I couldn’t put off mowing the lawn any longer. The grass was almost long enough to warrant a goat.

We have an old fashioned reel lawn mower. It is quite possibly older than me. It has been in the family for many years, mowed these lawns hundreds of times and if it could talk, I expect it would have a number of things to tell me.

My sneaking suspicion is that the first words out its mouth would be “For a human being, you’re not very smart, perhaps next time you might like to not leave it quite so long between mowings. It would make it considerably easier on both of us.”

The second thing that Mowice the Mower would tell me, smugly I imagine, is that my grandmother (who bought the mower) was much fitter than I am. Whereas I schedule exercise into my day around work and sometimes don’t get to it, a considerable amount of exercise was embedded into Granny’s everyday activities, such as maintaining a large garden with a sizeable vege patch. And mowing.

The final piece of advice, possibly offered less acerbically than the previous two, would be that there’s nothing quite like a good cup of tea and a little piece of something chocolatey after an hour’s worth of blister inducing mowing.