Here is a poem about working as this lady, who lives at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall:
Red Vespa
I’m normally the first to arrive, and in the pale blue light I arrange myself on the moss with a fair amount of enthusiasm. But as the visitors start to drift past on their way to view the giant rhubarb, a feeling of despondency comes over me, along with a searing pain in my right calf. Cramp is an occupational hazard, so I keep a stash of salt in my muddy pocket. By 10.30am I’ve usually emptied the contents of at least three sachets under my tongue.
I get 45 minutes for lunch and spend them in the local shops browsing through home made fudge and tapestry kits of small brown birds.
In a moment of self destruction I once suggested to my manager that it would be economically prudent to dispense with my services and replace me with a great hulking piece of granite rock. He replied that the curve in my fleshy waist was known as the most comfortable seat in Cornwall, and that publicity like that was like gold dust.
I hit a slump at around 3pm. Suspecting a drop in my blood glucose levels, I take a ten minute stroll through the walled flower garden and pull up a sugar cane to chew on. After that, my daydreams become temporarily more vivid and rewarding, often involving rare green herons emerging from the banana plantation and wading through my grassy hair.
What I didn’t put on my CV is that for two thousand years I worked as the interior wall of a pyramid, before being carried lovingly all the way to just off the A303 and placed bolt upright in the sun.
At 5.15pm every day my boyfriend of four years picks me up on his red Vespa and we hurtle along the country roads even faster than the time I took a summer job as a meteorite, and fell to Earth so quickly even the sauropods, with their heads in the stars, didn’t see me coming.
