I want to make retirement stick. I’m counting down to the date. Three months to go. The signs are good. Work is drying up. Today was typical. A one-hour call where I easily swerved witless HR nonsense. “How can we prove the ROI of an individual person and link it to their pay?” Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll couldn’t compete.
Released at 11, I rushed to the stables and got out my quad bike and hitched up the flail mower. Boadicea would love it. Once fired up a horizontal mounted cylinder of flails rotates in an invisible blur driven by a roaring Honda V twin engine. It cuts grass with contempt. On its lowest setting it eats ground and spits out rocks. Lethal in so many ways.
I start with the back field. It has a mile of pipework (safely) buried a meter underground to feed our ground source heat pump. After it was installed, I cast the grass seed by hand over an acre of barren earth. When it grew, I was panicked by my world changing powers. One man can do this? Grass as far as the eye I could see. Tending it is my fave summer thing. Like a footballer’s haircut it moves easily through styles. It started as a neat, tightly cropped paddock. But that took too long to maintain, so I switched to rewilding, using the mower to cut pathways through the brambles, thistles and dock leaves that nature prefers to grass. Then, when I returned to playing golf, I mowed a 150-yard practice hole. I have plenty of ball ammo left over from a previous entrepreneurial adventure that allows me to win every time I play that classic, blokes pub game of sitting in a circle and taking turns at “what’s the most stupid thing you’ve ever bought on eBay?”. So far nobody has beaten – 20,000 golf balls that were lost by golfers in Arizona, who are too scared of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and razor cactus to go and pick them up. The lost balls are collected and sold to John Lindauer by Mexican green keepers. John sells them on. Great guy John. Typical US millionaire. An economics professor, who owns newspapers and radio stations and was convicted of breaking funding regs when he stood for Governor of Alaska. He lives in a mansion by a golf course in Phoenix, where golf balls are another sideline. “John, you are clearly a rich man”. I said, after handing over $8000 in a bankers draft. “Why do you have all those people in your five bay garage washing, sorting and boxing golf balls?” “Because I can make money out of it”, he said, professorsorially as he cooked us a couple of steaks on the BBQ. As you deduced, I didn’t just send him $8,000 without going to Phoenix to check my purchase (the morning after buying them). “I’m popping over to Phoenix to check my eBay purchase of 20,000 golf balls”. I said to Mrs Charman at breakfast. She barely looked up from her book and muesli.
That was twenty years ago and 150yds isn’t far for modern golf clubs so I am getting through them in the back field. As I practice the peace is regularly punctured by the pistol crack of errant balls smacking into trees, telegraph poles and a three-phase electricity transformer stuck up a pole none of which are, strictly speaking, in the way. Sometimes I brain a cow that has wandered too close to the fence. Before cutting the grass, I pick up as many as I can using a tube with a bag on the end so that I don’t have to bend down. But this is boring, and some are too hard to see in the uncut grass. So, the more exciting way to find them is with the flails. When people ask me why I wear an ice hockey helmet with a protective face grill when mowing, I invite them to watch as I mow and golf balls are launched at a million miles per hour by the angry flails. They depart in any direction, including directly at yours truly. Twang! they report as they bounce off my hat. The face grill is there because there isn’t even time to blink. “Look out, ha ha.. safety first” I say as I whiz past the watching cows. Golf is easily an extreme sport under these conditions.
And that’s today in late pre-retirement. I spent two happy hours mowing until all the paths were cut and the golf hole marked out in neatly curving stripes that follow the contour (there’s only one, it’s flat) and, when finished, I looked down from the terrace in the sunshine with the Crooked Oak Valley and deep blue sky over Exmoor stretching beyond and beheld the coming pleasures of playing with my quad and mower, and other cool toys, that might make all those years of pressure, frustration and hard work marginally worth it.
