run, or any of the hearty stuff they do at boarding schools.  After all, he could have been breathing creosote fumes and talking nicely to idiots.