Mowing

It's not that I don't like grass, or even lawn for that matter.

I think lawns are marvellous things if they are impeccably kept and watered and tended to and cultivated even if they have signs on them telling me to keep off, which I never do.

We'd never been good at lawns really, but there came a time when we were renting a place which came with acres of the green stuff and it's attendant bother. Happily for me that time coincided exactly with a time when the lady of our house decided that mowing would be her newest hobby.

Sadly for me, the time that she preferred to partake in this odd hobby, was Sunday afternoon, just after lunch, when I was at my busiest with one of my other hobbies - the Sunday Snooze.

I, being only slightly less devoid of strength than she, was called upon with monotonous regularity, to "start the mower", usually at exactly the moment I had succumbed to the deepest form of repose, a place to which after being so rudely interrupted, I would rarely be able to return to until the same time next week.

Lack of snooze notwithstanding, the sound of someone else mowing was far better than the sound of me mowing, so I dared not complain lest the arrangement should be changed. That is not to say however, that a slight modification to the routine would not have been capable of producing mutually satisfactory benefit.

We eventually moved to a new place, with an entirely more respectable amount of lawn. So respectable was it, that I managed to convince her goodself that to maintain the same level of fitness that she had attained mowing at the last place, with this new reduced amount of green, we should really invest in that wonder of modern machinery, the engine-less push mower.

All went well for months, perhaps a year, and I was able to get quite a bit of practice on my own preferred Sunday activity. I became so good at it that I could be pushing up Zeds within minutes of her pulling out the mower, which was exactly what I was doing on that fateful day when she woke me to help her "Start" it.

I had woken from a deep sleep, and her request made no sense, given that we hadn't owned a mower that required starting for some considerable time, so I asked her to confirm her request. Sure enough "Could you please start the mower".

I rolled over, reminding her that it didn't have an engine, so go away and stop being a silly woman. She persisted, until I was compelled to investigate, to discover that something had jammed and that's what she had been attempting to communicate.

I was beaten.

There was simply no way to maintain a consistent quality of Sunday repose while ever we had grass that needed mowing.

That very day I began making arrangements to replace every blade of grass in our yard with plants and paving, and that's the way life was for over a decade.

It still would that way be too, even in our new place, if it weren't for Don, the mower man who comes on Fridays.