The Dwarf Killer

‘Aren’t you cutting the lawn today, Richard?’

I hadn’t anticipated the question but that’s just typical of what happens when breezes blow away the clouds and the rain steps aside in favour of a spot of sunny weather. About all I could manage was a sigh and a look of moral discomfort.

‘Again?’ I asked. ‘But I only cut it a few months ago.’

Judy lowered her Sunday Times. ‘You’re meant to cut it every fortnight during the summer,’ she said in that snippy way she has when distracted from her Sunday morning Appleyard.

I looked out on the garden and our acres of lush lawn. I had to admit that it had got a little out of hand. A dab of yellow in the middle was the cap of the gnome we’d had made from a full sized body cast of Bill Oddie. There the grass was approaching the four foot mark, already in long trousers and probably in need of a firm hand, if not a stern talking to.

‘Right then,’ I said, setting aside my novelisation of Chekov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’, ‘I’ll cut the lawn but I want you to remember this the next time I want you to help me, Jude.’

Judy muttered something that sounded like a promise and I went upstairs to squeeze myself into my lawn mowing clothes including bright orange overalls and fireproof balaclava.

Having a larger than average lawn means having a larger than average lawnmower. You can forget about Hover Mowers or anything by Qualcast. I own the most powerful lawn-razing beast in the region. In polite company, I call it ‘The Green Machine’ but privately prefer ‘The Dwarf Killer’ because of the many plaster dwarves that have gone under its blades, through its threshing mechanism, crushed in its mangle, and spewed out of its high velocity incinerating nozzle. It’s a high octane crop destroyer and has a top speed somewhere near the Mach.

I had backed The DK out of the garage and was in the process of swilling gas around the engine when a voice over my shoulder provided an interruption.

‘Sounds like you’ve got a supercharger in there,’ it said.

I turned off the engine and looked around.

‘Jeremy!’ I cried, delighted to see my old friend Clarkson. I even whipped off my balaclava to greet him with a smile. ‘How fortunate that you should be in the neighbourhood when I’m dealing with heavy machinery.’

‘Fortunate indeed,’ said Jeremy. ‘A coincidence that you’d find it hard to believe should you read about it in unpublished fiction.’

‘Pah!’ I said. ‘I’ve read much worse in published fiction. Technically minded men appositely arriving in the vicinity of lawn mowers is nothing new to me...’

‘So,’ said Jeremy, raising his eyebrows. ‘Are you taking her for a spin?’

‘More than a spin,’ I replied. ‘I’m doing the whole Madeley estate. It’s time to lay waste to grass.’

His eyes widened as if catching up with the brows. ‘I don’t suppose I can have a go?’

I jumped up as though my name were called in a tanning salon.

‘Jeremy, it would be an honour,’ I said, gesturing him to take the driver’s seat.

Jeremy slid behind the wheel and turned the big ignition switch. Then it was like the throttle cable was linked to his teeth muscles. His big yellow grin appeared each time the engine blew smoke.

‘Just take it easy,’ I warned.

But it was too late. With a squeal of caterpillar tracks and the sound of the twin chainsaw blades scraping against concrete, Jeremy was off down the drive and heading towards the back lawn. There was nothing I could do but watch as Jeremy hit the wall of grass and vanished in a cloud of smoke and cuttings.

When he emerged, fifteen minutes later, he was green with grass sap but high on destruction.

‘Wonderful machine,’ said Jeremy as he jumped from the seat.

I was more concerned about the state of The Dwarf Killer. After half a lawn, a long gash had appeared down its side and a fender was bent near the weed cudgel. More worrying was the evidence of something that had passed through the inlet to the edging scythes.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, wiping something crimson from the blades.

Jeremy peered down. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a field mouse?’

I jammed my hand into the inlet and felt something soft. I gave it a tug.

‘Do field mice wear leather?’ I asked, holding out a piece of soft leather in an unfortunate shade of pink.

Jeremy just shrugged. It wasn’t even a reassuring shrug. This was that shrug that guilty men give in courts when they’ve already been given two consecutive life sentences for committing abnormal acts in graveyards with the residents of obituary columns.

‘Funny,’ I said. ‘I wonder how this got in there...’

It was at that point that I heard the familiar cry of Graham Norton drifing from across the road.

‘Mugwump! Oh Mugwump!’ he sang.

‘Damn distracting,’ said Jeremy.

‘It’s the name of the Graham’s dog,’ I explained. ‘An animal that gives scabid rats a bad name. I can’t tell you the number of times that dog has attacked me in my own front garden. A horrid beast which he pampers terribly by dressing it its own waistcoat fashioned from soft pink leather.’

Jeremy looked down at the piece of leather between my fingers and then looked towards the lawn mower. It took me a few attempts but I finally latched on to what he meant when he began to laugh like a manic idiot and his face flushed red.

‘Oh,’ I said, dropping the leather. ‘I see.’

Jeremy launched himself for the driver’s seat once again.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to see what’s hiding in the other half of your lawn,’ he said. ‘If I’m lucky, I might even hit Oddie.’

I hadn’t the heart to rob him of his illusions when he hit the replica Oddie five minutes later. It would have been a cruel thing to do when he’d done so much good, cut so much grass, and trimmed so much dog from my woefully overgrown life.

A Lawn Mower At The Crossroads

I was spying through the garden fence this morning when Ian Hislop caught me.

‘Just admiring your new lawnmower,’ I said, though I confess, I was blushing just a touch between nose and ears for reasons other than guilt at the thought that he might suspect I was trying to get writing tips from his wife, Victoria. I had a far more likely reason to feel embarrassed .

Since the Hislops bought the big property that backs onto our garden, I’ve been trying to avoid letting him know we were neighbours of his. I feared that viperish wit he's known to dole out on those mentally inferior to him. One withering remark from him and I might begin to feel bad about my life and my part-time office job in Manchester.

‘And why, pray tell, were you examining my lawn mower?’ he eventually asked in that high-handed way he has which involves energetic fluttering of his eyelids. ‘What, exactly, were you doing?’

‘You mean doing generally or in particular?’

‘I mean doing in that garden,’ he said. ‘God in heaven! You don’t actually live here, do you?’

‘Comes as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it?’

‘Just a bit,’ he answered.

‘Well, I do live here and so does Judy. This is our home. We also have a beaver but it lives in our pond. We’ve named it after Stephen Fry. Not the pond, of course. Fry deserves nothing smaller than a lake or large inland sea. I mean the beaver. It’s called Stephen Fry. We’ve lived here ages. Buried plenty of skeletons in this garden, I can tell you... Though not literally. That would be murder. I just meant metaphorical skeletons... And, anyway, if I did have to get rid of a body, I wouldn’t bury it in my garden. I’d bury it in somebody else’s... Though not yours. Although I’m sure it’s a fine garden for that sort of thing. No, I wouldn’t need to because I haven’t killed anybody... But I might have accidentally drowned Fred Talbot when I scuttled the “This Morning” map in the pond. I’ve written about it on my blog....’ There was a long silence during which I probably did too much grinning. ‘Do you have a blog, Ian?’

That’s typical of what happens when you meet Hislop. He’s got this way about him that makes you confess to the most ridiculous things. His place is really with some police force. Stick him in a room with an innocent man and, I swear, inside the hour they’d be doing vocal gymnastics like a canary in counterfeit sweatpants.

‘Well, jolly good,’ said Ian, climbing astride his lawnmower. (I looked away as he did his striding. When a man wearing shorts starts to stride, I find it’s always better if you look away.) ‘If I were you, Richard,’ he said as he began to rev the throttle, ‘I’d seriously think about getting yourself a job. You’re going to rot, standing around at the bottom of your garden and spying on other people’s lawnmowers. And if you ask me, there’s also something indecent about it.’

And with that he was off, the editor of the nation’s premiere satirical magazine, cutting a swathe of green in his own rather overgrown back lawn.

Now, you might say that I’m a stubborn old sod who never learns his lesson. Yet this encounter did teach me two things. The first was that Ian Hislop loves a noisy lawn mower as much any celebrity who happens to come in below five feet in hip-cropped shorts. The other is that he’s acutely perceptive about a man facing a crossroads in his life.

You see, we’ve again reached the point of the week when I go down to the bottom of the garden to do some thinking, a little planning, and spread the occasional smatter of tears. Tomorrow is the day when I shed the skin of the lovable TV host and become, for a better want of words, Elberryesque, as I challenge my knees to the long trudge to the station and then a day working on the dark side of the moon which, in this case, looks remarkably like Manchester.

I’ll be working up there for two days but my nights will be spent looking for work. I hope to find something to rescue me from what is rapidly taking on all the characteristics of a rut. I want work that challenges me. Creative work. Work for a man who writes 2000 words of a blog before breakfast and then invents illuminated liquorice sticks in his garden shed before noon. I don’t mean temping work; shuffling files, euthanizing fax machines. I want work that tests a man with my unique qualities. Judy thinks I’d be a whiz as a copywriter or design guru. Give me the next Pepsi campaign and I’ll give you Leonard Cohen singing before a wombat chorus. Never been done before. Bound to be a hit.

Only, the trouble with being so famous in one line of work means that it’s hard to find work in another. I have been sending my CV to different companies in the hope of landing some small role in advertising. They usually send them back thinking I’m joking. When I do get an interview, it’s more out of fascination and the chance to get an autograph.

‘But haven’t you got a show on Channel 4?’ they ask.

‘I’m looking for a change,’ I tell them. ‘It’s very well for the press to say that I’m earning a few million a year but I’d be much happier if could clear twenty grand on a regular basis.’

‘That’s rather hard to believe,’ they say. ‘You’d rather have less than the UK’s average wage instead of these huge contracts?’

‘That’s just it,’ I tell them. ‘The contracts are all in Judy’s name. I’m just an honest Joe without a penny in his pocket.’

‘Do you have any qualifications?’

‘Honorary or academic?’ I ask but at this point they usually close their files and show me the door.

Oh, I could write more of tonight's rambling post but I’m merely delaying the inevitable. I have to go to bed. I can hear that Judy will soon be finished on the trombone so I’ll simply say that I’ll see you on Friday, if not sooner. I’ll try to post tomorrow night from Manchester but if you don't hear from me, I'll have emptied the mini-bar in room 318. And if anybody fancies joining me, I'll be taking my travel Scrabble...