Cutting it

Some people compile lists of things to do before they die; I have a mental one of things to avoid, such as cancer, broken limbs, root canal work - and mowing the lawn.

Cutting grass was not a problem at the bad place: there wasn’t any. I adored the house previous to that, but unfortunately that warm, fuzzy feeling didn’t extend to tending the garden. I would occasionally pull a couple of thistles but the grass and hedge were rampant. The cats liked it: my parents didn’t. Eventually, my dad would become so embarrassed that he and my brother would descend, armed with garden implements to tidy it up. I would smile secretly to myself: mission accomplished.

I also have warm and fuzzy feelings towards my current home; I also have, as a condition of tenancy, to keep the garden presentable. Last week, after nagging him from the day he returned home from university, I cornered my brother and forced him to come and cut the grass.

He appeared with grandad’s hover mower. “He’s going to buy a smaller one at the weekend,” said my brother, “so you can keep this one here.” It is now living in the shed. I try not to look at it when I go in for the horse feed.

The first cut, so they tell me, is the hardest of the year. Once the worst of it had been slashed through, my brother made me try. “It’s just like Hoovering,” he said. I didn’t tell him that I also avoid that whenever possible.

I was instructed to mow again at the start of the week. I didn’t, and now multiple treacherous green shoots are pushing up through the dry cuttings that I failed to rake off the lawn.

There is a bowling green close to my house. At the moment, a battalion of groundsmen, armed with machines sounding like demented dentists’ drills, are attacking all signs of growth. When they are finished, the green will look as if it has been trimmed with nail scissors. Compared to that, I simply can’t cut it.

Fish 'n' chips

It has taken me literally years to come to terms with Bank Holidays and to consider them to be a Good Thing. This is as a result of the trauma inflicted during a number of school holidays and my first university long vacation. The horror invariably reached a crescendo on August Bank Holiday Monday, but Good Friday was always the start.

The village has a surfeit of chip shops for its size. Three of them have café areas, or, as one where I worked liked to say, ‘fish restaurants’. It was a decent enough size and large numbers of people could be squeezed in due to strategic table positioning. But on a Bank Holiday, it was never big enough and from 11am, a queue started to snake its way along the street.

I would eye the queue with trepidation through the window. The worst moment – worse even than when the door was unlocked and they spilled in like bargain hunters on the first day of the Harrods sale – was when the granny buses went by. The grannies, complete with freshly set hair and a fancy for fish and chips on their day trip to the seaside, would nudge each other and point to the café. If they caught your eye, they would grin and wave. There was no escape.

Bus trips on top of the Bank Holiday hordes could easily induce a panic attack in a waitress of a nervous disposition. “Ethel doesn’t want peas, pet,” Ethel’s mate would say. Of course, when you have 30-odd orders for cod and chips (mushy peas came as standard – yuck) it’s easy to forget and blandly dollop bright green goo onto Ethel’s plate. Ethel, obviously, is upset and doesn’t want to pay for peas. You take her plate away and slide the fish and chips on to a fresh one. If the fish drops to the floor during this exercise, you pick it up and put it back on. You feel guilty for hating Ethel when she leaves you a tip.

Bank holidays were invariably sweaty, steamy, greasy, leg and arm-achingly awful. As the years passed, I got over it - until last Easter, when I almost had a relapse. Living in the bad place was just too close for comfort to the epicentre; the scent of stale fat pervaded the air and people filled the pavement, four abreast. I forced my car out of the alleyway, through the crowds, into a non-existent gap in the traffic – and fled...