| Mr Rotavator |
[Feb. 24th, 2003|07:38 am] |
Urrrrgh... even more tired, even more achy. Spent all of yesterday, from 11am to sunset, slaving away on the allotment. For most of that time I was wrestling with a rotavator - a small petrol-driven monstrosity that's supposed to plough up the top foot or so of soil.
What actually happens is that you pull a starting cable repeatedly until your arm is ready to drop off, then when it finally fires up you press a trigger and it takes off into the middle distance, dragging you with it. All the while the blades are whirring but doing absolutely nothing to the ground. What you have to do once you've tamed it is drag it backwards. This allows it to send dirt flying everywhere, but it's murder on the arms - not only are you fighting the ground's natural resistance to being cut up, you're also pulling against the machine's desire to go forward. And the whole battle takes place to the accompaniment of tooth-shaking vibration. So I woke up this morning with arms that felt like they'd been dragged out of their sockets.
Afterwards we went up to my parents' to drop off guidebooks and spending money for their holiday in Malta. A journey that usually takes an hour took three thanks to traffic jams and some dodgy route-finding on my part. Swung by Spike's on the way to drop off the money I owed him from the charity auction. His father answered the door. His father is huge and scary-looking, and suddenly I wished I wasn't still dressed in my allotment clothes and covered in dirt. But I put on my best innocent voice and said "is Martin home please", like I was calling to ask if he could come out to play, and all was well...
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| Comments: |
Oh I remember those things! My dad had one for his allotment and it was ever so noisy.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention the noise...
Picture row upon row of quiet allotments... no sound at all but birdsong, the low hum of far-off traffic, an early cricket match over the wall in Bushey Park, and the crackle of bonfires as people silently toil.
Then imagine this bloody great ROAR as I fire up the rotavator, get dragged along by it, battle back, yell curses at it and finally lose control and let it stall. More silence, and then the whole operation is repeated, again and again from 11am to just before sunset when an old codger called Mad George came and took it away from us because he had to lock it away and wanted to go 'ome. | |
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