Lawn Man is back. As The Grateful Dead once sang, what a long strange trip it's been.
I love mowing lawns.
People often say something is even better than sex.
I say, very rarely, something is even better than mowing lawns.
At our Ida Valley holiday home, which has a front lawn the size of Paul Henry's ego, I whirr around for hours creating a bowling green from clay and paddock.
Which is one reason why mowing lawns can be so good - it gives direct and substantial feedback.
Vacuuming the lounge never does this.
But the house we now live in has the most ridiculously designed lawn I have ever encountered.
If I had a dollar for every time I have walked past Peter Entwisle in the library researching Dunedin buildings and not asked him to find the designer of our lawn so I can throw paint on the houses of his descendants, I would be a very rich man indeed.
Our sloping front lawn is no bigger than three-quarters of a cricket pitch, and has tigerishly dense grass the consistency of convolvulus meeting industrial rope.
In three years, nobody has ever sat there.
At the top of the drive is a small rectangle of grass where the car sits.
I defy anyone to get a mower under that car.
And then, up steps as frightening and never-ending as John Buchan's 39, there are three more thin strips of lawn surrounded by concrete.
And two tiny hilly bits crawling around bushes.
All of this presents huge problems.
Petrol mowers cannot be carried up 39 steps, and the sort of vintage hand mowers I found in the auction rooms were even heavier.
I rang Lawn Man.
He quoted a reasonable price, and for 18 months he came every two weeks, often with his lovely dog.
But what sort of a man employs another man to do man's work? Well, I do.
But after 18 months, I decided to buy a hand mower and whisk around these strips myself.
The exercise will be good for me, I said, it may even build up a muscle or two.
Lawn Man's wife sounded weary and sad when I rang up to fire her husband.
I explained how I wanted to build muscles and get fit.
I felt weary and sad after saying that too.
I daresay every customer for Lawn Man is a meal on the table.
I bought a suspiciously light Made In China hand mower off Trade Me which had had one impatient male owner, a senior lecturer at the university.
He used it once, said his partner when we went round to pick it up, he said it was useless.
I laughed patronisingly and gave her the 50 bucks.
The hand mower was useless.
If I had turned it loose on paper, it would have just shifted the paper around and made it a different shape.
Plus it reacted very badly to being dropped at the top of the 39 steps, separating itself from the detachable handles and rolling down the steps like Gail when she was pushed by David in Coro.
It was never the same again.
But I stubbornly hauled it out every week and took the tops off a few daisies.
Until last spring, when I rang Lawn Man and asked if he could resume normal duties.
Oh yes, I remember, he said, you were going to do the lawns yourself with a hand mower to get fit and build muscles.
I deserved his subtle ridicule.
I had behaved like a complete berk.
I love Lawn Man.
He does a great job.
And he left us a yummy Christmas present in our letterbox.
I had just enough muscles to lift it out of the letterbox, and just enough fitness to carry it right up the drive with only one stop for a breather.
