Colin is the resident tortoise at a garden centre on the edge of a Midlands town. He has held the post since 1974 and has not applied for another.

Janet Pickersgill, the assistant manager, read me an article about job hugging from her phone during her break, as she does with most things, on the assumption that I will one day respond. The term, I gather, describes employees who are staying in their current roles because vacancies are thin, the market is cautious and nobody can say with confidence what will happen next. It has been presented as a development.

I have been in post for fifty years. I would describe it as the weather.

My Duties

I sit on a patch of lawn beside the display of cast-iron boot scrapers. I am stepped around. Children ask their parents whether I am real, and I decline to answer, a position that has so far held up. On frosty nights I am carried to a box in the stockroom, where I remain until March. There is no handover document, because there has never been anything to hand over.

Career Progression

In 1989 the bagged compost was reorganised, and I was moved eighteen inches towards the pergolas. Staff referred to it as a restructure. I thought of it as a Tuesday, though I accept that it was a significant moment for the compost.

“He has never once asked for a pay rise,” said Janet Pickersgill, assistant manager. “Mind, he’s never asked for anything. He gets a heat lamp, a quarter of a cucumber on Fridays and the stockroom box from November. That’s the package, and in all my years nobody has challenged it.”

I would add that the cucumber is not always a quarter. In 2003 it was a third, and I let it go.

On the Word ‘Strategy’

What I find hard to bear is the language. I am told that people are now describing not leaving as a strategy. A strategy implies that an alternative was weighed and found wanting. I did weigh one, in 1982, when I noticed a gap at the bottom of the hedge by the water features. It was a good gap. I looked at it for most of a summer. By the time I had decided to go through it, the gap had been filled by a display of ceramic hedgehogs, and I took that as a sign.

Dr Priya Ramanathan, a labour market analyst at a Midlands university, said that workers were “weighing the risk of moving against a limited supply of vacancies, and many are concluding that the sensible option is to remain where they are.” I find this accurate. I also find it something I could have told her in about eleven minutes, had she walked past the lawn rather than around the car park.

I have watched forty-three assistant managers come and go. Several left for a few per cent more at a rival garden centre three miles up the road. A fair number returned within eighteen months, stood by the boot scrapers and said, “Nothing’s changed.” I have come to regard this as the finest review a workplace can receive, and I have never once seen it put on a certificate.

There is a suggestion that those who stay put are stuck. I would say that being stuck is a matter of tone. I am not stuck. I am in post. The lawn is perfectly good, the light reaches it from about ten until mid afternoon, and the work, such as it is, has never followed me home, chiefly because I carry my home with me and it has not asked questions.

If you must hug your job, I would ask only that you do it quietly. Nobody needs a thinkpiece. Do the duties, accept the cucumber in whatever fraction it arrives, and allow the years to accumulate the way moss does on a north-facing wall.

The lawn is due to be reseeded in the spring. I have been told I will be moved for a fortnight, and I have asked to be put back in exactly the same place. Janet has assured me that I will be. It is Friday, so she is on her way over now with the cucumber.