it rained on my job

Now that it's November, the working day at the plant centre runs from 8.15am until 4.00pm.  In theory it ought to be easier to get to work by quarter past eight than eight on the dot, but in practice any change in starting time throws me out in the morning until I get used to it.  Advancing by fifteen minutes the point by which I should have cleaned my teeth, put my shoes on, put my uniform shirt on over my T shirt, and so on, for each stage in the process of getting myself fed, equipped with lunch, with clean teeth, fully dressed and heading out of the door, is confusing.  I am prone at the best of times to regard leaving the house as a frictionless and instanteous act, forgetting that collecting everything I need, locking the front door and climbing into the car does actually take a couple of minutes.  I think that taking a strict view of timekeeping I was probably late, but as the owners weren't around a strict view was not taken.

It was raining lightly but persistently, which gave me a chance to try out the car park attendant coat for real.  It isn't bad, still rather stiff, and my hands need to learn the routes to the pockets, but it is waterproof and wasn't either too baggy or too constricting.  The cuffs can be shut down with velcro tabs in wet or cold weather, and were pleasingly willing to stay shut, rather than popping the velcro apart and opening out at intervals.  The coats have the company logo on the back, mercifully fairly small, and a grey oval at the nape of the neck, on which one of my colleagues had written his name in black marker pen.  I flatly refuse to walk around in a coat that has my first name written on the back of my neck.  By the end of the day my coat had the beginnings of the usual patch of compost on the stomach, from cleaning pots, and I expect I'll soon learn to recognise it.

We are still packing plants away in the polytunnels for the winter.  I don't think anybody else has got any further with the heated tunnel since I was working in there on Monday.  I made reasonably progress today, though I got stuck minding the shop for chunks of the afternoon.  It worries some customers to see plants that they thought of as hardy being put under cover in November, and I have to explain the differences between a plant having its roots in the ground, and having them frozen solid in a black plastic pot.  Today I finished cleaning up the Genista, and brought in Ligustrum (except varieties of L. ovalifolium), one particularly precious shrubby honeysuckle, the hardy hibiscus, the curry plants, hebes, and Oemleria cerasiformis.  This last one is a beauty, a large, suckering, deciduous shrub that produces very sweetly scented white flowers in about February.  It likes humus rich soil and will tolerate semi-shade, so we're talking woodland edge conditions, and I want to plant one in the very end of our wood.  Just as soon as I have pickaxed out the roots of the Rhododentron ponticum.  I resisted the urge to buy an Oemleria before I had prepared the site, to avoid placing a hex on the digging out project.  In general it is better not to buy plants before the site for them is anywhere near reading for planting, as site clearance has a way of taking longer than you ever expect.  Sometimes a year or two longer.

There was a piercingly sweet and clean scent in the tunnel, which I tracked down to the Mahonia.  Mahonia flowers are good value in an enclosed space.  I never notice my M. japonica in the open garden as much as I do when they are in a tunnel, or the car.

The owners were shooting, or at least the shoot was in use.  I knew this because most of the radios were missing, and through the day there were periodic bursts of gunfire from beyond the garden walls.  I heard the crunch of tractor tyres at lunchtime, presumably as the guns came back for their lunch.  They are ferried about the estate in the back of a horsebox, seated on straw bales, with a little metal gate to stop them falling out of the back.  As I was leaving the landrover pulled into the car park, pulling a horsebox containing a horse, and one of the owners got out, dressed in black jacket, riding hat and immaculate white jodphurs, so she must have been doing some horsey thing and not shooting.

Because it doesn't get dark until half past four and the owners don't want to pass by the opportunity for a few late sales, they ask for a volunteer to stay after 4.00pm.  The deal is that whoever stays can come in late another time.  I didn't volunteer.  I'd already arranged to call on a friend after work for a cup of tea, and as a point of principle if I'm going to work late I'd like to be paid for it.  I don't regard half an hour at the end of the working day, when you are tired, dirty, possibly cold and hungry, and have other things to do, as being equivalent to half an hour before the working day.  What am I supposed to do with an odd half hour in the morning?  It isn't long enough to settle to anything, and would just be wasted in faffing about.  And like I said, I find changing start times confusing.  I am not a total jobsworth.  I will stop on my way home to shut the car park gate or bring in the sign, as we all do, in our own time and after we have completed our time sheets.  But I believe in drawing the line.

enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

The change in the clocks is gently confusing.  Compared to the horror of the change the other way in the spring, when if I'm working I have to get up at what my body clock insists is 5am, it isn't so bad, but the fact that there's so little light left after lunch is disorientating.  At work, we don't cut back our hours until November, so today I spent the final half hour standing by the till in case a customer came in (fat chance, given it was dark) and wandering around the shop putting bird feeders out for sale in a desultory sort of way, because by half past four I couldn't see to weed properly outside.

The mildly positive investment trend at the plant centre continues, in the face of world economic doom.  I picked up my two new uniform shirts the other day, which is just as well as one of my existing shirts reacted very badly to the sap in something I was handling a couple of Mondays ago, and has come put of the wash with a fresh spattering of lurid axe murderer stains.  It's been too warm to need the new uniform waterproof coat, but I tried it on yesterday.  The effect is rather NCP car park attendant, or maybe football manager, but it's not a bad coat.  The cuffs are adjustable, and the hood detachable, and it has a lot of pockets, some zippable, which is handy for carrying radio, phone, secateurs and so on.  It is very heavy compared to my walking coat, which I've been wearing in lieu of anything provided by work, but that did cost something approaching three digits over ten years ago, and was presumably engineered to not weigh the wearer down during the ascent of Scafell.  It has been up Scafell, and Scafell Pike, in February, but by now it is rather muddy, and I need to investigate whether it can be washed while remaining waterproof.

As well as the new uniform clothing there is to be a heavy lifting course.  I would really like to go on that, but it has been arranged for a day when I'm already booked to do something else.  Another Woodland Trust talk in Billericay, as it happens.  And there was a note from the owner saying we had pretty much made this month's budget, which by lunchtime had translated into a plate of cakes.  It's ages since we got buns for making the budget.  And apparently the adverts are going up at the local horticultural colleges and in the East Anglian Daily Times for a new full-time member of staff.

With the short afternoons, from tomorrow I'm going to have to try and get into the habit of rolling out of bed smartish in the morning, to make maximum use of the light.  One final challenge remains, which is to reset the clock on the Skoda.  On the dashboard is a little knob, which if turned one way advances the hour and if turned the other scrolls on through the minutes.  The snag is that I can't remember if to add an hour I should turn it clockwise or anti-clockwise.  It won't reverse the time, so if I add a minute by mistake there'll be no alternative except to sit there holding the knob while the other 59 minutes tick by.  The handbook doesn't help at all.  I suppose that when I've worked it out I could make a note in the handbook, for next time.

dressed to impress (not)

I went in to work today.  I don't normally, on Thursdays, but trade is so busy that we're doing extra shifts to try and keep up.  After the dreadfully quiet winter we need to make the most of it while customers want to buy plants.  It will start tailing off soon, though, if we don't get some rain.  The Met Office have been saying it was the dryest March for 40 years, and now it is unseasonally hot.  One of our customers, who has a large garden and opens under the Yellow Book scheme, was saying that it was much too dry to plant, and that was ten days ago.  I was watering at home last night for over two hours, not just newly planted areas but established plants like the pulmonarias, which had begun to flag badly.  I try not to water unless essential, given our water is the most expensive in all England and we're on a meter, so when I'm reduced to watering the borders in the first week of April that shows it really is dry.

I have changed into my summer work clothes, as it's so hot.  This has thrown up a couple of problems, now that I'm not wearing my coat and uniform fleece.  I shoved my phone and radio into the pockets of the hideous water-repellent trousers instead, and discovered that under their weight the trousers had a marked tendency to fall down.  I don't think the pants showing above the trousers look is a good one in any circumstances, but especially not for middle aged people working in upmarket horticultural retailing.  I daresay I have a suitable belt somewhere.

The other problem is the uniform shirt.  We used not to have a uniform for years, which suited me fine.  I wore my old office shirts to work, since I wasn't going to wear them anywhere else, and they had long sleeves and collars to prevent sunburn, and were made of good quality cotton.  Clothes are an expression of personality, and I like expressing my personality, and wearing shirts that actually fit.  The uniform shirts and fleeces were introduced so that customers could identify members of staff from fellow customers, which makes perfect sense, though the kit we carry does give them a clue.  Most people don't go shopping carrying a telephone handset, radio and secateurs.  The uniform didn't extend to waterproof coats, so customers couldn't see it anyway if it was cold, or raining.  The problem with the uniform shirts, apart from the fact that they are shapeless and made out of polycotton, is that I only have two of them.  Two is not enough if you are working three days on the trot in warm weather, so I end up wearing my old office shirts anyway.  There is an additional problem with one of the shirts, in that a while back I wore it while cutting down irises for the winter.  Something in the iris sap reacted with the polycotton in the wash, and the shirt came out of the washing machine with brown spatters up the front and sleeves.  They have faded with time, but still look as though I had worn it to commit an axe murder.  In the winter it is hidden under other layers of clothing and doesn't really show, but it is now on full display.

My colleagues are about as disorganised with their uniforms as I am, so overall it is a half-hearted effort.

Addendum  I had to write this on my other computer, because my laptop refused to let me sign in to Blogspot on the grounds of inability to receive cookies.  It was fine up to yesterday.  The Systems Administrator has gone to London to catch up with old colleagues and eat curry, so I can't ask why the laptop's stance on cookies has suddenly changed.  I haven't missed a day posting yet, but if I do it will probably be down to technical failure, and any of my friends and relations reading Cardunculus on a real-time basis should not worry unduly (unlikely they are or would anyway).