Today we had grand plans to finally tackle the lawn, an admission that would horrify great-grandmother Grace and her Presbyterian strictures on how to observe a Sunday, but which also a chore badly needs doing if the garden is ever going to look neat. As chores go this is the one we hate most of all; ours isn’t a big garden but it feels it when you start on the grass.
We got as far as shutting the Marschallin-cat away into the front of the house and connecting the menace that is the electric mower, and then as if by divine signal, it refused to start. We spent about an hour fussing and fiddling with it. We boast a fair amount of expertise at mending anything that needs a needle, but electronics are far and away out of the realms of our understanding. We couldn’t even coax the screws into loosening to have a look at the electrical mechanism. Not, you understand that we’d have known what to do with it if we’d succeeded, or even much fancied prodding about at a lot of wires without an idea as to what we were doing. We didn’t. We just thought we ought to try for the form of the thing.
In the end we went on an excursion to find out where the recycling centre was, and subsequently engaged a taxi to take us and the mower there, as it has obviously chosen the 7th Sunday in Eastertide to give up the ghost and missed the memo telling it this was supposed to have happened on Good Friday -if it had to happen at all – for the sake of liturgical appropriateness.
We have since contacted the powers-that-be to replace the electronic monstrosity, as we only rent the flat, and that should be shortly sorted. Other than that though, all we’ve achieved is the disposal of a machine we were never much attached to and irritating Miss Marschallin-cat, who is resentful that she didn’t get an excursion out into the garden after all. It’s days like this, when the sun is out and the grass long that I’m regretful we live on a road to busy for her to go exploring.
For our part we’ve settled for writing a bit and listening to Ian and Sylvia. Great-grandmother Grace would still be unimpressed though; Sundays according to her are for scripture and possibly (also inexplicably) Go Fish and pick-up sticks, or so we’re told. We make far better Scottish Episcoplains though than we do Presbyterians, and we don’t think they’d mind.
Chorister at Home 