Burning

So you’ve cut the grass and trimmed the hedges and it’s still only 9.30am on a Summer Sunday morning. 

What next?

Church? Not a bit of it!

A great big bonfire. What could be nicer?

Everyone loves a bonfire, especially at the weekend. Especially with lots of green hedge cuttings thrown on.

Ahhhh! The lovely smell of burning laurel. Oh happy neighbours. Oh happy day. The bucolic idyll is paradise, or hell on earth, or something like that.

The Merry Widow’s ride-on

Nestling in the English countryside so close to the historical airfields of the Battle of Britain, as we do, there’s nothing more evocative of Dame Vera Lynn and all that gumbo, than the hearty thrumming of a tractor mower that’s lost it’s peak condition since the man of the house was sadly taken from us to the great 19th hole above… leaving nothing but leisure time and millions for his widow to fritter away.

With the silencer and exhaust system apparently completely shot off in some noble former action, we can all lie back on a sunny summer’s afternoon with our eyes closed and imagine that the thunderous drone that’s reverberating round the valley, far from being our own merry widow’s faithful ride-on tractor mower, Cecilia, is actually a flight of Lancaster bombers passing over the neighbourhood to some brave adventure beyond the North Sea.

Eyes closed and now just drifting off, we can enjoy a reverie of pride in our brave boys tinged with sadness for their impending jeopardy, and  simultaneously wish the engineers from the nearby RAF base would attend en masse, double quick, to give her a ruddy good service with a few parts thrown in, as it were, so we can once again hear the burglar alarms ringing bravely out over the hills.

The Smutty Professor

A couple of years ago I bought a couple of parcels of land adjoining my house. One of these also adjoins my neighbour’s garden. He’s a man you’ve got to respect. He’s retired and looks to be about 184 years old. Guess what? He’s got to be a millionaire! He’s certainly one off the UK’s foremost leisure mowers.

When he thinks our meadow is unsightly he chooses a nice sunny day, preferably a weekend for maximum effect, pops on his sun hat and gets out his flail mower, and slap me all over with wallpaper paste and glue me to the wall if he doesn’t just go and mow the whole lot.

Up and down, up and down, up and down like an ancient terrapin pushing his yellow juggernaut before him.

It’s not his meadow, but he knows what he likes, and that doesn’t include other people letting the grass grow under their feet.

For this exceptional behaviour and dedication to the cause of discomforting others with petrol-powered gardening equipment at his speed and in his own time, I’m awarding the Smutty Professor honourary life membership of the Millionaire’s Mowing Club.

 

A kentish meadow goblin hexes the snicker snacker.

 

 

Now the grass is flowering we’ll be expecting him to start mowing any time soon, so I’ll try to toss off a better description of the kit he uses for you. I know it’s something rather swankier than an Allen Scythe.

Electric strimmers are for the weak

There’s a nasty trend for gardeners these days to replace their nice gutsy Stihl petrol strimmers with rechargeable electric ones. But this is a sign of enormous weakness, usually inspired by insipid family members who are too puny to start a petrol motor by pulling the cord.

How is anyone to know that you’re actively following an early morning weekend strimming regime if they can’t hear you? Especially at this time of year before the hedge trimming has really started in earnest and views across neighbours’ gardens are obscured.

Real men use two stroke, and they use it early, they use it loud and and they use it often. And then we know where they are; even if we haven’t got up yet.