Eins zwei drei

We appear to be living through a heatwave. This may be the summer. It’s hard to tell how long it will last but it’s been with us a while and looking at the photos of the Tearooms in the snow makes me feel very odd. Surely it can’t have been that cold.
On Sunday we had our celebrity visitor for the year (we’re lucky if we get one. I was unlucky not to be there to see him in the flesh.)
Mark Williams came for a cup of tea and was manhandled to the visitors’ book.

Today a coach of Austrian tourists took us by surprise. They were lovely and their English was as limited as my German. Our system of giving each person a numbered wooden spoon to identify them was in disarray. Every time we went out and shouted a number they all waved their spoon at us. Until I resorted to shouting the numbers in German.
They sat at the tables we’d reserved for Shrawley Horticultural Society’s cream teas but left just in time.
A man at the top of the garden called me over to ask if I knew the name of a particular plant? He pointed to it. I told him I had very poor knowledge but wasn’t it a yucca? No, he told me, yuccas are smaller. I suggested I go to ask the aforementioned Horticultural Society members who by now had eaten their way through their 22 scones. One of them went over to answer his question and he seemed satisfied.
A little later I asked what the plant was.
“It’s a yucca” said John.
I should have said it with more confidence.

Not on the menu, Heston.

This made us smile:

Sweet

I took a tea and a coffee order to a table in the conservatory and offered the couple a choice of brown and white sugar, as usual.
The gentleman had the coffee.
“White sugar, please,” he said, “the brown stuff is far too healthy”

Mightier than the sword

It’s lovely when people take the trouble to write in the visitors’ book. 

Although when I see anyone hunched over it with a pen it makes me nervous after once a lady wrote that I should stay behind the scenes and let the younger members of the team do the serving.

These entries came from half term week:

Today the schools went back and we returned to a more relaxed lunchtime. The calm before the summer holiday storm?

Untapped talent

The hot, muggy weather has continued into the last weekend of half term.
This afternoon I was clearing a table. Left on it was a full and unopened bottle of still water. The lady at the next table had spotted it:
“Excuse me,” she said, “would you mind if I have that water for my dog? He won’t drink from the bowl.” I told her she had a very posh pooch (no, she said, just fussy) and handed her the water, then watched as she held the bottle to the mouth of the dog - a sausage sort of variety.
The dog drank.
From the bottle.

Sore eyes

May
Mad May.
Two Bank Holidays.
Three weeks of sunshine and heat. One week of thunder, showers and half term.
One day in the middle of it all where we held a lunch in the garden for twenty nine of the Shrewsbury Wives Fellowship and when they left their seats we filled them with twenty nine former teachers from Walsall.
We’ve lost a few chairs (the old plastic ones won’t last much longer).
We’ve gained a bike (left outside the door and no one’s come back for it).
We’ve also taken delivery of Jim’s bench.
I’ve written about Jim a few times, the last time on 17th October last year.
We thought long and hard about what his bench should say and this is what we came up with:

It sits in the garden facing towards the door and is visible from the counter. It gives me a lift just like he always could.