another talk

I'm doing another talk tonight, this time on bee friendly gardening to a garden club.  I talk using plants as props, not slides, which many audiences seem to like.  You don't have to put the lights out, for a start, and the speaker can make eye contact with the audience, and it seems altogether more like a live experience than sitting in the dark while somebody lectures (one hopes not droning on) about a set of slides.  Also they can buy any plants they like the sound of to take home.  The downside is that I can't always get hold of some plant I really want to talk about, and they aren't always prime examples, like the Fuchsia 'Hawkshead' I'm taking along, which along with all the other fuchsias at the plant centre has been lightly but perceptibly touched by frost.  Plus, of course, I have to drive over to the plant centre to borrow the plants.  All in all it amounts to a day's work, but at least half of it is done in the evening, leaving me with some daylight hours free for gardening.

It's a funny thing going to your place of work on a day when you're not working.  I'd checked as a courtesy with the manager that it would be OK for me to borrow the plants (it always has been in the past, but it never does to take things for granted), but he had the day off today.  My colleagues were surprised to see me, and I explained that I was borrowing plants for a talk, and that the manager knew about it, and introduced myself to a woman who does tea shop duty during the week, whom I'd never met, though I'd seen her time sheets.  My keen new young colleague hovered around the trolley of plants as I finished picking out packets of seeds in the shop, chattering socially and incessantly, which was slightly distracting in that I was trying to make sure I hadn't forgotten to pick up anything on my list, then asked me with a faintly defensive and proprietorial air what the drill was, then.  Did 'we' keep a list of what I'd taken.  I said that no, they didn't, I just brought the plants back and paid the money for any I'd sold.

I could see where he was coming from.  He previously worked for a large garden chain, where I think they did have measures in place against staff theft.  Somebody else who worked there once mentioned bag and car searches.  We don't.  If I'm buying plants for my own use, on days when I'm at work, I put them through the till myself, and am trusted to do so.  You could have a system whereby everybody had to pay via a colleague, or the manager, and where the manager or owner reserved the right to do spot checks of cars at the end of the day, but we don't.  In the end the owners have to decide whether or not they trust us.  So if I were to want to steal from my employers, which I don't, I could think of far easier and more subtle ways of doing it than marching in on a day when the manager wasn't there and 'borrowing' a trolley load of plants, and if I thought my employers believed I might steal from them, I wouldn't want to work for them.

My colleague's (probably unwitting) air of suspicion highlighted how odd it is to go to your place of work on one of your days off.  Suddenly you aren't part of the team.  If the phone rings you don't answer it (I do find myself pointing customers in the right direction if they ask where things are, because so many of them recognise me by now).  If I'm taking plants back on a non-working day I don't touch the till, but ask somebody else to ring things through for me.  On non-working days at work you are neither fish nor fowl.  You know how things work, but aren't expected to do anything about them.

Back in the garden at home I sat for a while under the 'Taihaku', listening to the sound of the bees working the blossom, then went on with digging around the yellow bamboo, until driven in by a hailstorm.  I haven't been out to look yet, but I hope it hasn't done too much damage to the cherry flowers.

it's going to be a long (cold) day

I’m not going to have time to write a blog entry today, which is why I’m doing it last night.  Today is a working day.  I don’t suppose there’ll be many (any?) customers, as it’s still forecast to be jolly cold, and the roads will be icy, but it’s my weekend to work.  The only thing I can imagine the manager will find for me to do is to tidy away dead leaves and spilled compost in the tunnels, although come to think of it that’s all there’ll have been for my colleagues to do all week.

At the start of February our finishing time moves later, to 5.00pm.  It is light until then, so on a normal day that would make sense.  If we have any customers after 4.00pm today I’d be very surprised.  I’m hoping to negotiate to go home then, even though it is February, as I need to get cleaned up and changed for the supper concert and then drive back to the village hall with the apple crumbles.  It’s probably going to be so cold that the boot of the car won’t get any warmer than a fridge, and I could get away with leaving them in there all day, but I’m nervous about making the experiment.

Goodness knows what they’re going to be like, after an eleven-mile drive to the hall.  I still have bad memories of an apple crumble cooked in a school cookery lesson, taken home on the bus and carried the final mile from the bus stop.  It was pretty soggy by the time we ate it.  Cookery lessons at school were a waste of time anyway, because I’d already done more than that at home, apart from learning how to gut herrings, a skill so revolting I have never again put it into practice, and made sure I wouldn’t need to by marrying a non-fish eater.

I haven’t been to the supper concert before and don’t know what to expect.  At the committee meeting they were talking about tablecloths and flower arrangements, and the timetable of events said the rehearsal was at 6.30pm.  I asked whether this was a musical rehearsal or a catering one, to general hilarity, but honestly I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.  Scurrying about carrying plates of chicken stew to 90 people, I think, which I don’t mind.  I’m glad I volunteered to cook extra pudding and not get involved in the main course.  The scope for accidentally poisoning people with apple crumble is quite limited.  I’m slightly amazed that this kind of community catering hasn’t been banned by now, unless all the volunteer cooks have obtained Level something-or-other Hygiene and Food Handling certificates and submitted their kitchens for official inspection.

I suppose that at the end there’ll be washing up, and then the roads will be icy going home, and it will be horribly late, and then on Sunday morning I’ll have to leap up early to go to work again.  Still, the thaw is forecast to start on Sunday.  Here’s hoping.

working and not working

When I read the headline that David Cameron said people should take their children to work with them on the strike day, I thought what a gift for the scriptwriters of The Now Show.  Given that this morning even the Today programme was taking a poke at it, they may feel that by Friday night it will have been done to death.  We'll see (or rather, hear), though the Systems Administrator and I may not until Saturday lunchtime.  On Friday evening we're going to see a Now Show stalwart live, as Mitch Benn is appearing at The Colchester Arts Centre.  ADVANCE NOTICE  Mitch Benn and the Distractions are performing tomorrow night at The Colchester Arts Centre, and as of this moment tickets are still available.

Apparently children will be allowed into Number 10 next Wednesday.  This slightly makes me think that the government machine is not running as tight a ship as it could be.  At my place of work it would be difficult to take children in for the entire day, supposing you had any.  The staff room is honestly rather insanitary, and rather cold, and smells rather mouldy, for it to be a suitable place to park a child for the day.  They would get chilly and possibly wet wandering around outside, and it is not exactly a hazard free environment for a small child.  The owners probably believe that while they are paying their staff, we should be concentrating on doing our jobs, not on preventing our children from ingesting chemicals, drowning in the ponds, messing up the tills, or otherwise causing injury to themselves or disruption to the business.

As a customer I'd like to feel that staff I was dealing with were concentrating on the job.  I don't want to go for a haircut and find that the hairdresser's attention is mostly on what four year old Tristan has got up to now, and whether he is safe, while she absent mindedly tonsures me.  Nor do I want to have my septic hand examined by the nurse while her bored 14 year old in the corner checks out Facebook on her mobile.  Not all places of work have a spare room and a more or less free member of staff to run an impromtu creche for mixed ages.

A friend of ours was recently made redundant by one of the big banks.  The bank is cutting 20,000 worldwide, with 250 to come out of the division our friend used to work in until the week before last.  Staff set off to work for business as usual on Monday morning.  On Wednesday rumours were circulating.  On Thursday the people being laid off were told, handed in their laptops and passes and went home.  On Friday they didn't go in.  Employment finished.  Our friend was the last person in his department to get the call, and by 4.30pm he was thinking he'd missed out.  He is close to retirement age, has lots of hobbies, and was really keen to be allowed to spend more time pursuing them.  Not everybody was in the same fortunate position.  I was surprised the bank had bothered to make him redundant, given he'd have soon gone anyway, but the SA pointed out that under new age discrimination legislation he might not have chosen to leave at 60, plus getting rid of one person who wanted to go saved the job of somebody else who didn't.  Thus our lives in big organisations hang by an arbitrary thread.  A divisonal head has to get rid of 250 people.  Are you number 250 or number 251 in the queue?

Meanwhile, back in the world of unpaid work, I have finished weeding the gravel by the entrance.  It's as good as it's going to be, at any rate.  The creeping sorrel will come up again, as it is impossible to get every scrap of root out, so the improvement is transient and somewhat illusory, but then so is the effect of mowing the lawn.  I topped up thin patches in the gravel, taking some from the bag of new gravel, and some from the edges of the drive where it gets spun out by vehicle wheels.  I want to use up the bag because then I won't have a bright green bag taking centre stage just inside the entrance, but I grudge running out of the supply of clean, weed-free gravel.  The garden layout does not work well for bulky deliveries, but that's one of the things you only discover after the event.  I would know next time, but there isn't supposed to be a next time.

Gravel gardening is quite fun, and you can achieve some interesting dynamic effects with self seeding, but it is not low maintenance.  It took over two days (admittedly short ones at this time of the year) to weed the entrance gravel, which is a very small part of the whole garden.  OK, if you laid a thick layer of gravel and blasted the entire area with weedkiller a few times a year and raked the leaves off in autumn it would be low maintenance, but if you want plants growing in gravel you will spend a long time weeding,  picking leaves out from among them, and topping up the bald patches that appear.  As for plants growing through holes cut in a membrane mulched with gravel, I wouldn't touch them.  The membrane will show at the edges of the holes, and you lose the attractive elements of self seeding.  Plants you want won't be able to grow to flowering size sitting on top of the membrane, but hairy bittercress will still find a foothold.

preview of a day

Back in the 1990s there was a brief craze for Japanese electronic pets called Kamagochi.  They required to have their buttons pushed at regular intervals to 'feed' them and 'play' with them, otherwise they stopped working.  The Far Eastern desk of the place I used to work for back then had one, but found it rather a nuisance, as they couldn't really take it into meetings with stockbrokers and suchlike, and they had to leave it with their desk assistant to tend in their absence.  I believe it died quite quickly.

Having set myself the target of posting something on the blog daily, and writing it on the day, can occassionally have Kamagochi-like qualities.  I'm working today, then going straight from work (clocking off an hour early) to go to a performance of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in St. Mary's Church in Hadleigh.  By the time I get home I don't think I'll have the energy to compose blog posts.  Also it seems a bit mean to my life's companion to get in through the door mid-evening, and rush straight to the keyboard.  Writing some blog posts in advance, that could be quickly pasted in on the day, was suggested, but I think that would lose some of the dynamic quality of response to events.  Also I thought about writing this on Sunday evening, then went and sat in the conservatory with a glass of chilled white wine instead.  The setting sun does show up the smears on the glass.  I was afraid it would.