Bloke has a bit of a lawn mowing obsession. He used to frequently cut my front and back lawns whilst we were at work. I had never asked him to, but I think he thinks he was being neighbourly. (It is sometimes difficult to fathom the thought processes, if indeed there are any.) The problem with the well-intentioned mowing was that he would scalp the lawns and I ended up with bare patches and hack marks where the lawnmower dug in and gouged the soil. In an attempt to repair it I had a lawn treatment company come in, and used that as an excuse to get Stephen to explain to him why he couldn't cut the back lawn any more.
Unfortunately this didn't stop him cutting the front...and now I have turf wars between him and our other neighbour who also cuts it! I think this other neighbour is perhaps trying to stop Bloke marching up and down with the mower outside their sitting room windows 3 times a week, but it doesn't work. It simply means that the front grass gets cut 5 times a week now!! I have a hankering to gravel the front garden to aid my sanity. But I digress....
In a fairly recent development Bloke has taken to borrowing our lawnmower. I guess he knows that his mower chops the ground. However (and we've not really fathomed this out yet), he will often cut my front grass with his crappy mower (because we're at work and there is no access to our mower...maybe??), then borrow ours to cut his front lawn, back lawn and the grass which verges onto the road... This has been increasingly getting on my single remaining nerve - especially as I often can't cut my lawn as he has my mower. But there is an element of anything for a quiet life as it gets him out of our hair quicker when he pops round. However, yesterday may signal the end of the lawnmower borrowing....
We had just returned home from grocery shopping when Bloke appeared. He has the ability to appear from nowhere just as we're getting in or out of the car, so I do wonder if he hides in the bushes and waits for us in a slightly stalkerish way!! I think he has a bit of a man-crush on Stephen and finds me quite terrifying - I know my Mum used me as the "Bad Cop" when she was housesitting for us, so I think he now has a healthy fear of the devil-woman that I can become at the swish of a forked tail...!!!
He waited until I was carrying grocery bags into the house so he could speak to Stephen, and after a minute I could hear the lawnmower being wheeled round to his house, and shortly afterwards the sound of mowing. It went quiet pretty soon afterwards, but I figured that he'd been distracted by something...that would be unusual as he does love to mow, but you also have to balance that with having the attention span of Dory, the forgetful fish from Finding Nemo. Sometimes One Man forgets to mow his Meadow!!
A little while later there was a tap at the kitchen door. I could hear talking, and Stephen came back with a rather grim face. "Bloke has mowed over the lawnmower cable. He's agreed to get it repaired". You may ask how a sensible person manages to mow over the cable... and I would arch my eyebrow, purse my lips, roll my eyes and say "Exactly!". I am only glad that he had enough sense to plug it into an RCD (or at least I think he did!)...God knows what 240 volts would do to his brain cells! They would be clashing about in his skull like balls in a pinball machine. Ding ding ding ding.
The repair has been the cause of some teeth grinding from Stephen, as Bloke phoned to say that his friend was going to cut in new cable and mend it with those little white cable blocks that you use to connect wires together. Erm...NO BLOODY WAY! He didn't mow over some bit of out of the way cable. He mowed over the bit that drags along the ground through the (usually wet) grass!! I am very glad that Stephen obviously still loves me enough not to want me to be electrocuted during the first post-repair mow! He was quite firm on that one!!!! (Obviously he doesn't have enough life insurance on me yet!!) Bloke finally sent a text saying he was going to get the entire cable replaced and a very subdued Bloke dropped the repaired mower back off tonight. I wonder how long it will be before he asks to borrow it again?
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