the birds

The peahen and her chick are determined to come into the shop.  They made it in several times over the weekend, the mother being large enough to trigger the motion sensor that opens the sliding doors.  I don't think peafowl are the world's brightest birds, but they are not completely stupid, and have worked out that it is warmer, drier and a lot less windy inside the shop than outside in the plant centre, and that there might be cake crumbs.

I shooed them away from the doors several times, but went into the shop at one point to find the gardener and the manager advancing purposefully on a wicker basket full of cut-price strimmer lines.  The gardener reached behind it, and scooped up the peachick, which shrieked in furious protest.  Remarking that he ought to wring its neck, he deposited it outside the back door.  Later on, while I was on the telephone to a charming and rather grand woman from Kensington, discussing her Drimys lanceolata, which had been accidentally over-watered in its pot, the mother and baby were back again.  Entering the shop from the far end, they meandered in stately fashion until they stood in front of the cafe counter, at which point the mother deposited a neat blob of excrement.  I did not think I could remonstrate with the peafowl, or call for help over the radio, while being polite to a Kensington grandee, so sidled towards the back door, which mercifully opened.  The pea family stalked out, and once I'd finished my phone call I went to get some paper towels to clean up the blob.

After they gave up with the shop, they hung around outside our staff room for a bit.  I suspect the young gardener of feeding them.  The hens seem keen to get in as well, since the young gardener joined the staff.

Calling the peachick a baby makes it sound very sweet and tiny.  It is quite sweet, but although it sticks close to its mother at all times, it is by now the size of a small to medium chicken.  A little patch of peacock blue feathers is just starting to show on the back of its neck.  The peacock appeared briefly in the plant centre, but he has nothing to do with the care of his developing offspring, preferring to hang around with the guinea fowl.

A van load of rare magnolias and other desirable plants arrived from a nursery in Devon, but I didn't get to help unload them because I was minding the shop.  Then the van wouldn't start, and the nurseryman had to wait in our car park until the AA turned up.  That's probably all his profit on the magnolias, gone on the next garage bill.  It's a desperate way to make a living, propagating rare plants.  The expected delivery of reconstituted stone urns never came at all, because their lorry broke down before getting as far as us.

start of the concert season

I arrived at work to find a peeved note from the owner in the ice cream tub where we keep keys, and put notes, saying that both tills had been wrong yesterday, and that there was no excuse, when we were not busy.  The note didn't really make it clear what was wrong with the tills.  One error involved a regular customer, that I hadn't served, and it sounded as though he might have asked to be invoiced, after his plants had been rung through the till, and as though my co-worker might have failed to clear them off the till again (using the Extra Discount button).  The owner claimed not to have understood the messages I left in both tills, warning her that to make up change for a twenty pound note on one of them I'd had to take a ten pound note from the other, but I thought that was about as clear as you could possibly make it.  One till was known to be ten pounds up and the other ten pounds down.  If there was an additional discrepancy of £6.95 then that was an entirely separate issue.  I don't think I made any mistakes on the till yesterday, but I can't be certain.

It is a fallacy to believe that, because the takings are modest, your staff are necessarily having a stress-free day in which errors need not occur.  With only two sales staff on duty, plus the tea shop girl who can operate the till at a pinch and tell customers where the loo is, but not where plants are, and who does not answer the phone, it doesn't take much to have the pair of them jumping through hoops and quite up to making till errors.  A couple of people waiting to pay while your colleague is occupied helping someone else find the magnolias, and a phone ringing loudly in your pocket with nobody free to answer it, and the staff are busy, at least for that ten minute period.

As I'd come to the end of the manager's list of my designated jobs, and finished someone else's for good measure, that left me with the generic instruction to sweep through the shrub beds.  Clearing up fallen leaves at this time of year feels futile to the point of being Sisyphan, when there are still so many more to fall, and I couldn't see the point of lifting shrubs off the shrub beds, cleaning the beds, and lifting them back on again, if those same shrubs were going to be moved next week anyway to be put under cover in one of the tunnels.  Why lift anything three times in seven days when you only need lift it once?  But I did sweep up leaves and scrape green lichen and moss off the beds we'd recently cleared, to make them look tidy, and then cleaned through the Salix, since they were dreadfully messy and I knew that most of them would be staying outside for the winter.

It was the first of the music society's concerts at four.  I was keen to make it, since I have a season ticket so have in a sense already paid to go, and because it was a string quartet.  I love string quartets.  My fantasy music society programme would alternate between string quartets, and some combination of cello and piano.  No wind trios, no classical guitar, no up-and-coming sopranos, definitely no brass ensembles.  It was a nuisance that this concert, and the next one, fell on my working Sundays, so that I was going to have to leave work early.  Significantly early, in fact.  It won't be so bad once the clocks change.  I asked the owner a couple of weeks back if that would be OK, choosing my moment when I was in her good books after doing the wildlife talks, and she said yes.  I left a note reminding her in the ice cream tub last night, but then came the till errors, and I was no longer in favour, so there was no reply, and by mid afternoon the family had gone out.

I was worried about leaving my colleague, and the tea shop girl, to cope for the final hour and a bit if we were busy, and I was concerned about leaving my colleague to lock up alone, given the recent burglaries in the village.  However, by half past three most of the remaining customers were pensioners drinking tea, and it didn't look as though we were about to be inundated by a late rush, and my colleague said that she would not be locking up alone because she would have the tea shop girl.  So I went.  They were starting with Haydn, and I really didn't want to miss that.  I love Papa Haydn.

It was a very, very good concert, and the church was gratifyingly full.  The only slight musical glitch was that the second violin was ill in hospital, which was obviously worse for her than for us, and while the emergency substitute came from another quartet of equal standing (or roughly equal.  I must ask my more musically sophisticated committee members whether she was appearing above or below her usual level), they had to drop the programmed second half Beethoven in favour of Dvorak. The Dvorak was beautiful, and probably pleased a friend who is not such a Papa Haydn enthusiast and prefers something more romantic, but Haydn and then Mozart don't really set you up in the right mood to appreciate a second half of Slavic music laced with American folk motifs.

The slight sartorial hitch was that I forgot to chuck a clean sweater and pair of shoes in the car, and had to spend the interval trying to look as though it was perfectly normal to attend a recital covered in compost and green slime and wearing wellington boots.

early bird

This may be all the blog there is today, because it's a working day and we have friends coming to supper tonight, and as it's only ten hours since I wrote the last entry, and since all I've done since then is eat supper (nothing special), read the beginning of a book about the role of the UK and France in Syria in the first half of the last century (depressing) and sleep (like a lamb, thanks) there's not a lot new happening in north east Essex to report on.

I have made up my packed lunch and eaten my porridge (slightly grainy, could have done with another couple of minutes on the hob) listening to Radio Three, because that's where the set was tuned to last night, and I liked the string quartet that was playing when I switched it on, so left it there.  At half past six you catch the tail end of Through the Night, and it is such a civilised programme.  A presenter tells you what the music is going to be, in a quiet, polite, neutral voice. Then he plays the next piece.  If you didn't quite catch what he said because you were out in the hall dishing out cat food, or the kettle was boiling loudly, you can look it up there and then on the BBC website, instead of having to wait until sometime tomorrow for the website to be updated, by which time you will have forgotten about it, or what time it was.

It is so dignified and soothing.  There are no calls from insomniac listeners, explaining why they aren't asleep, or how they first heard this song in 1973 on a date with the person they subsequently married, or who broke their heart, or whatever.  The presenter doesn't sound desperately chummy, or prattle, or talk to me in the strange, cheery voice that some people adopt when talking to small children or old people.  There is no desperate small talk with a studio guest.  I wish all of Radio Three could be like that, apart from Private Passions (and Rob Cowan can do what he likes).  Yes, Producer of Radio Three Breakfast, I am talking to you.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, GPs condemn David Cameron's open-all-hours surgery plans, on the basis that at the moment 99 per cent of surgeries don't open all weekend.  Er, I think that's the point the Prime Minister was making.  It would be very handy for all those NHS patients who pay for the health service out of the taxes they pay on their Monday to Friday jobs and don't happen to work five minutes walk from their surgery, if they could go to see their GP without having to take half a day off work to do so.  As a former commuter I know whereof I speak.  And as a lowly plant centre assistant, who has just got up at six in the morning in order to go to work on a Saturday, and who will do the same tomorrow, and in a fortnight's time, if the plant centre and its staff, who are paid only just over the living wage, can keep the show on the road seven days a week for the convenience of their customers, I'm sure that GPs on six figure salaries can work out their rotas to do likewise.

I'm glad I got that off my chest.  And now it's time to go and let the chickens out, and go to work.

season of mists

It wasn't even mist, but full-blown fog, that greeted me as I wound the bathroom blind up to look out over the back garden.  I could see the outlines of the neighbour's oak tree, and the top of our not-a-swamp-cypress, but the next door farm's wind turbine had vanished into the murk.

The yellowing leaves of the birch trees stood out against the grey.  I hadn't noticed until this morning how far their leaves had turned.  Day by day, autumn trips along.  The collection of witch hazels in pots were putting on a good display, a medley of yellows, oranges, reds, purples, and browns, but they have mostly fallen by now.  The red leaves of the Japanese maples must be reaching a crescendo, and glowed in the soft, fog-filtered light with an almost luminous intensity.  A wild holly growing at the end of the wood is very obligingly providing them with a dark green background, which contrasts splendidly with the red.

I have begun chopping things down in the borders.  It's a nice question, how early to start, and whether to do it in phases or make a clean sweep, once started.  I felt mean cutting down the Baptisia australis, when its leaves haven't even started to die back by themselves, but due to my inadequate staking they had flopped out all over the bed, and other plants, and it is the second half of October, so the plants have had the use of them for a good long time.  Cutting off the seed heads of Acanthus spinosus before they can scatter seed everywhere makes sense, as I have more than enough Acanthus already.

The leaves of some of the peonies had turned rather beautiful shades of red, and I left them, for now, but others just looked brown and tatty, and they came off.  Clearing away some of the fading foliage from the beds allowed me to get at the ground to start weeding, though I won't start wholesale Strulching until the tops of all the herbaceous plants are cleared away.  It's another nice question which borders get mulched with mushroom compost, which obviously has to go on before the Strulch.  If some of last year's Strulch is left, it's tempting just to top it up.  A thick layer of both would be the ideal for every bed, but is more than time or finances will permit.

mellow fruitfulness

Autumn is teasing us.  Yesterday it was so cold in the sitting room by the afternoon that the Systems Administrator put the central heating on for a trial run.  Today the sun shone with a mellow glow, and it was warm enough that I had to take my hat off as I worked.  OK, I have started wearing thermals under my gardening trousers, and a long sleeved t-shirt as an additional layer under my heavy chambray shirt and fleece.  Winter draws nearer, and even the warm days are cooler than they were.  But still it was a lovely day to be outside, albeit that every shrub and bush was loaded and primed with rainwater, ready to dump it down the back of the unwary gardener's neck.

There are still late flowers to be had.  The bright, orange-red Zauschneria californica flowers are going strong in the gravel at the entrance.  The little yellow lockets of the herbaceous perennial climber Dicentra scandens are blooming, with unopened buds still to come, and in recent days the deep, purplish-blue flowers of a late season species of Aconitum have appeared.  To my shame, I am not entirely sure which one.  I have not copied the names of things planted in the garden from my gardening notebook into my spreadsheet of garden plants for a terribly long time, meaning the only way to check the names of more recent introductions is to search page by page through the book, and I don't have a single comprehensive list of all the forms of aconite I've ever tried in that bed.  If I had, it would be easy to work out which one this must be.

The soft apricot, slightly quilled flowers of the Rudbeckia named 'Henry Eilers' are still in full bloom, as is a pretty chrysanthemum in a similar shade called 'Mary Stoker'.  I used to have a very late flowering, tall, pink chrysanthemum, also with quilled petals, but I am not sure if it is still there, or if it has been overcome by other plants.  A drawback to the naturalistic, self-seeding and spreading approach to gardening is that when everything doesn't have its own jealously preserved space, you do lose things.  If I do see signs of a pink quill, I'll pull up a couple of stems, chop them down and pot the roots.  Hardy chrysanthemums seem to root so ridiculously easily in pots from small offset pulled up with roots already forming, that there is no excuse for failing to keep them going in the garden.

The dahlias and fuschias are putting on a better show now than they were in the summer.  Perhaps they prefer the slightly cooler and moister air.  I should cut some dahlias for the house, so that we can admire them properly instead of looking at them across the concrete car parking and utility area.  Behind them, the little red crab apples of 'Red Sentinel' are starting to colour up splendidly. They are about the size of a well-grown dessert cherry, and much the same colour, once fully ripe, and they hang on the tree until the New Year.  I've had mixed success with crab apples in the front garden, however, since 'Comtessa de Paris' is looking very feeble, and 'Professer Sprenger' quietly died.  He was in one of the particularly vicious veins of soil that run across the front garden, but I hoped I might get lucky.  I wish I could grow Sorbus, but our light soil is completely wrong for them, and by now I don't have the space further down the slope, where sand gives way to clay.

I wonder whether I should have planted a Liquidambar in the back garden, where the soil is heavier, instead of the double gean, but never mind, it's too late now.  The truth is that, unless I had a garden at least the size of Hergest Croft, I should never be able to grow all the trees I'd like to.  I just have to satisfy myself with looking at them in other people's gardens.

mission completed

I have done my woodland charity talk.  That's rather a relief.  Since the first of October I have stood up and talked six times, on five different topics.  Two of them were entirely new talks composed for the occasion, while the woodland charity presentation was updated fairly recently, so tonight was only the second time I'd talked off that version of the slides.  Keeping them all clear in my mind has felt like hard work at times.  Now I've got a month's break before doing the woodland talk again, and after that a really long break, with no talks booked until March.

This evening's talk was to a recently formed tree group.  Tonight was their first AGM.  They were not a large audience, but actually more intimidating than your average group, because I knew they would have a well above-average level of knowledge about trees and practical conservation.  I'm not sure I told them a great deal they didn't already know, but still, having an outside speaker pitch up for the annual meeting was an event.  Otherwise, since the committee were re-elected en bloc with no dissent, they'd have had to spend the whole evening chatting to each other over tea and biscuits.

Last night's garden group were lovely, and bought quite a lot of plants.  I preen myself a little for having managed to make the plants sound so nice, but I have to remember that I was in a well-heeled part of Suffolk, so I shouldn't take all the credit.  It's just as well they liked it, as they already have me booked for next year as well.  I'm not entirely sure whether that was intentional, or whether, given that a new booking secretary has recently taken over, she got in a muddle about what the previous one had already booked.

I count it as something of a miracle to have successfully traversed the region's trunk roads twice in two evenings without being caught in traffic.  To sail over the Orwell bridge and up the A12 towards Chelmsford without getting stuck in a jam at least once feels like an achievement.  I had a scare tonight, as the roadside electronic signs that were installed in a rush towards the end of the last government, and normally just say Check Your Mirrors or Don't Drink and Drive, presumably because there is no budget to pay anyone to update them with useful real-time information, actually gave some traffic data for a change.  They said that there was an accident on the A12 southbound at Eight Ash Green.  I skulked through Lexden and down to Copford and Mark's Tey without joining the A12, in the hopes that if there were delays I might get past them, or at least have the option of peeling away to the south.  It was probably a vain hope, since when the A12 is blocked, the diverted traffic stuffs up all the surrounding roads, and as I don't have a Satnav my chances of navigating cross country in the dark with one hand on the road atlas and one eye on the road were approximately nil, but fortunately I didn't have to.  Goodness knows when the accident at Eight Ash Green was.  Probably lunchtime.

a small victory against the machine

I have triumphed, in a small way.  I have struck a tiny blow for everybody who has ever had their day out, or their commute to work, spoiled by a broken ticket machine, and railway staff indifferent to the point of hostility.  I have obtained a five pound cash refund from Northern (a serco and abellio joint venture).  Not even a five pound travel voucher to use on one of their trains, which would be dead handy when they operate in the north west of England and I live in Essex.  No, an actual cheque.  Practically real money.  I have to go into Colchester tomorrow, and I shall take great pleasure in banking it.

When the car park ticket machine at Wilmslow station ate five pounds worth of coins, and then failed either to issue a ticket or to return the coins, after we had got very wet standing in front of the machine in the rain, and spent ages registering on-line with the car park company by mobile, and been charged twenty pence extra for confirmatory texts we didn't want because we came prepared with enough change to pay to park, and the railway staff had been completely not interested in any of it, because the car park company was nothing to do with them, I decided not to let it rest.

It was not just the five pounds, though five pounds is a useful amount of money.  It would buy you one of my jars of delicious artisan honey, and regular readers will know the effort that goes into producing that, not to mention the price of jars and all the incidental costs of keeping bees.  It would cover any one of several items on my current Amazon wishlist, or buy me a latte and a muffin in the Tate members room when I go to see the Paul Klee exhibition.

But mainly it was the principle of the thing.  The Manchester tram system is plastered with notices warning of steep fines for anyone caught evading the fare (less than five pounds).  I have been hit with a twenty-five pound fine for inadvertently overstaying in the Walton-on-the-Naze car park by twenty minutes, although I was not causing any obstruction to traffic and it was not even a quarter full (own goal by the Tendring local authority, I have never been back since to support their struggling tourist industry).  At every turn, railway companies and car park companies are poised to slap a fine on travellers for the smallest infringement, even if due to genuine error.  Some councils will fine you for putting your bin out on the wrong day.  I couldn't fine Northern, but I could use up an amount of management time at least equivalent to the annoyance the Systems Administrator and I had suffered in their beastly station car park.

If you wanted to contact the parking company directly, you had to use a telephone number starting 08.  I had no intention of paying anything, let alone a call to a premium rate number, to complain about bad service, so the day after our trip I dug around Northern's website until I discovered an e-mail address for customer services, and e-mailed them:

Dear Sir

I am on holiday in the north west.  Yesterday I wished to go to Manchester and caught the train at Wilmslow station.  The car park machine ticket accepted five pounds in cash but did not print a ticket, or return the cash when the red button was pressed.  When buying our train tickets I asked the station staff whether they knew that the car park ticket machine was out of order.  They replied that I could pay by phone.  I explained that it had taken my cash and would not return it.  Their response was that parking was nothing to do with them and that I should take it up with the car parking company.  I suggested they put a notice on the machine to warn other travellers that it was not working.

I paid to park by phone, meaning I have been charged an extra five pounds plus twenty pence for advisory texts, without which I would have had no proof of payment.  Please could you advise me on how Northern Rail and your parking subcontractor Ring Go are between you going to reimburse me the five pounds I have been double charged.  We parked a little after ten, in a grey Jaguar registration XXX XXX.  The parking company will have a record of my phone payment for this, and I am sure that the station CCTV will show two people, a small woman in a fawn raincoat and bearded man in a black coat, spending a long time standing in front of the ticket machine in the rain before returning to their car.  Two members of rail staff were on duty behind the ticket desk when we bought our tickets, at approximately quarter past ten on Monday 16 September, and should be able to remember that I advised them the machine was not working.

When we returned to Wilmslow at just after four I checked the machine out of interest, and there was nothing to warn other customers that it was not printing tickets for cash payments or returning coins.

Yours faithfully

Mrs [my name and address]

I was sure nobody was going to check any of the details, but I didn't want to leave any wriggle room for them to say that my claim could not be verified.  The automated reply ran as follows:

Dear Customer

Customer Relations

Case Reference: NR/333594

Thank you for taking the time to contact Northern, the train company serving communities across the north of England.

We aim to respond within 20 working days.

In the meantime we can confirm receipt of your feedback/enquiry.

If you are claiming compensation for delay or disruption to your journey we need your home address, details of where you were travelling from and to, and copies of relevant travel documentation. If you are making a complaint about a Northern station, we need the station name and the time and date of the incident. If it’s a complaint about a member of staff, we need the time, date and location of the incident, and a name and/or description would be helpful. In all instances, please immediately reply directly to this email making sure the case reference number is in the subject heading.

Kind regards

Customer Relations Officer

So far, so good.  I had a case reference number, so this one was now going all the way to the office of the rail regulator if needs be.

On 5 October I received a letter:

Dear Mrs [my name]

Thank you for your correspondence, which I received on the 17th September 2013.

In the circumstances, I am arranging for a cheque to be issued to the value of £5.00.  This will be sent separately within the next 28 days.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to contact me.

Yours sincerely

[someone's name]

Customer Relations Officer.

You will notice that it doesn't contain an apology as such.  Sorry that you spent five minutes standing in our car park in a monsoon, and that our staff were unhelpful to the point of rudeness. Sorry that if you hadn't happened to have a smart phone, you wouldn't have been able to park at all.

Still, I got my five pounds back, and all up I reckon I caused them at least as much aggravation as they caused us.  Rejoice in the small victory against the machine.

odd customers

Today seemed to be a day of odd phone calls and peculiar customers.  They kicked off with the woman who called to say that she had meant to buy six of a plant with green leaves and red berries when she came in at the weekend, but had only taken five although she had paid for six.  She couldn't remember the name of the plant, and she was calling from work so couldn't check the label. My mind boggled gently as to whether she was expecting a refund for the sixth plant over the phone, or wished me to reserve another one for her, except that she couldn't tell me what it was, and I was expected, psychically, to know.  I thought the most likely candidate was Skimmia japonica subsp. reevesiana, and put one aside, with a note to go up to the office for the owner.  I suppose part of the lesson is that we shouldn't allow customers to go through their own trolleys, saying 'I've got three of these' and 'I've got two of those', but should insist on a staff member checking everything through.  We won't.  We don't have enough staff, when things are busy, and like parents losing control of their teenagers, we don't have our customers sufficiently in check.

She was followed by the woman who wanted advice on potting her rhododendron.  Using my psychic powers once again, I was supposed to be able to tell her how many times a week she should water a plant of unknown size I hadn't seen, planted in a very large pot I hadn't seen either, and stood in a position I couldn't see, in weather conditions yet to be determined.  She had already put a thick layer of crocks in the very large pot, and filled it with compost, and was now wondering whether the crocks were unnecessary, or harmful, and if the pot was too big for the plant to move up to it in once go.  Sometimes I think our customers must be lonely, or drunk.

Then there was the woman who wanted to know whether it was safe to compost the lichen off her conservatory roof, because there was so much that it wouldn't fit in the wheelie bin.  I asked whether she had used any chemical cleaner to remove it, and on being told not gave my considered opinion that while it wasn't something recommended for making great compost, it wouldn't be toxic or harmful.  She said she would dump it at the bottom of the garden.

In the afternoon there was the man who wanted two Kalmia latifolia to be mail ordered to him.  He seemed quite put out to be asked whether he would like a particular variety, saying he didn't know there was more than one.  He didn't know whether he had acid soil, something Kalmia require.  He said it was clay, and I had to explain gently that clay was a description of texture, not a measure of acidity, and asked whether he could grow rhododendrons, but he didn't know that either.  He wanted us to mail order him some peat as well, but I suggested that would be so prohibitively expensive that he would do better to source it locally.  He was planning to put the two Kalmia in a north west facing position, and Hillier's dictionary says they flower better in full sun, but by then I was so exhausted with trying to give him sensible advice that I thought it wasn't my job to talk him out of Kalmia, if that was what he had decided he wanted.

The woman who rang up wanting to know how to plant her trees, because she had lost the instruction leaflet, came as a relief.  She asked what to do, I talked her through the hole, the stake, the tie, and the watering, and she seemed to understand what I was saying and be grateful.  Not so the truculent couple who wanted to know where to find Eucryphia, which were not in alphabetical order.  They never are, because they live with the shade loving plants, not on the main shrub beds. Eucryphia are beautiful shrubs or small trees, flowering in late summer when the garden can be starting to run out of oomph, but they have their own particular requirements, which are for a cool root run and a sunny top.  I told the couple this, once I'd shown them where to find Eucryphia, and they were fearfully put out.  They had seen some flowering at Westonbirt a couple of weeks ago and determined to have one, but the spot they had in mind would not provide a cool root run.  I suggested ways of making it cooler, but they just sulked, and said they would have to think about it.

When the phone rang and it was a man with a strong Dutch accent, and a name I didn't catch, asking for the manager, I assumed it was one of our suppliers.  However, on further conversation it turned out that he was not a supplier but the vicar's husband.  I know him by sight, and he is not Dutch, but Africaans.  He called into the plant centre last week in search of grape vines when the manager had the day off, and I had to break it to him that the manager was off all this week as well, and would not be available to give advice on culinary grapes until next Monday.  I didn't dare put him on to the boss, since I'd already been in trouble for asking about the dimensions and scab resistance of various plants I couldn't find in the plant centre.  The boss has a fabulous database of plant information he uses to print his labels, but he won't make it available to the staff, I think in case of industrial espionage, so in order to check the details of any plant you don't know, you have to be able to find one and read the label, or scrabble around in the dictionary.  I do my best, but given that we sell several thousand different species and varieties I'm not going to remember everything about all of them.

Addendum  The banana bread was not too sweet, and my colleagues were duly appreciative.  It is a Jill Duplex recipe.  Cream 175 grammes brown sugar into 125 grammes butter, add two beaten eggs one at a time, fold in half of the total 280 grammes of flour with a teaspoon of bicarb, loosen with up to 125 millilitres of milk and add the other half of the flour.  Mix in three mashed up ripe bananas, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 75 grammes chopped nuts.  The recipe said walnuts, I used pecans because that's what I had, and I should think it would work with any oily nut.  Or probably dates, or raisins.  The recipe said to add a pinch of salt but I didn't.  Cook in a greased loaf tin for around an hour at 180 degrees C.  My loaf took pretty much exactly the hour on the lowest shelf of the baking oven of a four door Aga, and I put foil over it for the second half hour. Cool partially in the tin before turning out.  The recipe says it will remain moist for days, but I'd be surprised if there's any of this one left by Wednesday.

mugging up

I was relieved, when I woke briefly in the small hours, to hear rain drumming loudly on the roof, and pleased when it was still raining when I got up, and raining really hard (bouncing off the roof of the car parked outside the kitchen window) by mid-morning.  I checked quickly on the Met Office website that it was still supposed to be raining at Kew until four o'clock (though I did notice that the yellow rain warning for London had been withdrawn).  Logically, the fact that it is pouring on the Essex-Suffolk borders does not mean that it is raining at Kew, but it makes it much easier to believe, and to accept that cancelling the day out was a sensible decision, when the evidence of your own eyes is of nature chucking it down.

I thought I'd better spend part of my unexpected free day mugging up on next week's presentations. Tuesday sees another gardening talk, then on Wednesday it's the turn of the woodland conservation charity.  The garden club talk, on Colour and Interest in the autumn garden, will be based on whatever I can borrow from the plant centre that looks either colourful or interesting, supplemented with twigs and sprays from my own garden.  The fact that I never know until the day what will be available does add a certain adrenaline-fuelled spontaneity to the talk.  People like the real plants, or perhaps they like my enthusiastic reaction to them, or maybe the fact that the lights are on makes it easier for them to stay awake.  Last week's carefully prepared bulb talk went OK, but didn't seem as much fun as the ones with live plants, for anybody involved.

The woodland conservation charity sent me a new set of slides a few months back, and Wednesday will be only the second time I've talked from them.  The new presentation is passable.  The previous one, as sent out to volunteers, was a muddle.  I'm sure it was written from the heart, but not apparently by anyone who had received any presentation training, and it went round and round in circles.  You were supposed to tell the audience how important it was to involve children in woodland planting, and then, four slides later, just as you thought you'd covered the topic of children and were on to the next point, there the children were again.  I ended up writing my own script, and cannibalising the slides to fit.

The new one is better than that, but it is still a challenge to memory to remember what I am supposed to say about each slide, and the re-stated three part aims (I'm sure there used to be four) of Create, Protect, Restore, don't cover human interaction with trees, which is definitely supposed to be there somewhere.  The script goes rather wildly off track as well at the point where it is supposed to be covering what the charity is doing in response to the threat from new imported tree diseases, presumably because there is very little they can do (standing wringing your hands and weeping does not count).

After lunch I made some banana bread, since the Systems Administrator rather overbought on bananas for my lunch box last week, and we had a bagful going squidgy in the cupboard.  I will report back on whether it is too sweet.  Some recipes are, but as I couldn't remember which one I used last time that didn't help.

I highly recommend Claudia Roden's lamb with okra.  You cook some onion and garlic quite gently, until it is golden, add the cubed lamb and cook until the lamb is brown, add the okra and cook some more, add a tin of tomatoes, and simmer until it's tender.  True one pot cooking.  I expected the lamb to weep instead of browning, but it didn't.  Ground coriander at the onion frying stage is optional, as is the final squeeze of lemon.  I included both.  If, like Simon Hopkinson, you hate imprecise recipes, then you will hate that recipe.  Sorry about that.

kew postponed

I wish the Met Office forecast was a little more reliable on a twenty-four to forty-eight hour basis. Or, to put it another way, I wish it was any use at all.  As of yesterday, today was forecast to be wet, which is one reason why I volunteered to cook, while Sunday was going to be dry, and I agreed to go to Kew with a friend.  Lo and behold, it didn't rain today, but I was committed to coming in for lunch from the garden forty-five minutes early to prep the onions for my home-made cheese, tomato and caramelised onion quiche, but there are now yellow rain warnings in force for London on Sunday.

We've agreed to postpone the Kew visit.  It takes quite a lot of time and effort to get to Kew from north Essex (or in her case, Suffolk).  I used the north London loop for my last visit, but that has engineering works and a substitute bus service this weekend.  The travel advice my friend received from the staff at Manningtree station was to go via Euston and Willesden, which would have taken the best part of three hours.  The Systems Administrator's suggestion was to get the District line Richmond branch (getting off at Kew Gardens, obviously), which would still take getting on for two and a half hours from Manningtree.  It is not worth it, to go and walk around in lashing wind and the pouring rain, especially as one of the glasshouses is closed for repairs (it had got to the point where it was unsafe for visitors).

We'll find a date to reschedule, though I hope it will not be a visit of ill omen.  It's a curious thought, but I am no longer on close terms, or any terms at all, with anybody with whom I have ever visited Kew Gardens.  I went there for the first time in the closing days of my last City employer, in the bizarre period when we were required to present ourselves at the office every day, but forbidden to do anything.  I took an afternoon off to visit Kew with a secretary I was friendly with. She felt obliged to explain her absence by saying that she was going to the dentist.  I merely said that I was going out.  I don't know where she is now, since the friendship outlasted the life of the company by the duration of about one Christmas card.  Her erstwhile boss went on to be Lord Mayor of London.

Writtle College took me to Kew.  I still have a friend living locally, and a pen friend in Japan, from my Writtle days, but neither of them were on that trip.  I took another former colleague as a birthday treat.  We're just about in touch, but the friendship has dwindled considerably since our Kew day out.  That was a good visit.  We were able to climb the pagoda, which I think is shut to visitors nowadays, and a peacock displayed to us, which I was excited about at the time, but would be blase now, when I have one at work.  The last time I went I took yet another colleague, from the plant centre, to cheer her up because she was going through a bad patch, but she has since moved on and changed her mobile without giving me her new number.  That visit was in autumn, and the Carya were looking spectacular, great pillars of yellow.  The trains back were badly delayed, though, and we spent a long time waiting at Stratford.

Still, fingers crossed.  Kew Gardens are beautiful, and I can't believe they exert a malign influence over human relationships.  Odd, though, how the only literary associations I can think of offhand for botanical gardens are unhappy.  Lyra and Will in Oxford Botanic, each sitting on their bench in their separate worlds, thinking of the other.  Irene weeping in a glasshouse in the Forsyte Saga.  Maybe I could stretch my case to include General Sternwood in his orchid house, old and haunted by fears about his daughter he cannot fully articulate.

shopping and potting

Finally, a day when I didn't have to go anywhere or do anything.  No evening talk, or committee meeting, or urgent need to prepare for the next talk, or meeting.  No promise to meet anybody for coffee, lunch or tea.  Hair cut and optician's appointment not due until next week.  A free day.  A day, in other words, that I could spend in the garden.  So it rained.  Why wouldn't it?

It was forecast to start raining around lunch, and I suggested hopefully to the Systems Administrator that the morning could be a good time to mend my cold frames, so that I could spend the rainy afternoon potting up bulbs in the newly re-roofed greenhouse, and put them in the cold frames.  There isn't going to be room for all of them in the greenhouse, and they don't need the heat particularly, just not to sit soaking wet all winter, or they will rot.  The quid pro quo was that if the SA fettled up the cold frames, I would do the Tesco shop en route to B&Q to get compost for the bulbs, and in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered to cook tomorrow as well as getting something for today's lunch.  By the time I got to Tesco it was already raining.

Shopping in Tesco took much, much longer than it need have because they had reorganised the ruddy vegetable section again.  I had made a shopping list, as people wishing to follow a particular recipe tend to, and all of us are encouraged to do in order to cut down on food waste from random impulse purchases.  On the shopping list was okra, which I needed for Claudia Roden's Meat and Okra (Bamia) Stew (the clue's in the name).  Where okra used to be, ever since the last wholesale store reorganisation, was now a solid wall of bananas.  God only knows why stores keep doing that. I am not going to impulse-buy bananas, just because somebody has put them where the thing I actually want previously was.   I know that bananas exist.  If I had wanted bananas I would have written bananas on the list.  As I pushed my trolley round and round the vegetable section, searching for the ingredients on my damp piece of paper, and feeling the morning slipping away from me, I met a pensioner couple similarly engaged, the wife lamenting to her husband Why do they keep moving things?  Why indeed?

When I got home, the SA had been forced to give up on cold frame refurbishment for the time being.  I spent the afternoon potting up bulbs anyway while listening to the R5 Kermode and Mayo Film Programme, standing the filled pots in seed trays, which all managed to fit on the floor as a temporary measure.  I have got three sorts of dwarf tulip, three different fritillaries, pink Chionodoxa, white dog's tooth violet, several alliums, a strange south African red and green affair called Dichelostemma ida-maia, some Tritelia, and five Eremurus 'Cleopatra'.  They came from a Scottish firm called Kevock, that I have never used before, but who have staged very nice exhibits at the past two Chelseas, and the bulbs looked excellent as I planted them, just one shrivelled specimen among them, and no short packets.  By the time I'd finished I'd filled over a hundred pots. I know it was that many, because I bought some plastic labels in B&Q, and started on my second packet of a hundred before I'd finished potting.  I'm expecting another box of bulbs from Peter Nyssen any day now (at which point I really will need the space in the cold frames).

Unfortunately B&Q are pulling back on their large store format, because they are not trading well enough, and are going to close the Colchester store.  I'm not entirely surprised, as it is a vast shed to stock, heat and light, and there never seem to be that many customers in there.  People like me buying two bales of compost, two packets of labels, and resisting the urge to buy a Loropetalum on impulse, are not enough to keep it going.  Pity, as it is a useful place to buy compost, and the SA goes there for odd plumbing parts, fixings, and electrical sundries.  The good news is that it is rumoured that Sainsbury will take the site.  That will provide some competition for Tesco, which might improve their offering (they only started stocking Prosecco when Waitrose arrived in town), or I could simply go to Sainsbury.  My till voucher today told me that I saved 74 pence compared to Sainsbury, Morrisons or Aldi, but frankly I'd have paid an extra 74 pence for a less aggravating experience.

only a northern town

The Systems Administrator and I went up to London together today.  That doesn't happen as often as you might expect.  The SA's appetite for traipsing around art galleries is less than mine, while I find that an annual trip to Lords satisfies my desire for cricket, and being forced to listen to live chamber music at lunchtime would come close to cruel and unnatural punishment in the SA's book. We had a nice time at the theatre back in August, but that was north London, not London central, and I'm pretty sure our only other joint trip to the capital this year has been passing through Liverpool Street and Blackfriars on our way to a party in Bromley.  I think I offended one friend by declining the opportunity to join a coach trip to a charity concert at the Albert Hall, on the grounds that spending an hour or two trapped on a coach with complete strangers, after driving an hour to catch the coach, then sitting through an evening of excerpts from the classics, before repeating the travelling experience in reverse, was close to the SA's idea of hell on earth (see yesterday's blog on the perils of invitations).

However, today we went to see the Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, joined in a genuine shared love of his work.  I really like Lowry.  I always have, since childhood.  My school, although academically pushy, was not very good at arts education, and a lot of what we were taught seemed to be about ranking artists between the top tier, the acceptable middle, and the not quite Art, so that we should not let ourselves down by bracketing Mendelsshon with Mozart, or Butterworth with Beethoven.  Lowry was deemed a lesser artist, not to be taken seriously, not really a proper artist at all.  However, I reserve my right to like and respect Laurence Stephen Lowry, artist, aesthete and Salford rent collector.  Not as much as I love and revere Rembrandt van Rijn, a great deal more than I regard Damien Hirst.

Lowry painted what he knew.  He observed and commented on the English social scene in a particular part of the industrial north at a specific time.  His paintings are highly individual, stylistically innovative, and faintly disconcerting, his people so often disconnected from each other even as they teem in ant like masses across the canvas.  I like them, and if that marks me down as a stuck-in-the-mud middlebrow then never mind, I probably am one.  I read Trollope and have a weakness for Brahms as well, so there.

As usual, I was cutting it fine with this exhibition, which closes in ten days, but last week I was already going to town to do something else, and the week before that the SA was, and we were trying to pace ourselves.  It was crowded, but not so much that you couldn't see the pictures properly if you waited for people to move.  If I lived in London I'd go again, or have been already. Tate Britain will be nicer when its building works are finished.  They are due to be completed in November, at which point there will be a new Members' Room, but at the moment there is not enough cafe capacity.

Then we trotted down to the Imperial War Museum, which is largely closed until August of next year for renovation, but which I was fairly sure had rehung some of its war art.  It has, and the experience of walking through boarded off areas of museum to the sound of distant banging to find it probably adds to the experience of looking at it.  The exhibition on Britain's secret services was slightly disappointing, a bit cluttered, and I don't like museums to play me multiple overlapping sound tracks at the same time as expecting me to read things.  I don't have a good feeling about the way the IWM is going, after the Manchester experience and now today.  The small exhibition about logistics in Afghanistan was good.

We caught a Thames Clipper from the London Eye back to Tower Pier.  I never went on one before, and was delighted with the view from the Thames, as we whizzed past familiar landmarks which normally I view at a pedestrian's pace.  The route from the Tower to Liverpool Street lies on the Systems Administrator's old stamping ground from City days, and I was taken on a walking tour at great speed through tiny alleys and cut-throughs, pausing only to admire a 1930s office block, now listed, in the shadow of the Gherkin.  As we closed in on Liverpool Street I began to know the streets better, but the SA was in charge, and it is remarkable how everyone has their own streetscape.  It never occurred to me to use the underground entrance to Liverpool Street from the east side of Bishopsgate.  I have always, but always, crossed the road and then taken the steps down into the main concourse.

invitations and excursions

I went into Colchester this morning, so thought I'd call by at the Arts Centre box office and get a couple of tickets for The Full English, the latest folk supergroup, but when I checked the date on their website the gig was already sold out.  I wasn't totally gutted.  If I'd really, really wanted to go I'd have bought tickets as soon as I saw the band was visiting Colchester, hence we've already got tickets for Adrian Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds in early December, which is also a sell-out. I bought tickets for that back in about January, as soon as I noticed scrolling down the events page of the Arts Centre website that it was on.

Originally I tried to persuade a friend to come with me to The Full English.  We've been to a few gigs together, including a folk concert and a poetry reading, both organised by her, and it sounded like something she might like.  She seemed keen initially, but was difficult to pin down, and I stopped trying and asked the Systems Administrator to come instead, who agreed, but in a sort of All right, I don't mind if you want to go way, rather than shouting Brilliant, I really want to see them!!  I didn't rush to get our tickets, and now it's too late.

The friend recently apologised for being so elusive about invitations, and explained that she was very concerned about her son, who had just started at university and was absolutely hating it, to the point of wanting to give up.  She, meanwhile, couldn't find the heart to go out.  I was sorry to hear about her worries, though mildly relieved to be given an explanation for her recent coolness.  I didn't think I'd done anything to offend her, but had begun to wonder.  On the other hand, I had not stressed about it unduly.  One of the benefits of reaching middle age is that, along with the worsening eyesight and increasingly untrustworthy lower back, you do learn that it's generally not about you.  If someone is behaving uncharacteristically, it might be your fault, but it probably isn't. Most likely they have their own stuff to deal with.

It's a tricky area, the offering and declining of invitations.  Some of the bravest (and most financially exposed) souls are those members of cricket and rugby clubs who put in for their maximum entitlement for tickets to major events as soon as the ballot opens, without any idea which, if any of their friends and relations will be free on the third Thursday of July 2015 and would like to go to Lords.  The ticket prices are steep, and if when it comes to the point nobody can get the day off work, or it clashes with their wife's birthday, the original applicant will be left holding the surplus tickets with no means of redress.  They can't blame their friends, since they didn't ask them if they wanted to go when they bought the tickets.  Be grateful, and a little humble, to those who obtain members-only tickets to events and then offer them to you.  They have carried all the underwriting risk themselves.

It is kind to your friends, when invited to anything they have to book in advance, to give them an answer there and then, or at least shortly afterwards.  This is a difficult counsel to live up to, and I myself have been guilty recently of being vague and dilatory about whether or not I wanted to go and see John Cooper Clarke.  According to the lifestyle sections of the Telegraph and Guardian, this is a modern epidemic of manners, blamed on the ubiquity of the mobile phone (instant communication allows last minute plans) and a general fear of committing to anything in advance in case another invitation to something better turns up later.  Journalists must get more invitations than I do, since my lack of decision was based on nothing more than not being sure if I liked John Cooper Clarke.  I suppose the fact I couldn't visualise who he was should have told me that I wasn't very keen.

It is equally kind to your friends, if they don't leap at the chance to do something, not to keep asking them.  One gentle reminder should suffice, then if they still won't commit go ahead and book without them, or abandon the plan.  They may find it difficult to tell you to your face that they can't afford the tickets, can't stand your partner, or that an evening of listening to Peruvian nose flute music is not their idea of fun.

make do and mend

It's forecast to get colder by the end of the week.  Not frosts, yet, or at least not in north Essex, but still it's time to start thinking about bringing the tender geraniums and pots of Tulbaghia and evergreen Agapanthus under cover.  Except that under cover was broken (the latest vogue political word) or not fit for purpose (going back to the previous administration), which is to say that one pane of glass in my greenhouse roof had slid out until approximately half of it was unsupported, then snapped off under its own weight, shattering into a thousand tiny pieces which it took the Systems Administrator about two hours to pick up, and leaving a large hole in the greenhouse roof.

The SA researched greenhouse glass on-line, and discovered that such a thing scarcely exists. Nowadays the material of choice is polycarbonate, lighter to handle, and much safer.  The SA measured up the roof bay, and ordered the requisite piece of 4 millimetre polycarbonate, which arrived extremely promptly, wrapped in a tremendous amount of bubble wrap.  I felt rather bad about that, since our recycling does not accept bubble wrap, but I suppose the packaging for glass would have been even worse.

The polycarbonate slid beautifully into its runners, once the SA had scraped the moss out of them with a screwdriver, and fitted exactly.  As the saying goes in carpentry, measure twice, cut once. One little screw in the wooden frame at the bottom of the pane, to stop it sliding out again, and the job was done.  I was at liberty to spend the rest of the morning moving pots about, and trying to work out how the dahlias were going to fit in as well (they aren't, not without a distortion in the space-time continuum of Douglas Adams magnitude).

After lunch, at my request, the SA came with me to remove the netting from the roof of the fruit cage, and replace the worst of the damaged bars that were bent by snow.  I've had the replacement aluminium tubes sitting in the garage for a very long time, as mending the fruit cage has never risen to the top of either of our lists of Things To Do.  I thought it would be a good time to change the bent roof bars over, because it was (a) not cold, so we wouldn't be working with numb, frozen fingers and (b) not windy, so we would be able to think straight, whereas if we left it until next spring there would be a thousand other things to do, and next thing we knew, embryonic fruits would be forming on the bushes and we'd be crashing around knocking them off.

The Systems Administrator said optimistically that it would be a quick job.  In fact, removing the top net took some time, as it was held on with cable ties, and we had to cut through every tie without cutting through the net, plus extract the various twigs that had grown up through the net. It came off intact, however, and I bundled it up in a black dustbin bag and put it away in the garage before a cat could get tangled in it.

Then the real fun started.  We could not get the top bars off the uprights.  That is the potted version of what turned into a protracted and hideous struggle.  The cage as supplied came with dinky fittings that slid tightly into the tops of the poles, each with a screw hole in the centre. Mushroom shaped fittings with a protruding screw sat on top of the poles, the screw went through holes in the ends of the cross bars, and screwed down into the fitting on top of the upright.  After several years of outdoor exposure (which is where most people use their fruit cages) the screw had seized hard into the pole fitting.  It would not unscrew, with a manual or electric screwdriver.  It would not be jemmied off, with an old chisel or a proper floorboard jemmy, and it would not be struck off by repeated blows from underneath with a lump hammer.  All that happened was that the upright began to lift out of the ground.  Nor would the dinky fitting slide out of the pole.  It was well and truly stuck fast, and would not be prised out.

In the end the Systems Administrator sawed the top three centimetres off the upright, which knackered a hacksaw blade, and still didn't solve the problem of removing the screw fitting from the ends of any less badly bent bars which we want to reuse.  The SA suggested that maybe I should buy a proper cage made out of solid bars like angle iron, instead of persisting with the wretched aluminium tubed structure, but as I explained, I'd gone for hollow aluminium tubes in the first place on grounds of cost.  If we were going to throw that away and replace it with a solid metal cage, we might as well just give up and have the fruit delivered from Harrods.  The plan we came up with was to buy new blades for the electric hacksaw, run power up to the fruit cafe, cut the tops off all the poles, the SA to make wooden block tops to fit over them all (which will give back the height we've just lost shortening them) and screw the cross poles into the wooden blocks.  It would still be almost as easy just to order in the fruit when required.

The supplier of this seized solid, impossible to extend or renovate fruit cage was a company called Knowle Nets.  I leave it to you whether you want to buy one of their cages.

day three in the plant centre

The turkeys were hanging around the plant centre first thing this morning, Mr Turkey fanning out his stumpy tail and making his strange gobbling noise.  I don't mind them myself.  I wouldn't choose a pair of turkeys as pets, but they seem quite amenable birds, gentle and on the timid side.  On the other hand, not everyone is going to feel that happy up close and personal with a gigantic black fowl half the size of a dustbin, and I shooed them from the back door of the shop.  They would have liked to come in.  They were trying to get inside yesterday as well, and the owner tried to coax them away with strange eldritch cries, which had no effect on the turkeys, but brought the dog trotting out of the house.

The gardener was pleased to find that the owner had managed to finish the salvage he had begun of a couple of woven straps that had, quite literally, fallen off a lorry.  He had come across them lying in the road.  The car ahead of him swerved to avoid them, while he stopped to pick them up, at which point a police car appeared.  The police advised him that if he were to take the straps that would be theft, and told him to leave them in a gateway.  So the person who removes a traffic obstruction from the road is not allowed to keep it, but the next passer-by can have it.  The gardener mentioned the straps to the owner, who went and collected them.  They did not have any identifying marks that would have let us reunite them with their original owner, but will come in useful as tow ropes for hauling bits of tree in the garden, being extremely strong.

It took the young gardener three hours to get to work, thanks to the lorry that crashed through the central barrier of the A12 last night, blocking the carriageway for thirteen hours.

We were without a teashop girl, and so I was stuck with the cafe until mid morning, when the owner returned from whatever she had been doing first thing.  Luckily nobody made a fuss about the fact that latte was off the menu due to my inability to operate the milk frothing machine or the espresso maker.  A couple of customers addressed me persistently as 'dear' which puzzled me.  People don't normally.  Intelligent ones rapidly intuit that beneath my thick spectacles and fluffy hair I am about as cuddly as a Siberian tiger cub, and proceed accordingly.  I think that one of today's culprits had been dropping off her CV and attempting to see the owner, only the owner was out.  I would be very surprised (and dismayed) if we took her on.  The other pretended to play his bamboo lawn edging as Peruvian pan pipes as he left the shop.

I was quite pleased when it got to quarter past five, and my three days of work were over for another fortnight.

take two

I psyched myself up mid-morning to call someone about a climbing plant they'd asked for this time last year, and which had finally come into stock.  A year is a long time to wait.  Much more than that and I really do feel too ludicrous ringing them, unless it is a very special plant of incredible rarity.  The man was in, so I didn't even get the soft option of leaving a message on his voicemail, and after some deliberation concluded he would like the plant to be mail ordered to him in Lincolnshire.  Once he'd decided that I was harmless and trying to be helpful, he became quite chatty, and I was treated to a short lecture about the evils of local government reorganisation. Some people still haven't forgiven Ted Heath for the creation of Humberside.

The second outing of the wildlife talk is all done and dusted.  This time I had the boss sitting in full view for half of it, which could have been deeply off-putting if I'd let it.  Not so much because he is my employer, as because lecturing to people you know is bizarre.  That's why I didn't even attempt to practice a dress rehearsal on the Systems Administrator, it would simply have felt ludicrous.  The audience was smaller than yesterday, and this time I forgot to tell them not to put fish in their wildlife pond, otherwise they'd eat the eggs of everything else, but I remembered to include most of what I wanted to say.  I got one request for my contact details with a view to future possible talks, which was encouraging.  I am mightily relieved to have got that out of the way, given that when we got back from holiday I had to do three different talks by 9th October, two of which were new, and I hadn't written either of them.

The manager and I each received a couple of bottles of wine by way of reward, and the owner said that she was grateful, and knew that preparing the talks meant extra work out of hours, and that it was potentially embarrassing if nobody came.  The wine was a kind thought, and it was nice to know that they did grasp something of what was involved.  People who don't like public speaking tell me that I'm brave, when bravery doesn't come into it, if you aren't inhibited about standing up and addressing a group, but it is an effort, in the preparation, and in cranking yourself up to the required level of energy.  I am not my normal self while I'm lecturing, but have adopted a different and more outgoing persona, like Galadriel assuming the glamour (except that instead of a huge and terrifying elf queen, the audience gets a small and genial middle aged woman pacing about with flailing arms).

Somebody rang up about the advertised job.  I wish the owners would stop advertising, given that they have now got a shortlist of people the manager says would be ideal.  Today's candidate was polite, but with a thick accent I put down over the phone as from somewhere in Africa, and sounded as though they had no idea what a plant centre even was, let alone experience of working in one.  I felt obliged to answer their questions about what the job entailed and what sort of qualifications were expected, while knowing that it was a complete waste of time.  The owners are never going to employ anybody with no knowledge of plants, a heavy foreign accent that our customers won't be able to understand, and apparently not terribly good at understanding RP themselves.

The manager said that he took a call last week from a man who told him at the outset that he knew f*** a** about plants, but that he had been told he'd got to ring us up otherwise his Jobseeker's Allowance would be cut, which I thought showed an element of refreshing honesty.  It's fair enough and all to the good that Jobcentres propel the unemployed into work, but agents of the state shouldn't be conspiring to waste small business's time by coercing benefits claimants into applying for posts requiring skills and knowledge they patently lack.  The job has been advertised throughout as requiring extensive plant knowledge, so have the courtesy to take the proprietors at their word. The manager is faster at thinking on his feet than I am, and said that the vacancy had already been filled.

my wildlife talk's world premiere

I wouldn't say the day started well.  Or at least it started well enough, in that my alarm clock went off at the right time, I remembered to take a teazel stalk and a sunflower seed head as props for my wildlife talk, and to pack my script, and my mother's birthday present which I'd arranged to take round to her house after work.  I remembered my packed lunch, and even to stop at the post box to drop off a friend's birthday card, to be sure it would arrive by Tuesday.

Things only began to go downhill when I got to work.  The manager, who does not normally work at weekends, was in for his sixth successive day, as he was due to give a talk on Planting Up Your Containers.  He had stayed at the plant centre getting things ready until gone seven the previous evening, and was tired, stressed and scratchy.  The owner gave the three of us our instructions in the office, to sell lots, and wafted off, announcing that she had to make Phil's lunch.  Phil is a professional landscaper who always comes in to help the boss with the guided tour of the garden.  I presume the boss likes the moral support, while Phil hopes to pick up some useful contacts that might lead to future work.

As soon as the three of us got out into the plant centre, the manager gave my co-worker a ticking off for failing to empty his wheelbarrow yesterday evening.  I myself have had a few stand-offs with the same chap over his tendency to leave his hose snaked across the plant centre when he has finished watering, instead of putting it away safely before the customers arrive.  However, I don't suppose the manager's recent management course included razzing up your staff on the morning of what is supposed to be a big sales push.  Gloomily reflecting as did my share of the watering that although I was doing a talk unaided, I would be lunching off a packet of oatcakes and an old end of parmesan I found in the fridge, and not something freshly prepared by the owner's fair hands, I rather wished that I was somewhere else, and not dragging a heavy hose around in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination at half past eight on a Saturday morning.

The talk, when it came, went well.  Surprisingly well, really, given that there wasn't any sort of rehearsal, so it was the world live premiere, and I had the owner standing in on it.  Afterwards I remembered a few extra points I'd meant to include, and forgotten to mention in the excitement of the moment, but most of it came out of my mouth as planned last Thursday afternoon.  There were almost no empty chairs, the audience smiled, and at the end there were questions, the opening one coming from an extremely cute and serious small girl about eight years old, which developed into a small spontaneous group discussion about wildlife.  I decided I had earned myself a piece of cake, and bought a large piece of coffee and walnut from the tea shop girl.  Sitting drinking tea and eating the cake in our staff room while my adrenaline levels began to subside, I was interrupted a couple of minutes later by the owner, who said that she owed me some money, and I didn't have to pay for the cake.

A couple who had sat through the talk appeared later at the till with their purchases, and asked me how I did the talk, and whether I got nervous or did my enthusiasm carry me through.  It was a good question, and I told them truthfully that I had not been nervous, because I did a lot of talks one way and another, but that this one had been technically difficult, because it was a new script and I'd had to work hard to try and remember to cover everything.  They might have noticed that on the table behind me I'd had some pieces of paper with cue words and phrases, among the plants and the bird food.  They said that they had noticed.  I added that in my previous life I'd worked in the City, where I'd had some very expensive presentation training, and they smiled at each other.

I didn't get a paying gig off it, though.  One woman who said it was very good would have liked me to do a woodland conservation talk for her Inner Wheel, but she was from Stowmarket.  I had to explain that I couldn't trespass into the Suffolk speaker's territory, and gave her the name of the volunteer co-ordinator at the charity.

Later on someone came in who still wanted the Prunus tenella 'Fire Hill' she'd ordered in April of last year, and which I'd rung her about.  It was such a long time ago, and so embarrassing, that I was quite glad when I only got her voicemail and didn't have to explain what I was ringing about in person.

Tomorrow I have to do it all over again.  By then it should be really slick.

a late viewing

A very old friend (in the sense that we have known each other for an extremely long time.  Chronologically she is only sixteen months older than me, and I consider us both to be in the prime of our middle age rather than ancient) kindly took me to lunch in a Japanese restaurant to celebrate my birthday.  I do like Japanese food.  It is so completely unlike English food.  With French, or Italian, or even the UK version of Indian, I feel I am in a different part of a familiar world. Japanese is much more other, I can't identify half the flavours.  I like their tea, too.

Buoyed up by sushi I yomped across Green Park for the second time, to go to the exhibition of Tudor and Stuart fashion in the Queen's Gallery that finishes this weekend.  I'd already called round before lunch to get a ticket, since I once pitched up with a friend in tow one lunchtime only to discover that there were no slots available until mid afternoon.  This morning's trip turned out to be wasted, because while the gallery will sell you advance tickets over the internet, in person they will only let you have one for the next available slot, and the next available slot was at that moment. Goodness knows why Her Majesty's booking system has this particular idiosyncrasy, but that's how it is.  However, a kindly woman on the security desk assured me that they were not fully booked and that I should be fine turning up later, imminent end of run notwithstanding.

Apparently the key factor is whether Buckingham Palace is open.  When it is, the gallery is lumped in as part of the tour, and punters want to get their money's worth and pile into the picture gallery, which is not very big.  When it is not, the only gallery visitors are those who are interested in paintings, and Tudor and Stuart portraits don't have the same kerb appeal as Van Gogh sunflowers or Monet waterlilies.

It was a brilliant exhibition, though.  It's a bit mean of me to tell you that, when it shuts in two days.  I recognised some of the pictures from previous visits.  The small Dutch portrait of a lady sitting on her bed, pulling on (or taking off) one blue stocking with a coquettish look in her eyes, last appeared in an exhibition devoted to Dutch painters, while the young Henry Prince of Wales (1594 - 1612), here reduced to a walk on part as a fashion icon, was the star of his own show the last time I met him.  Poor Henry, he was the oldest son of James I, and England had great hopes for him as a true Renaissance prince, when he died, and the country ended up with James II and the glorious revolution.  And I have seen Charles II being presented with a pineapple many times in reproduction, but in garden history books where the emphasis was on the pineapple, and not, as today, on Charles' new style of long vest and coat.

Who'd have thought that around the time of the Restoration, that there was a fashion for men's shoes with red heels?  There they are, though, in portraits, including the future Charles II, dancing with his sister in the Netherlands.  You can spot the royal menfolk among the crowd of well dressed people at the party.  They are the only ones allowed to keep their hats on.

An educational panel between two rooms told me what defines satin, which is that it is a waving technique in which the weft crosses multiple warps at once (the phrase satins and silks therefore mixing technique and material).  This floating weft is what gives the material its lustrous shine, while presumably reducing its strength.  That built nicely on our recent textile museum trips.

Among all the wonderful portrayals of costume was one portrait by Rembrandt Van Rijn.  Agatha Bas, blonde eyebrows almost invisible, chin tipped slightly down, lips closed, gazes at us seriously, her gold fan standing out against her black dress, and protruding over the edge of the frame within a frame that Rembrandt has painted.  I could have looked at that picture for hours.  I would exchange every pickled shark and array of dots ever to come out of Damien Hirst's studio factory, plus Tracey Emin's bed, her tent, her neon tubes, and every single thing she ever made, for that portrait.  I would see them all sunk to the bottom of the sea, even the diamond encrusted skull, rather than that it be harmed.

I wonder if Her Majesty goes around out of hours for a private view?  I've never got the impression that she was very interested in art.

scriptwriting

The programme organiser from the garden club I'm due to talk to next Wednesday about bulbs rang last night to check that I was still on for it.  I assured her in my best reassuring tones that it was safely in my diary, and confirmed we were still meeting in the same hall I went to last time, and not the one round the corner that the WI uses.  I forbore to mention that at the moment she rang I had finished exactly one slide of the presentation, and that the Systems Administrator and I were struggling to find the Drawing toolbar on my version of Powerpoint, which seemed to be missing.

I had made a little more progress than that, as I'd  hunted down and saved quite a few pictures of the flowers I wanted to talk about, but getting them into Powerpoint and centred in the middle of the screen was proving unexpectedly difficult.  It worked fine when I did it this time last year, but perhaps then I was happy to roughly centre the pictures by eye.  The SA, after comparing my version of Powerpoint with the one on his laptop, announced that mine was about six versions out of date, and that if I gave him the rough presentation he could line everything up neatly, and swap the white background for something less glaring, which sounded good to me.  Even so, my slides are not going to be nearly as slick as last Thursday's bumble bee man's were.

I thought I'd better go on with the slides this morning, until I had reached the point of having a workable presentation that I wouldn't be embarrassed to use on the night, loaded on to a memory stick and tested with the actual projector and not just on the laptop, to prove that it ran OK.  I could then add any last things that occurred to me over the weekend, and the SA could jazz it up cosmetically, but at least I'd be ready to do the talk as booked.  It took until eleven, with a hiatus to take the SA's car to the garage, which was a waste of half a dry morning in the garden, but couldn't be helped.  I meant to do more of it before going on holiday, but there seemed to be too many other things to do then.

By a quarter to two the first drops of rain were falling, which was pretty much bang on the timetable indicated by the rain radar, so after lunch I thought I'd better write the wildlife gardening presentation I'd agreed to do for work.  I'd already thought of most of what I wanted to say, but it needed a running order.  It will be harder to do than the bulb talk, which is conceptually very simple, as I shall set out my brief, and tell them that I'm going to tell them about reliable bulbs that are good garden doers, and not the subtle differences between 83 different sorts of snowdrop.  Then there's a picture of every bulb I intend to talk about, in the right order (the last bulb talk I went to myself was by Lady Skelmersdale, proprietor of the excellent Broadleigh Bulbs, back in the days of physical slides.  Due to technical problems with her host's projection equipment, she had had to move all the slides into a different carousel at the last moment.  They were not all in the right order.  Some were not even the right way up).  I know what I want to say about each variety, so finding my way from one end of the presentation to the other should be straightforward.

The wildlife talk is anything but.  I won't have slides, just a collection of props, bird feeding kit, and some plants and bits of plants.  I need to remember to cover food, shelter and breeding sites, across birds, bees, butterflies, and beetles, amphibians, and hedgehogs, and try and remember to cover ponds and long grass.  I think my employer is hoping to hear a commercial plug for bird food and berrying shrubs, which is what they'll get at the beginning.  However, the talk will go on to suggest that wildlife gardening entails a shift in attitude.  The gardener needs to accept that they live with their garden rather than being in dominion over it, which means relying on natural predators for aphid control instead of reaching for the insecticide, timing their heavy pruning to fit in with the bird nesting season, turning any pointless large areas of mown grass into something more productive and less polluting, and learning to find winter seed heads and leaf litter beautiful rather than messy.  I've got two pages of notes, and if I manage to remember to get half of it in that will be a small miracle.  There won't be a rehearsal.  The talk will be done twice, in front of a live audience both times.  Provided that anybody comes.

autumn gathers pace

Suddenly, without my noticing, the countryside has gone from gold to brown.  North Staffordshire and the Peak District were astonishingly green, while north Essex was still a straw coloured patchwork of stubble when we got home.  Now, the fields have mostly been ploughed and harrowed, and are reduced to a neat brown tilth.  Potato harvesters are still trundling up and down here and there, including on the lettuce farm, with a clattering rumble of machinery.  The potato leaves are withered and brown too, and even stretches of the roads are streaked with mud from the tyres of tractors.  Strictly speaking, I believe it is an offence to leave mud on the road, but farm vehicles do.

The trees have barely started to change colour.  So far what look from a distance like flushes of autumn russet turn out on closer inspection to be horse chestnuts hit by leaf miners, and gone brown and shrivelled before their time.  The oaks in the hedgerows sit heavily in the landscape, but are still dark green, and there is not yet a hint of butter yellow in the field maples.

The geese are flying.  They pass overhead as evening approaches, sometimes in great flocks, and other times as tonight in small, low, v-shaped groups, causing the chickens to scatter in panic as they register a large, low flying bird, without stopping to analyse whether it is a goose or a buzzard. We did see four buzzards at the weekend, swooping with slow wing beats over the field behind the house and riding the updraughts.  Four at once suggests a family group, parent birds and their successful fledglings, learning to hunt and forage.

I like the slow descent into autumn, the vivid red splash of rose hips in the hedges, and the gleaming black berries of elder.  It is still warm, seventeen degrees this afternoon according to my car, as I drove back from visiting a friend whose apple tree is literally dripping with fruit.  Vast cooking apples drop from it into the grass.  She has had apple crumble and stewed apple, and made an apple cake for me, and pressed a great carrier bag of apples into my hands as I left, because she has so many.  She has a glut of courgettes too, but that is what happens when you plant out fourteen courgette plants for two people, one of whom doesn't like green vegetables.

The replacement pane of polycarbonate arrived for my greenhouse, to fill the gap where a pane of glass simply slid out.  We must fit it, before the leisurely journey into winter accelerates, and I am threatened with a frost.

bee stories

I have just got back from giving my beekeeping talk to a garden club down towards Chelmsford. They were a cheerful bunch, and the turnout seemed impressive, though I don't know how many people they normally get at a meeting, or how many of the audience were there to hear me rather than to discover the result of the President's competition, which was being unveiled on the same evening.

It was a potato growing competition, and when I arrived (rather early, but I'd sooner allow plenty of time to find an unfamiliar venue, plus extra when the A12 is involved) the potato unearthing and weighing was in full swing.  Each bag or pot of potatoes was tipped out in turn on to a plastic sheet, the potatoes gathered up, weighed and the result recorded, while the compost was swept up and returned to its pot.  The stage of the village hall began to fill with trays of potatoes and compost in a variety of bags, while more and more aspirant potato growers came in through the door. Tantalisingly, the result was held over until after my talk, but it was clear that some yields were distinctly better than others.

I'd been asked to speak for a full hour, rather than the 45 minutes that many clubs give you.  Even so, condensing the whole of beekeeping into an hour is tricky.  It forces you to leave things out, and tonight I said less about drones and mating than I probably should have.  Still, I think they got a flavour of the beekeeper's year, as I started in January with the bees quiet in their box, existing on stores, and took them through inspections, adding supers, swarming, supersedure, foraging behaviour and forage, the honey harvest and feeding, with a nod to disease, stings, and the benefits of joining your local association.  I should have gone into disease more thoroughly, but was running short on time, and you don't want to dwell for too long on the negative in what is supposed to be a light hearted general introduction.

Most of the audience looked as though they were listening, which is always a good start, and quite a few looked as though they were enjoying it, and there were questions afterwards.  There were a couple of beekeepers in the audience, and really it was very good of them to come, when I wasn't likely to tell them anything they didn't know already.  Two people allegedly came from West Bergholt specially for the bee talk, and I was told not to mind the person who went to sleep, because they always did, irrespective of subject or speaker.

The organiser was keen that I take honey to sell, so I jarred up one of my remaining buckets of 2013 honey, and sold it all.  That's a first for a bee related talk.  Either I am getting better at talking, or they are a well-heeled lot down in central Essex compared to Suffolk, or it is a straw in the wind that the economy is picking up.  I did one talk up beyond Sudbury, on bee forage, and the club chairman bought a jar, maybe to be polite, while everyone else just looked at it and muttered that there was a chap in the village selling honey for one pound fifty.  I charge a fiver for a pound jar, which is what the association charges at shows, and it is cheap at the price, given the labour involved, and the cost of sugar, frames, foundation, and varroa treatments that the bees consume on an annual basis, not to mention replacing and renewing equipment.  I've just spend twenty quid on plastic bucket feeders, and the lids will go brittle and crack in a few seasons, just like the old ones did.

The potato competition turned out to be judged on weight of crop, and not number of potatoes, to the disappointment of the man who had twenty seven tiny ones.  The winner came in at a credible eight pounds something, while the lowest scoring entry weighed four ounces.  I never asked, but I presume they started with one seed potato each, in which her four ounces may have represented a net loss of vegetable matter during the course of the competition.  The Systems Administrator asked what was to stop them going to Tesco and simply buying a bag of potatoes.