Cutting it Down to the Wire

Finishing off the bank holiday with a mission, two runners went to help Mr A with his garden. The main task was to mow the lawn which was long overdue a cut. In fact, being about 15 meters long, the lawn was rather long in more ways than one.

It wasn’t long, however, until the work commenced. After a quick tutorial in strimmer maintenance, and fetching the all-important extension cable, Catriona and Anne agreed on a strim-mow-rake strategy and got mowing.

Initial visions of creating a Wimbledon style lawn soon gave way to a less pristine reality. Unphased though, the runners simply welcomed the upper-body workout and pushed (and pulled) on.

As the grass was tamed, a few things were found lurking in its depths - two frogs and a couple of tennis bats and accompanying ball. Perhaps someone else had had visions of Wimbledon before us.

Just as the end of the lawn came into view, the strim-mow-rake strategy was jeopardised when the strimmer cable was found to be shorter than that of the lawnmower’s, and significantly shorter than the lawn. After an extensive search by Mr A and his family, an extra 5m extension cable was added to the weaponry and we strimmed on. But it still wasn’t enough. In the end, the final section had to be tackled with just the lawnmower, which it turned out, handled the task admirably and made us question our strim-first strategy of the last 2 hours.

As we finished raking and gathering grass cuttings into bags, we agreed the strimming had not been in vain after all and all-in-all, it was a good task well done.