Something like a Pagan Wedding ...

I have been outside with my (on loan from my dad) Garden Groom. A hedge trimmer advertised as 'ideal for the elderly and ladies' (I know) it is a marvellous looking thing. Fish says it looks like an enormous flip flop. Lightweight plastic, it is the hovercraft of the privet shearing world, zooming and zipping over the hedge seemingly of it's own accord. The intimation is that all the operator has to do is hold it down. A kite, one might say, with teeth. Here it is -


The tail attached to the clipper - sorry, groom, inflates and the whizzy lightweight ( lie - more later) blades shoosh and suck the clippings (which are chopped into mini pieces) down the tube and into that black bag that you see at the bottom. What could be finer, easier, more fun than this? At seven am I am awake, eagerly peering out of the window in search of hedge grooming weather. Eventually it stops raining and I go outside the the short yet overgrown 6ft hedge out front. It's windy and the tube lashes back and forwards like a giant angry cobra, I am spattered with bits of chopped privet and the dog is having an epileptic fit at the noise. I retire with faintly shaking arms for a cuppa and then go out the back to the 300ft long hedge. I call Wibs to come help, and Bonny to hold the bag at the bottom of the tube. Smash slash heave, we are a team. Wibs goes on ahead with the shears lopping off the big bits, Bonny solemnly and slowly walks with the bag and hose, she is a bridesmaid. Slash whip grind, bits of the hedge are decimated. We get halfway down. More tea. Bonny has to make it, I am Parkinsonian with effort, my hands are vibrating like a navvy's pneumatic drill and I am liberally covered with a confetti of garden mulch. I look like the Green Man.

Suitable for the elderly and laydeez eh? There is a slowly dawning sense that my father has played an elaborate practical joke on me. I shall get my revenge.