Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

It was an everyday ordinary sort of day, a trip to Inverness was called for, a visit to the Garden Centre to take an amble amidst the horticultural blooms and the gardening accessories followed by coffee and cake, what a grand idea, so that's what I did.

Now there's a garden superstore nearby. Not been there for a while, I thought, so this would suffice, do some food shopping at the same time, buy a CD from the music shop (Catching Amy or Fiona MacKenzie) and maybe substitute my earlier notion of coffee and cake for an Aberdeen Angus burger and chips from one of the Inverness fast food outlets instead. A pre-packaged and difficult to open packet of exceedingly expensive mini-pineapple chunks with accompanying plastic fork from the supermarket would have been healthier, of course, but I was trying to keep my carbon footprint to a minimum.

I parked the Citroen Berlingo and headed for the garden superstore. While I was checking out the coffee combinations in the café (Latte, Cappuccino, Mocha, Doppio...) and inspecting the cakes (Death by Chocolate, Meringue, Spicy Ginger...) I was approached by an elderly lady who engaged me in conversation. It went something like this:

"I want compost, that bag over there."
"Do you need help?" I asked, stunned by such directness.
 "Of course I need help," she snapped.
Her attitude left much to be desired but I gave her a helping hand anyway.

A while later an elderly gent laid his hand upon my shoulder (very impertinent) and barked the following question: 
"How does this organic biodegradable peat-free coconut coir compost work then?"
"I don't know," I replied
"Don't know, don't know," he snorted.

And then it all became clear. I was wearing faded jeans and a dark green t-shirt, the same as the staff here except for a barely visible logo below the right shoulder.  As the irritable old gentleman took off in the direction of the hand-decorated pots I chuckled quietly to myself. After this experience I wouldn't entertain the notion of being a shop assistant, not if this was the attitude regularly adopted by customers. Undoubtedly a thick skin and a surreal sense of humour are the necessary pre-requisites for this sort of job.

My stomach told me that it was time for food so I traversed the metropolis to one of the places that sold Aberdeen Angus burgers and chips where I was pleasantly informed by a man in a brightly coloured hat that today was 'Special Offer' day: simply collect four cereal packet tokens, recite The Lord's Prayer backwards whilst standing on one leg with a finger up your nose and qualify for a free donut with accompanying toffee sauce between the 'happy' hour of nine and ten in the morning (or something along those lines anyway, you know what I mean).

Or alternatively present an empty packet of non-biological washing powder (5.4kg size) and a receipt for a well known brand of toilet roll (nine pack, quilted) at the counter to receive a free 'Demented Harry' (a soft drink apparently). Surely this was a wind up?  A 5.4kg packet of non-biological washing powder is very large, is it not, and not the sort of thing that you would normally buy for the average family? Most definitely a reinforced trolley item, that, not a basket one. Now I know that gardener's are prone to flights of fancy (me included if the above ramblings are anything to go by), cucumbers the size of cricket bats, tomatoes as large as footballs, grapes like melons, that sort of thing, but this was taking things a bit too far.

Obviously it was time for home - obviously - where an organic low-carbon footprint cheese and lettuce sandwich awaited me in the sanity of my own kitchen followed by a dignified retreat to the polytunnel to contemplate my navel.

So that's what I did - home, sandwich, polytunnel, navel. An everyday ordinary - with a touch of the extraordinary -  sort of day. How was yours?

Copyright Patrick Vickery 2009

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