There’s something about Mary.

Yesterday a woman returned to the counter to say how much she’d enjoyed her lemon drizzle cake.
I thanked her and told her it was Mary Berry’s traybake recipe.
She frowned: “I don’t like her,” she said.
The lady buying a pair of earrings at the time looked as surprised as I did. Another who was sitting nearby raised her eyebrows. I told her I’d never met anyone who doesn’t like “queen” Mary.
“I’m more of a Marguerite Patten girl,” she added, “but I suppose that’s showing my age.”

Mystery

A few years ago one of the artists who’d had an exhibition in the tearoom gave me a picture. It was a framed photograph he’d taken of a poppy and I’d admired it when he first brought it in.

It’s been on the wall in the ladies’ loos ever since. It’s a large, bright, happy thing and makes me smile.

Or rather it did.

On Tuesday Meg noticed it was missing.

Presumably now it’s hanging on another hook making someone else smile.

Grrrr

Smart phone warehouse

August has been a blur hence the infrequent posts.
Most of it has been a warm blur, not as hot as May, June and July, but good enough for us to be busy every day. Every day except one. Last Sunday. It was the Bank Holiday weekend so I had asked a lot of people to work.
We all stood around watching the rain.
Then we went home.
Normal service was resumed on Bank Hol Monday.
Most of the team members put their phones all together on one side of the kitchen. There are usually two, maybe three. This was Monday:

And I took the photo with mine.

On your marks

When I wake in the morning my first task is to work out which day it is.
With summer holidays and continuing dry weather (thought the temperature has dropped a few degrees) all the days are remarkably similar at the moment.
We are rushing headlong into the big bank holiday weekend. I’m restocking the ice cream freezer tomorrow and cases of soft drinks arrived today (local apple juice coming on Friday). We’re cooking a ham every day and the bread order just gets bigger and bigger.
Today, for the first time in months, we cooked jacket potatoes after a special request was phoned in yesterday. That made the kitchen an even hotter place to work. Add in the hour it takes to stir the red onion marmalade pan and my face got redder and redder.
Or it could have been made red by the child who put hand prints all over the cake display fridge. He pointed to every cake and wiped his fingers across the glass as if joining the dots. When he pressed his lips against it I must have turned purple.

Conundrum

An order on a busy day which bamboozled us.  If a customer wants their coffee black then we top it right up and don’t leave enough room for milk. But this person apparently didn’t want milk but didn’t want it black either. Hmm.
We had to wait until Meg had finished taking a few more orders before we could get to the bottom of it.
Turns out he’d already had one Americano and wanted a second but still had enough milk to satisfy his needs. Simple when you know the whole story.