Two Chaps Talking

So the demolition crew have packed their equipment - their jackhammers, their steam strippers, prybars, sledges and inexplicable tins of smoked fish - and trooped off like disconsolate Eastern European gnomes. For a short few days I am back at the desk, sorting the idiotic builder's quotes from the merely risible, picking a wary path through the slough of local planning application and enjoying a moment's hiatus before the real battle begins.

I have scheduled a whole morning in which to reply to you and to allow my mind the leisure to wander far from purlins, boomerang ties and noggins, but I find my self drifting into dark philosophical mien, preoccupied like so many men of letters before me, with aging.

Don't, please get the wrong idea. In spite of the number bandied in association with my forthcoming birthday, I am still in the full flush of manly vigour. There has been no dimunition in my ability to wield the mattock or carry the hod, my mind is ever sharp and, pace my cluttered inbox, I have, as yet, no need for interventions, pharmaceutical or surgical, in the operations of the Old Chap.

No, what throws me in to this brown study is the simple fact that I am planning a garden.

To my left, where once teetered a soaring pile of learned texts there is now a short stack of instructive tomes on horticulture, garden design and, God help me, lawncare.

And it is this latter which is the real cause of my weltschmertz. I fear the lawn.

My intended has suggested that I loathe greensward because of some long-buried psycho-sexual association with compulsory sport but, I believe, I have laid those ghosts to rest.

Neither is it some deep-seated class-terror of the suburban. Though any man who grew up in Bournemouth would have reason enough to run screaming at the mention of top-dressing, bents and fescues or pathologically anal parallel mown lines, I have grown through such fears and am the better for it.

No, for me the lawn represents the very lip of an unstoppable slide toward death: a slippery, one-way chute that runs clearly from the laying of the first sod to the patting down of the very last.

I am told that, because I am blessed with a toddler, it would be tantamount to child-abuse to deny her a lawn upon which to decoratively desport herself. I could argue that, Regent's Park, a mere toddle from our door, has herbage aplenty. I could aver that, her generation looks likely to eschew all outdoor pleasures and merely jack their cerebella into VirtualGarden(tm). I could even offer an entirely organic vegetable patch as a better contribution to her health. But no, we must have lawn.

I am not an unreasonable man and I will comply but I know that the women in my life will never understand the awful ramifications of their request.

Once a week, the damned thing has to be attended to. Raked, scarified, weeded, de-thatched, cleared of leaves in autumn, catshit in the spring and, the seasons round, mowed.

If there is to be a lawn, there must be a lawnmower. I don't begrudge the contemplative half-hour spent walking behind the damned thing - God knows I get little enough chance to let the mind wander. I don't mind the scheduled rows about whether the bloody mowing has been done, the tutting of the neighbours at a lawn too long, too short or a mower too loud. I don't mind having to deal with a huge, stinking mound of festering clippings that stubbornly refuse to turn into a rich compost and instead smell like mangrove swamp. What I do mind is this...

If there is a lawnmower, there must be a shed.

Oh Christ, I'm not ready for a shed. I'm not quite forty-two. I've got some hair. I imagined burning bright and short. I wanted to die when, momentarily distracted at the wheel of my speeding Ferrari by the exceptionally competent blowjob I was receiving from a lascivious countess, I hurtled off the hairpin outside Monte and collided with an oncoming police truck containing four tons of recently seized foie-gras, Billecart Salmon rosŽ, high-grade cocaine and pornography. I was destined for better things.

Orwell was wrong. It isn't the 'baby carriage in the hall' that is the enemy of great genius - though God knows that's difficult enough to work round - it's the garden bloody shed. A vile, sagging poison-filled, creosote-stinking sepulchre, yawning at the end of my own bloody garden.

I will not die mouldering in a garden shed, sitting, surrounded by mole smokes, pea netting and soiled copies of the Sunday sport. If I am forced to have a lawn, a mower and a shed, this is what I propose to do.

I shall stock the thing with turps, thinner, 3-in-one, WD-40, barbecue firelighters, charcoal and a half-ton of dry straw mulch. I shall lay in store of fireworks in preparation for of November the 5th. I will fully fuel the mower, oil its blades and park it carefully. I will don my best tweeds, a small flask of absinthe and a briar pipe and walk, for one last time the long, green 72yds of the garden path before blowing, shed, mower and self to ratshit in one last, glorious conflagration.

Do not go gentle into that good night...

Tx