It was Sunday afternoon. The sky was overcast; the temperature wasn't too bad for summer; it looked like the rain would hold off for a few hours; Ernie Els was ten shots clear in the golf on Channel Seven; the cricket match on Channel Nine was one-sided; and I'd already seen the soccer being shown on SBS. It seemed the universe was conspiring against me. It was time to face the music—I was going to have to mow the lawn.
If Mother Nature could get her act together and insist that each weed species grow at the same rate, I could get away with another week. It's the higgledy-piggledy look of the weed patch masquerading as our lawn that seems to really get the wife's goat…hmmm…I wonder how a goat would go as an automatic lawnmower…nah, another stubborn female is the last thing this family needs. Here's another idea Mother Nature: just stop the weeds growing any higher than, say, one inch—we'd never have to mow again. New sports would have to be invented just to cope with all the extra spare time. But, no. Instead we have to have a chaotic jungle of vicious, random-heighted, drought-resistant, dog-turd-hiding monstrosities to deal with. If only Father Nature had got the gig, things could have been so different...
At least I don't have the worry that my onerous task is going to be made even more painful by a mower that's hard to start. My trusty 20-year-old Victa has never missed a beat. I keep thinking that I'll have to replace that spark plug one of these years, but it just keeps on going—a true champion (there's a pun in there for those who know their spark plugs). It's such goer, in fact, that it literally doesn't know how to stop. When you've finished mowing and pulled the throttle back to the "Stop" position, it actually revs up. So, you've got three options:
- Pull the spark plug lead off—not good, unless you're partial to electric shocks.
- Start mowing the neighbors' lawns and keep going until you run out of petrol—not good, because you could be treading on dangerous diplomatic territory…you know what some guys are like with their lawns (by the way, what do you say to your recently-widowed neighbor when, on consoling her, she says that she wishes she'd received half as much attention from her late husband as "that damn lawn" had got?).
- Move the throttle to the "Start" position, then tip the mower up on the two right-side wheels at an angle of precisely 36° and wait till it stalls—this is the preferred method, and one that I arrived at by trial and error, a protractor and copious swearing.
Another of my mower's annoying quirks is its habit of dropping a trail of grass clippings after the catcher becomes half full. This could be handy in the unlikely event of somebody stealing the mower—as long as they mowed during the getaway. I could simply follow the incriminating trail straight to the gangster's hideout. Fortunately, this has never eventuated and, as it happens, I have discovered a way around the problem—I just have to mow backwards. Over the years, I've learned to live with this inconvenience, but lately the catcher's downright laziness has pushed even my patience too far. When it gets to the point where it decides it's full enough, it just drops off. The only thing that stops me from thrashing it, John Cleese-style, is the thought that maybe I'm witnessing one of Nature's marvels—mower evolution. Yes, that's right, my humble Victa could be on the cusp of developing a self-changing grass catcher. All it needs to do now is work out how to carry itself to the compost bin, empty the grass, return to the mower, and reattach itself.
I realize I'm probably being overly optimistic because when one of the back wheels cracked last year, I waited for months, and never at any stage did it show signs of self-healing. In the end, I had no choice but to use some wheels I salvaged from another (even older) mower. This turned out to be a masterstroke because the replacement wheels, being slightly bigger than the originals, give the mower a tough, hotted-up look that, unless I'm sadly mistaken, is winning us quite a few admiring glances from passers-by.
While pondering these thoughts, I'm sure the sky has darkened a little and, if I really strain my ears, I can almost detect a low rumble-could it be thunder?
Oh well, can't be
helped. I'll just check how Ernie Els is going…