My third and final task in Southall on a dry, hot Saturday was mowing the front and back gardens for Ms M. The weather was perfect for this kind of job, although I have to admit the heat did start to take its toll on me before I reached the mission location.

The front garden turned out to be a quick win. The grass was quite long, but I was given a small Bosch mower, which proved to be a surprisingly powerful little beast and made short work of it.

For the second part of the task, I took the mower and extension cable through to the back garden - and what I found was more of a jungle than a lawn. The grass was almost as tall as me (not that I’m particularly tall, but still), and it looked more like material for a strimmer job than something a mower should reasonably handle.

The Bosch beast didn’t disappoint, though. We became a solid team out there - her brute force and my GoodGym know-how were a match made in gardening heaven. I lifted the beast's front wheels to attack the grass at an angle - a trick learned from previous extreme lawn-mowing missions. The main challenge wasn’t just the grass, but what was hiding in it. As it came down, all sorts of litter were revealed: food packaging, cans, plastic bags, and even socks, which proved particularly unpleasant when they got tangled in the mower's blades. At one point, I also uncovered several balls - one of which was claimed by a boy from a neighbouring garden, who popped his head over the fence to see what was going on.

Using the Bosch mower, I couldn’t help thinking of Hieronymus Bosch, and as the garden transformed, I couldn’t quite decide what I was looking at - a slice of heaven in the tidy grass, or something closer to hell once all the hidden debris came to light.

By the end, the back garden was finally brought under control. I left it in a much more manageable state for Ms M and her family to maintain - otherwise it felt like it could easily slip back into a Bosch-like purgatory state of a never-ending cycle of overgrowth.