Out with the old, in with the new

 The forecast for today was torrential rain, which was due to arrive by lunchtime. That had a significant impact on our gardening plans and we ended up doing little jobs that could be easily aborted as the morning showers came and went.

30% contented herself with weeding out in the front, whilst I nipped out the side shoots and trained the tomatoes in the greenhouse. I then headed out to the vegetable garden and planted another row of spring onions and also a row of beetroot in the larger of the two raised beds. The carrots in the smaller bed were thinned about a week ago and are looking fantastic with their feathery foliage, evenly spaced in five neat rows.

In the early afternoon we headed in to Worcester to pick up the new lawn mower and collect a few sundries from the supermarket just over the road from Ron Smith Ltd. We were back home by two o'clock, just as the rain started.

30%'s life is punctuated by coffee breaks. Every activity is either preceded by, or followed up, with a cup of coffee, so our safe arrival home was celebrated with a cup of "instant" before I assembled the mower. 

It didn't seem to be an overly complex job. The push handle needed to be fixed in to place and the grass collection bag needed to be assembled. However, If I am honest, the task was made more complicated by the fucking appalling, infographic loaded, multi language pamphlet that had been substituted for a proper manual.* The booklet covered three model ranges and had model dependent assembly instructions. Unfortunately the diagrams did not make clear which model they for and there were a couple of steps that had to be redone after moments of inspiration, gifted by the deity** of lawn mowing.

As for the grass collection bag, do not get me started! The only reason I was able to get this put together was that I had read a couple of on-line reviews, and learnt that, if assembled inside out, the bag would simply fall apart once it was half full of clippings. It still took me a couple of attempts and a bloody big screwdriver to clip the bag on to its metal supports. What makes this worse is that I rarely use the grass collection bag, preferring to mow in mulch mode.

Anyway, rant over. All I need to do now is to decide on a name for the new mower.

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* A full manual is available on-line, but I am assembling the mower sheltered from the rain in the shed and I am sixty years old. There is no fucking way that I am going to use a tiny phone screen that turns off five seconds after I put the damned thing down, in order to tighten up the next bolt in the assembly process. I want a proper bloody manual that I can put down, open at the correct page and then glance at it when I am ready to follow the next step in the process. Is that too much to ask for Mountfield?

** Worship this all knowing entity properly and make the correct offerings.*** Then you can be certain of fine weather and a dry sward on the day you want to mow the lawn.

*** I have clearly fucked this god properly off as I have recently been stricken with a plague of moles!