The First Cut is the Deepest
I know, I know, I know – I’ve talked about this before. But it still raises a laugh in the office when I say I’m going to France to mow the grass. And I’ve been using that line for quite a few years.
I’ve broken my golden rule this year, which is – never leave the first cut till after Easter. Well Easter has come and long gone, and I finally got across to Brittany on May 12th.
I was not expecting good things.
As I steered the car down the single track lane towards the house I could hear the Jaws theme tune in my head. What was awaiting me? Not a Great White, but certainly a great expanse of lush green.
I turned off the lane into the gravel drive, a drive liberally sprinkled with dandelions (or as they’re known in France ‘pissenlit’, quite literally piss-in-the-bed. Those old gallic charmers) and beheld the prospect.
Having owned the house for 26 years now I’ve got pretty good at guessing how high it’s going to be. I’ve had years of cutting overlong grass, stretching back to my university days when Peter Greig used to make our household cut lawns for old people in Ashford (Kent). This year my grass exceeded expectations.
Normally I get some respite, with a low, fallow-ish kind of area at one end by the stone wall (incidentally, a wall I constructed myself twenty year ago, and it’s still standing. Known locally as the Wall of Miracles). Then there is typically an even plain of moderately high grass, often occupied by the moles, and then the far end where the skyscraper clumps of clump grass live.
Not this time, though. This time, it was all skyscraper grass.
There’s a young hippy couple who live at the top of the lane, Regis et Jessica, and they have goats which they tether to eat the grass on the banks of the lane. When I’m outside and not mowing, you can hear their needy bleats punctuating the afternoon. I’ve offered my grass to Regis and the goats before now, but he says the grass is so prolific that he doesn’t need it. (I think we were talking about the same kind of grass).
There’s no point in attaching the rear box to the mower in conditions like this, you would only be stopping and emptying it every three metres. Even with the back flap jammed open with a stick, the sheer height and cloggyness of the grass makes the mower jam after five minutes of chewing.
My mower is supposed to be self-propelled, but that idea has long since gone out of the window. There’s something wrong with the drive to the wheels and the left one won’t turn, while the right one will only give a timid, token rotation if you lift it off the ground. Like the faint, dying batter y of a toy taken out of the cupboard many years after its last use. It’s not going to be competing for pole position at any lawnmower grands prix any time soon.
So I have to push this hefty ‘grass juicer on wheels’ through a soggy meadow of grass, while being shot-blasted with shredded green material that threatens to turn me into Shrek (some would say I have a good head start). As it flies by, the Agricultural College student in me keeps on thinking, ‘oooh, this would make great silage’.
The woodier bits tend to blind you if caught in the eye, and so it’s essential to wear glasses. Then, when it starts to rain, as it often does in Brittany, they steam, up, so you only have a vague awareness of the task you are performing. At one point I stopped the mower and saw an object hop-hop-hop past me. I’m guessing it was a frog, but my glasses were so steamed up it could have been a mouse impersonating a frog.
The task of mowing the lawn and the lane verges usually takes two hours to complete, but five hours later I was finally parking the mower – the steaming green machine - back in the barn. This had included a break for twenty minutes when the rain got too heavy and I went to change shirts. Each wellington was full to the brim with grass and the socks were instantly consigned to the dustbin.
The cut grass is usually left as a thin mulch to impede further growth, but such are the growing conditions in Brittany, that it’s soon poking through again. By the time I’ve disappeared up the Autoroute des Estuaires to Caen, dreaming of a time when I get to cut the lawn at least four times in one year, it’s already poking its way through.
