TODAY'S starter for 10: if the smell of freshly cut grass is evocative, why do so many find cutting it a chore? And for five points: why is "like watching grass grow" seen as a synonym for boring when it's an essential part of summer?
Two rhetorical questions for the price of one, even if at least one of them – make allowances, I'm a journalist – might be based on a false premise. It is, just, possible that not everyone finds the smell of freshly cut grass evocative, that some nos
trils fail to twitch or memories stir as that special scent wafts on a May evening from lawn, sports pitch, golf course or silage field.
As for the effort that goes into producing the effect, who knows what the percentages might be of those who enjoy it, those who cut grass in the same frame of mind as cleaning the bathroom and those who have to be driven to it by scorn and harsh words before the front green turns into a hayfield.
Not forgetting those who do it for a living. If local authorities knew how much pleasure grass-cutting gangs give they would probably add it to the council tax.
There is one other category we can be certain about: those who have concreted or paved over grass to park cars. Come the revolution they will be re-educated and given a reverse makeover and it won't be pleasant.
It's not that I want grass at any price. Far from it. Nothing in a garden is more off-putting than obsessive attention to grass and, thankfully, the percentage aiming for a lawn manicured like Augusta golf course is small.
But I recall clearly an at-home by a businessman with a military background, with hundreds of marigolds at attention in rows as precise as a Trooping the Colour ceremony round the lawn on which we trod as gingerly as we would have done on his Wilton carpets.
Which his lawn effectively was – an expensive outdoor carpet, with no chance of a ball being kicked on it, a tricycle ridden, a paddling pool filled or a deckchair sat in that could damage the turf.
Given the efforts of two gardeners to keep it rich green, weed-free, and an unvarying 4 centimetres tall, it probably cost £40 a square metre annually. It would do his perfectionist blood pressure no good to walk my green areas where grass is the main, but by no means only, constituent part. I don't mind cutting grass – much – because that sets off the flower borders and vegetable plots and helps make useful compost. But life's too short to manicure lawns when there are flowers and potatoes to grow, tomatoes to water and slugs to kill.
Grass should be useful. It's there for children to play on, for cricket or football, to cut for hay and silage or for animals to graze. Watching it grow is not boring for those who depend on it to feed animals or see it as the prime indicator of spring and summer's progress.
On second thoughts, it probably is boring. But do we care? No. We know the importance of man the mower watching closely and getting out there to do what a man's gotta do – cut his grass before his neighbour's mower coughs a second time.
The full article contains 571 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
