After the delay in posting Tuesdays events I’m going to give a quick overview of Wednesday and then plunge into Thursday – a much more interesting day.

Chickens, eggs, butterfly count (which included green-veined whites), Canadian visitor, made a get well soon card, a volunteer called to see if they could help us with anything (as if!), a discussion on seeing tigers in Indian National Parks, a meeting (which I avoided), another meeting (which I didn’t) and a feeling that things could be better.

Move on to Thursday and I managed to take a poor picture of an immature Green Woodpecker through a dirty windscreen. We’ve seen a few flying and heard many more but this was my first chance to get a photo. Still, it was better than the one of the Green-veined White butterfly I took on my phone yesterday.

I then checked the office emails and found a gem from a local college.

To put it in perspective, we have them out on the farm for six days in a year. We charge £5 each (which we were told was all they could afford) so we take about £50 – £60 a day. If you cost it up strictly it takes about 16- 20 man hours to plan and deliver the visits, and we have to pay the farm rent for using  the facilities.

The college sent us a letter once, telling us it could send lecturers out if we needed any help delivering education and they would only cost us £70 an hour. Yes, they would charge us more for an hour than they are prepared to pay us for a day.

I didn’t read the payment terms because I was spluttering too much, but I can tell you their terms. They pay at the end of the month following the month in which the service was delivered. We had a visit from them in the first week of June and we got paid last week. And they wonder why small businesses have trouble.

Today we had a 300 word email which contained this gem of a paragraph.

As a part of our due diligence process we audit our suppliers on a regular basis and will only work with organisations who also commit to the eradication of slavery and human trafficking.  Our procurement appraisal process will incorporate a review of the controls undertaken by our suppliers and now also requires, from all suppliers, an annual statement of their commitment and actions taken to eliminate modern slavery.

I’m happy to eradicate modern slavery, but is this really going to help?

I will say no more.