Today I’m going to give you the benefit of some tips for having a beautiful garden.

Gardening tip number 1: don’t do it. It’s dull, laborious, back-breaking and it’ll all look exactly the same when you’ve finished, 7 hours and 35 Ibuprofen later. So get a gardener, marry a gardener, or move to a flat.

But then there’s the lawn. Ours is not ‘big’, like Buckingham Palace big, like Hyde Park big. Like Old Trafford big enough to hold a riot. But its big enough. And I like mowing the lawn. Because it doesn’t take long, gives immediate sense of satisfaction and beautifulness and makes loads of noise and involves smelly internal combustion, petrol engines. And my trusty, faithful old mower just died. I pulled the cord and… and… and nothing happened and the cord didn’t whizz back in. It just… dangled. Oh well, I would reassess the whole ‘trusty’ and ‘faithful’ shit but its not a dog. It’s a machine. Old and now dead. So its time to google another.

And they’ve changed. Oh my, how they’ve changed. In line with the recently announced ‘exemptions from any climate change consideration’, like Ferraris and gas heating boilers, lawn mowers have grown in stature. Ok, they make electric if you want to spend all afternoon repairing the cable you’ve just mowed in half, and they make ‘re-chargeable’ if you’re unsure of your pronoun affiliation. But lawns require power. And, with all due apologies to Greta Thunberg, petrol delivers.

And now they make them with four-stroke engines. Big ones. Which need radiators. And superchargers. Well, ‘need’… But how can it hurt to make a grass-cutting equivalent of Vin Diesel’s Dodge in Fast and Furious? They come with electric starters, no more cord-pulling, and gearboxes and… and… and…

It’s lawn-mower porn. And I’m ordering today.

Happy bank holiday Monday

A xxxx