Well, it wasn't all straightforward. The involvement with the large holiday let turned out to be very stressful. I couldn't bear to witness the damage this caused to our work in the gardens, and, because I lived across the road, I never felt off duty, which becomes very wearing after a while, particularly if you are being pestered continually to come and fix things on your days off.
For this reason, we had begged for and been granted permission by the management to find our own accommodation in another village locally, to allow us some space from the job. This would then free up our house to increase property income as another holiday let perhaps. I didn't even consider the fact that effectively my income would be substantially reduced by this, as I would lose the value of the nominal rent that was included in my wage plan. I was just desperate to regain a private life for at least a couple of days a week.
In the end, we did move into our own property, but not under the circumstances we had envisaged.
I was doing some summer pruning in the orchard, in this case working on a fan-trained plum tree against the wall. You can't prune stone-fruit during the winter at the same time as the apples and pears, because of the threat of letting in silver-leaf disease, so I was doing this in late August or early September. I was pruning out a dead branch, which had decayed to a paper-like consistency in places, when the wood gave way, and the saw slipped, carving a gouge out of my index finger. I knew instantly that something bad had happened, even though it didn't particularly hurt, and I got someone to call my wife at work to pick me up and take me to the hospital. I had severed a tendon.
The treatment involved an immediate operation, followed by fifteen weeks off work and intensive and very painful physiotherapy, which was much worse than the original injury.
Fine, you'd think, wouldn't you? It's only the finger. I live just down the road from work. They can call on me if they need any decisions. I'll be able to keep an eye on the place. I'm not mentally impaired by this. I can still do part of the job.
Now, I've told you about team tensions. I felt I was being pretty effective in keeping these at bay. After all, it was one of the declared job objectives I had been presented with - to sort out the team and its morale. Well, while I was off it only took days for it all to flare up again. I was approached at home by a member of staff with a serious, but obviously spurious, allegation against another member of staff and was asked, or more challenged with, what I was going to do about it. Knowing it was all nonsense, I said I had no intention of doing anything about it, and made it very clear that that was my final decision, thinking that would be an end to it. Not so. The aforementioned member of staff was not satisfied with my answer, and wishing to make mischief for the other worker, went over my head to a higher authority. The way the structure worked, this was the same person who had nurtured most of the staff tensions in the first place. A decision was taken which compromised the person in our team undeservedly, lent support to the machinations of the person raising the allegation and completely undermined my authority. My protests that having a damaged finger in no way impeded my critical faculties or my ability to manage staff issues fell on deaf ears, on the grounds that if I was signed off sick, I was not allowed to work at all, in any of my areas of responsibility. The place had reverted to type and I had no choice but to tender my resignation.
I will show one final photograph to show what I was leaving. It is the view from the front door of our tied cottage one afternoon when the hills caught fire -
I have nothing like that here on a housing estate in the flatlands of the east. And we both miss it.
Correction. My wife informs me that my colleague took me to the hospital, and she received one of those horrible phone calls telling her I had been taken to hospital, where she met me. Fickle memory.
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