Ribbons and Bows

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I’ve cut the grass!

This is on the scale of things not a major achievement, but for me feeling like I do at the moment, it is there on a par with much lesser feats such as scaling Mount Everest or swimming across the Pacific Ocean twice on the same day, naked!

My lawnmower with its girly ribbons tied where the handles reaches the machine had to be dragged up out of the cellar.

The cellar is only ever visited by very desperate meter readers.

So fearful a place is it that meter readers will only give the slightest of taps on the front door, wait for the briefest of nanoseconds, before quickly scurrying off to the sanctuary of the nice clean cellar next door.

Mine is the sort of cellar where you expect to find dead bodies falling down upon you from one of its many dark corners, a cellar where you expect to see rats scuttling across your slippers, and where you know for certain you are walking on crystallised Eau de Daisy.

Daisy had once lived next door and was ninety something before she was taken away by her son from the house and garden that she loved and plonked in a nursing home.

Something once went badly wrong with her drains. The water that rose up in my cellar was not the spring water that I thought I could bottle and sell, but instead was Eau de Daisy a far more lethal concoction.

That was years and years ago, but the cellar floor has still not lost its musty dampness, and that strange aroma that still seeps through the floorboards into the rest of the house ‘perfuming’ each room with a certain je ne sais quoi.

I force Meter readers to take off their shoes after they’ve read the meter and to carry them back to the front door.

This doesn’t go down well.

They curse me for costing them precious seconds and for making them reveal their designer socks.

Hence their timid taps on my door on future visits for fear of me hearing them; and the hurried silent postings of their, ‘Came to read your meter today but you were out,’ (Thank God) cards through the letter box.

My lawnmower hangs on a hook in this cellar with its dusty ribbon bows. I yank it from its nails and carry it up the steps. It protests of course, swinging out to catch door jambs and walls as I struggle to carry it up the steep brick steps and try to avoid tripping on old paint tins that form a guard of honour on the cellar steps.

Once on the ‘lawn’ it lies on the elephantine grass deciding whether or not it is going to work when I send that first tingle of electricity through its wires.

But before that I do one more thing.

The bows are part not the original design. Nor have I put them on to the machine to girlify it or to make it look pretty as I mow the grass.

They are to stop the contraption from falling to bits.

The essential plastic bits that held the machine together pinged off into the undergrowth years before, and the ribbons have since done the trick.

The sun was shining and I was feeling quite optimistic despite the Russian cold that the teenager had given me after his trip to Moscow, a couple of weeks ago; and despite doing an on line quiz that stated cheerily that ‘You have mild to moderate depression.’ I was determined to cut the grass!

My energy level is rather flat, so to have any chance at all of cutting the grass I had written a ‘to do list’.

I’d broken everything down into lots of easy steps.

The next step said fix the plastic thingy-me.

This had been a eureka moment, the discovery of one of the long lost plastic bits while working on the fallen wall.

I read my instructions:

Find scissors… I did.

Snip off one ribbon from lawn mower… I did.

Fix plastic thingy-me…

Written down it looked easy, but from long experience I know that easy jobs are often the hardest to accomplish.

Fix plastic thingy-me...I wasn’t very hopeful, but I did in seconds. I was so pleased. I couldn’t believe it.

I read the next instructions on my ‘to do’ list.

Put spare plastic blades in pocket … I did.

The Flymo would now fly.

And it did.

The machine woke up, sent a dreadful racket reverberating off all the brick buildings; shook woodpigeons off their roosts with its cacophony; and did nothing at all for World Peace, but it was working…

For five seconds.

A plastic blade went.

‘Aha,’ I said, and quickly replaced it.

Ten seconds later a second blade went.

‘Aha,’ I said, and replaced it.

In the game of out-witting the lawnmower, I was winning.

‘Aha.’

The machine gave up on the broken blade tactic.

Then there was just the home stretch left to do.

Nearly done.

Then the lawnmower lurched in on itself. There was a ping, as the plastic thingy-me freed itself, flew on a perfect trajectory through the air, describing a perfect parabola and landed with a smug splash in the deepest part of the pond.

Lawnmower 1 WWM 0

I went inside for more ribbon and knotted the bows. The lawnmower resplendent with its tied bunches, finished the job.

I returned the lawnmower back into the depths of the cellar.

‘Now, whatever you do just push a card through that door, you know the one I mean, that strange woman’s house: the one who likes to see the colour of your socks.’ I imagine the veteran gas meter reader telling the new recruit.

I can imagine the wide-eyed fear in the new recruit’s eyes …’You mean she actually puts ribbons on her lawn mower?’

‘Aye, mad as a hatter that one.

I imagine their collective shudders as I read my ‘to do’ list and follow its instructions:

Make a cup of tea.

And I do.