Leaf-blowers are a public nuisance – put away your noisy man-toys and leave me in peace
I live on a hill, two streets away from the steepest road in London. “It’s like San Francisco!” I tell friends who visit, flinging my arms wide at the views of the City ahead of us. “Careful! Mind the dog poo.” The hills are (partly) what made Crystal Palace fashionable in the first place. Up here, the Victorians could escape the smog below.
Trouble is, it’s autumn, and the leaves have turned these roads into red runs. Great banks of mulch carpet the pavements and the Tarmac and, as I sit at my desk, I’m writing to the peaceful backdrop of several parked cars attempting to head off for the school run, their rear wheels kicking up the mess behind them as if they’re leather-clad members of the T-Birds.
My neighbour’s solution to this, I learnt with dismay last week, is to deploy his leaf blower. Out he came wearing a pair of large headphones, brandishing the thing like a duelling pistol. He spent the next 20 minutes merrily blowing leaves from his garden directly into the road and pavement either side of his drive for everyone else to slip on. Don’t worry, elderly residents of Crystal Palace, if the coronavirus doesn’t get you, those slippery orange leaves in front of No 72 almost certainly will.
I have multiple objections to leaf blowers. They’re idle, for a start. What’s wrong with a rake? If it was good enough for ancient Chinese civilisations to gather in their grains, it can presumably handle your back garden. Spend an hour or so pottering outside, scrape them up, dump the leaves on the compost heap and reward yourself with a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Lovely.
You are less deserving of a piece of cake if you’ve spent a few minutes using a large hairdryer to redistribute the leaves in your garden elsewhere.
The early prototype of the leaf blower was supposedly invented by a Japanese man in 1947, but, needless to say, it was in the US where they were first taken up with great enthusiasm and, by 1989, more than a million of the devils had been sold there. All right, perhaps you use yours to blow leaves into a pile before tipping them on to the compost or bagging them, and there’s an efficiency in this. But you’ve also wasted man-made energy, instead of calories, and made an unbearable racket.
There’s an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth in which Baldrick recites a poem he’s written called “The German Guns”. “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom,” it goes. I’d rather listen to Baldrick – on repeat – than another three seconds of my neighbour’s giant man-toy.
As far as I can see, the only vaguely acceptable uses of leaf blowers have nothing to do with leaves. During the Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter protests in the past year, protesters have carried them to combat tear gas, expelling the clouds away.
In Florida, meanwhile, online videos this week showed a 57-year-old janitor called Brian propelling himself around on what he calls a “blue-collar limousine.” Sitting in a wheeled mop bucket, Brian opens an umbrella in front of him and, with his other hand, directs the leaf blower into it. Do look up the clips of him whipping along at speed, a modern-day Mary Poppins. I still don’t approve of blowers, obviously, but it did make me laugh.
Is Dominic West on the verge of divorce? No, he’s just a traditional Old Etonian
Dominic West has been photographed “without his wedding ring”. Whenever there’s a whiff of scandal about a married couple, this headline is used as evidence that the wife has thrown out the man in question and yet it’s often a load of nonsense.
I’ve conducted a highly scientific poll among my married Etonian friends, since Dominic is an Old Etonian himself, and only 25 per cent of them wear a wedding band. Plenty of traditional sorts still don’t. While one should be careful these days because there are a terrifyingly high number of Old Etonian rogues floating about, especially at Westminster, the lack of a gold band doesn’t necessarily mean that they are limbering up for divorce.
I’ve found the magic ingredient to improve my cooking: if in doubt, add sherry
Since I’m at home so much at the moment, I’m trying to get better at cooking. It’s a slow business – the swede purée I made turned out to be a weaning recipe, only half of the blueberry cake I made slid from the loaf tin and I burned some very expensive scallops, but I’ve discovered that you can’t go wrong if you throw a generous dash of sherry into everything.
I made a mushroom soup last night that tasted more of sherry than mushroom (sherry soup?), I fried a mushroom omelette the previous day and threw some sherry into that, too. Sensational. It’s going to be a long winter everyone, get panic-buying the Tío Pepe. Surely my first cookery book cannot be far off.
