Day 110 - Top whack please

I was still receiving the horticultural press through my letterbox every week. It was my lifeline, reminding me that the real world was still out there while I was living in the virtual hell of my boss's hallucinations. There hadn't been anything suitable advertised for quite a while, as the organisations I had previously worked for had stopped placing their adverts there in an economy drive. However, eventually one opportunity came up which didn't look altogether right for me, but was maybe worth a punt. I dithered, unsure if it might be a frying pan and fire situation. It was a single-handed job in the garden of a deceased famous composer. As far as I knew the garden had no real horticultural credentials, and I was by now fed up with working in lesser establishments when I had already proved myself in one of the great ones. I found out, though, that the consultants who had set the job up were ex-colleagues of mine, and got in touch to see if it might be my kind of thing. I was given no strong pointers in any direction, which would have been unprofessional, as they were on the interview panel, but I found out that the employers, a small but wealthy charitable foundation, were 'nice people'. Well, to be honest, you have to be much more than 'nice' to get on with me in the workplace. You have to have unbelievable tolerance for the whirlwind of ideas and dynamic change that will take place faster than you can deal with it, and you will have to accept my word for it when I tell you that I know more about it than you do. Obviously I would get up everyone's nose, but then, that would happen wherever I went, so I decided to send in an application. My partner was a bit wary, and rightly so, as it would involve us moving to part of the country neither of us had ever lived in, and it had no hills. On the other hand, she was also very supportive, as her heart wept for me in  my abominable job and she wanted me to find a way out.

The selection process involved a tour of the garden with my ex-colleagues followed by an interview with them and the Director of the Foundation and the Financial Controller, who would be my line manager. The Director was apparently a keen amateur gardener who was the driving force behind trying to initiate improvements. Naturally this filled me with foreboding, as I knew from bitter experience that enthusiastic amateurs always assume their experience means that they know how it works, when in fact it is worlds away from what we professionals do.

The interview went without a hitch, and ended with a question along the lines of 'how do you find the salary range?' Well, it was quite a wide range, set, presumably to cover all eventualities, as they had no idea who would apply for a job in an unknown garden which was quite a demanding restoration project. I replied that I would need the top end of the range to tempt me to come, and presumed I had shot myself in the foot. But the fact was that the top end was still £5000 short of what I had been earning four jobs before, even if everything I had earned since then was far less, and frankly an insult.

My partner and  I stopped for lunch in a pub up the road on the way home, and shortly after leaving there I received a call on my mobile offering me the job. Now we would have to find a job for my partner, sell our house and arrange our move 300 miles southwards, into the house my new employers were going to lend me till we could find our own place. In the end we spent three months apart while I started the job and my partner found employment nearby and organised the sale of the house.

Our temporary new house was ok, if badly-planned. It had a lean-to dining-room at the most diagonally-opposite corner of the house from the kitchen. But it was bright and sunny, with large south-facing windows. My first winter there the weather was beautiful, dry and sunny most of the time, and I would walk Stan across the golf course to the beach. He would run all day in the garden beside me, or curl up by the bonfire if it got cold. Meanwhile, from Scotland, I was getting reports of blizzards and temperatures of minus 9, so I kept telling my partner how marvellous it was down here and how she would love it when she got here. I hadn't factored in how much we would both miss the hills.

This was the house we moved into -

It had an acre of garden which was part of my job. Added in to the main garden this made my area just over 5 acres to restore single-handed from the sorry state I will show you tomorrow.