'When
I was small, and Christmas trees were tall, tum-ti-tum-ti-tum”. That was a song about May Day, by the Bee Gees
in their pre-disco, pre-falsetto-squeak, melancholy mode. I always thought the
lyrics made little sense, but then it was around 1968, and nothing much made
any sense to me then.
It's May Day today, and as I
look through the French windows at my new artificial lawn, barely a week
old, the song comes into my mind.
The original lawn, which came with
the house, had been sucked dry by the four eighty-foot high, century-old, deciduous
trees in the back garden, so that it had begun to resemble the Somme , circa 1916.
I had it replaced, at considerable expense, by a fake one. It's so bright green, it makes ordinary grass
look like thin cabbage leaves.
“It'll
darken with age”, the lawn installation men said. I took that to mean by about
2024, and in the meantime I'll have to wear dark glasses when I gaze out at it. I was interested in the way the two of them worked. They skimmed off the topsoil, laid down whin
dust, tamped it down with a machine, positioned the lawn in strips, secured it
to timber at each edge, then spread sand over the grass.
"When it rains," the more intense and
articulate of the two men said, "It'll be three times as heavy. That helps to
keep it level." It took them just a day
to complete the job.
I
had hired a skip for the spoil, but they only filled a fifth of it, so I spent
the next three days chucking out stuff from the garage which had accumulated
since 1986 and, in a few cases, long before that. These disjecta
membra of a lost past included paint
tins whose contents were solid as bricks, numerous bicycle parts from a Raleigh
Wayfarer that was scrapped in 1990, ancient tools whose original purpose could
only be guessed at, and vehicle spares in their hundreds, including a dynamo
from a Daf 44 and a starting handle from a 1959 Ford Popular. I didn't
recognise the garage when I'd finished. In fact, you could almost get an Isettta in there now and still be able to open the car door. I
covered the contents of the skip with an old pair of curtains in case the
neighbours saw the junk I'd been in the habit of accumulating over the years
and watched as the surly skip man swung it up onto his vast, dirty wagon.
Today, the
lawn people sent me in the post a list of do's and don'ts. I hadn't
realised that there was so much work involved in what is supposed to be a
maintenance-free green carpet. For a
start, they recommend the use of a petrol blower to remove detritus. I have a yard brush. They say the surface is 'a perfect
germination (sic) for weed seedlings, (so) an application of weedkiller is
required twice a year.' How can weeds grow on sand and plastic? They suggest
cleaning the lawn by hosing it down, following a coating of light detergent
(not bleach, because that turns the grass white and I wouldn't want to look out
over Christmas snow in May, despite the words the Bee Gees warbled). The lawn people also refer accusingly to
'high traffic areas flattening the pile', as if you aren't supposed to stand on
it. The pile has to be 'stimulated' by
'vigorous application with a stiff brush.'
I feel weak just thinking about it.
Finally, they warn that 'outdoor mirrors or mirrored walls can have an
adverse effect on the surface and that will invalidate the warranty.' Like all such warranties, it isn't worth the
paper it's printed on in any case, because it includes so many escape clauses you would think it had been drafted by Sid James. As it happens, no mirror of any description
is contained within the external area of what the Americans peculiarly call
'the yard.' I had a yard, when I lived
with my parents in a flat in Wallsend as a boy, and it was concrete, so I have
no idea why the Americans turned the phrase 'a back yard' into 'a back
garden.' I've no more idea why they call
a car bonnet a 'hood' or a boot a 'trunk'.
We must be ‘divided by a common language.’
Returning
to mirrors in the yard, someone once told me that if you stick a mirror in the
soil, cats won't use the soil thereabouts as a toilet. I reasoned that, in my case, if the mirror
was one square foot in dimensions, that left the cat with another 3,599 square
feet to play with, so it really wasn't worth it, unless you were going to
replace all the soil with mirrors, in which case you might dazzle the RAF
pilots who so obligingly fly low over the house and it would be extremely
difficult to grow azaleas.
