At home my lawnmower is currently broken. Whilst I took it last week to get fixed at the perculiarly styled wild west themed lawnmower services guy in Morningside, I've yet to get it back and the back green is looking wild... Coming across this article yesterday by Joe Moran seemed pertinant...
The great lyricist of mowing the lawn is Philip Larkin, who mentions it throughout his poems and letters...Like many gardeners, Larkin moaned constantly about having to cut the grass, but never questioned the fact that he had to do it, in the same way that he complained about the tedium of library committee meetings while diligently chairing them and collecting the minutes. His ambivalent attitude to lawnmowing finds an echo in his poetry, which often suggests that everything is ephemeral and nothing ultimately means anything, but that in our fragile social conventions we find a respite from this knowledge.
Anyone who talks to a gardener with a carefully trimmed lawn will know that lawn care is a rich subculture full of social expectation and shared knowledge, from the relative merits of cylinder and rotary mowers to the dangers of close cropping. Like a lot of things in life in which we invest our physical and emotional labour, keeping a lawn tidy is ultimately pointless. The grass carries on growing, and the lawnmower eventually packs up, followed by its owner. If you want a vivid illustration of this, you can find Larkin’s rusty, grass-coated Victa Powerplus lawnmower in the Hull University library archive.
I always loved Philip Larkin's poetry at school, which contrary to my classmates I thought was too insightful to be depressing... 20 years later and I'd be turning into him - I even bought a Sidney Bechet LP two weeks ago! Meanwhile, here's some pictures of a lovely birthday present from my good chums, Colin and Sharon - who always make me smile!
