You know you are becoming countrified when after 2 or 3 hours working in the garden you find yourself looking up at the Sun's position and calculate that it must be about 3:30pm..... AND only being 10 minutes off!
Having completed many time critical maintenance tasks over the last few weeks in preparation for both the new seasons B&B guests and Holiday Cottage I finally found time to get out into the garden to tidy it up in readiness. Thus the compost bin area tidied, lawn mown and patio totally cleaned all completed just in time for our new guests, B&B tonight and the Holiday cottage on Saturday night.
Claire, my right hand 'man', chief menu tester, companion shopper, nag, bully admonisher and Daughter is abandoning me for a job in Somerset, that's right Somerset! Just 5 ~ 6 hours down the road then. Yes it is her dream job (she is a Speech Therapist), yes it will give her the freedom that she has so longed for, yes she will escape from having to live with her 52 year old fart of a Dad and yes the whole world is about to open up for her....... BUT WHAT ABOUT ME?
The work that Claire has done has put us many months more advanced than we would have otherwise been and of course with her being here so much of the time in the refurbishment and setting up of the business, well she kinda softened the blow, so as to speak, in getting me customised from running a team of some 300 staff to suddenly just managing, well just Me I suppose. This was always going to be the tricky bit after all I had had about 30 years working in large teams and working alone was an unknown, a foray into a completely different work climate and indeed in a County with the word 'slow' often written in front of it's name!
Don't get me wrong I have worked in several 'slow' supermarkets in my time several of which were in the dozy county of Surrey. I was put into a tiny, tiny little (it was very small) branch in a small village called Bramley (which I guess is where the apples came from). Four customers an hour and you'd have been happy! The postman made it 5 and on delivery days everything just went crazy as an extra member of staff was called in to put the 12 cans of beans on the shelf. I had been working in a fairly busy store and so this was totally nuts to me and I couldn't see how it could ever pay. Then the bomb shell, I found out that the reason I was covering the Managers job was because the Manager had been fiddling the books by swopping the one and only till with one of his own and pocketing all the proceeds, then swopping it back when another member of staff was actually working with him (delivery days). SWOPPING THE TILL! How an earth he thought he was going to get away with that God only knows, for goodness sake he only had 4 customers an hour, it could hardly have been worth the bloody trouble!
Then there was Keresley store just north of Coventry which was just a small shop in a terrace of small village stores. However the thing about Keresley was that it only existed because of one thing.... The coal mine. It was like the Midlands version of Merthyr Tydfil and every now and again you'd get an actual miner come in and pay and he would hold out the loose change in what appeared to me to be the biggest hands I had ever seen. Honestly you would think that they were digging the coal with their bare hands, I have seen grisley bears up close and their paws are the nearest thing that I have ever seen to compare with the hands of the Keresley miners. The Store was so small that when you were restocking the shelves you had to stand up to let any customer that was in the aisle squeeze past. I worked a winter in that store and I even cycled to it from Shirley (nr Birmingham) some 17 miles (my car had broken down), in the new laid snow and on the way back I can remember cycling back through snow filled country lanes in the dark winter evening under a full moon. God was it spooky as the bare tree branches seemed to reach out and try to touch me. It took bloody hours and I never did it again. My overriding memory of the Keresley Store was that there was a hole in the roof right above the toilet and as I sat there, doing what I had to do, slowly but surely snow flakes silently wafted down on me as it started to snow.
I should not miss out the Wisborough Green Store, another of the small Surrey stores where I was put in to cover for a suspended Manager allegedly on the fiddle. What it was with those Managers I'll never know, it must have been something in the water., In actual fact that branch took just £4,000 a week and half of that was in alcohol and the other half included 200 water syphons a week. For those of you that don't know what a water syphon is well you may have seen old comedy sketches / films where a person picks up a large bottle with a sort of trigger spray on top and squirts a lot of water at another person in a slap stick sort of way. They are really meant to be used to add fizzy water to a Gin or Scotch. |The store was the only one where I kept the cold foods in the back up chiller that was made of wood, oak I think. Again I was often the only member of staff and I was most tested when I arrived at 7am one morning to find that over the weekend someone had captured my little shop in the biggest butterfly net that I had ever seen. The net was held up by two enormous poles in the genre of cabers (the sort that Scotsmen toss on a regular basis) and the mesh stretched from the roof of my store to the far left and far right, and there right in the middle was the front door in sight but right out of reach. I stood there and pondered a little. It took me a second or two before the reason for it being there dawned on me, then the penny dropped. The shop sat prominently on the said 'green' and they played Sunday cricket there so the net had been placed across my shop to prevent a stray cricket ball from smashing a window. Only thing was that I now couldn't actually get to my front door and I'd need four hearty fellows to move these two tree trunks to allow me to do so.
Then a Toyota Truck trundled around the corner whilst I was still standing their in bewilderment and a young guy, dishevelled and bleary eyed as if he had just woken up in the realisation that he was meant to have taken down that net last night before he started that last session in the pub with the rest of the team. He said nothing to me other than a greeting grunt then he simply dropped one caber at a time to the ground, detached the net lifted and shoved the two massive poles onto his pick-up and job done he sped of back around the corner leaving me standing in his dust cloud with my door key poised and ready to go. That is middle England for you.
So I will carry on without Claire and yes I will 'manage' just fine but a little something will be missing and I will be looking forward to her return in the school holidays....
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