Perforations

Sold this spring on the merits of spiking the back lawn and I am now going the whole hog with the pick axe; an old tool, with one arm spike ended and the rather longer arm chisel ended.

I opted for the spike end and one smart blow drives the spike into our presently soft brown clay up to the haft. As with a felling axe, one wonders what chance a head containing helmet from the middle ages would have had against such a direct blow: it might hold out a glancing blow but I doubt whether it would be much protection against a direct one - although I seem to recall that the fancier helmets were cunningly shaped so that more blows would be glancing than would otherwise be the case. But I think that the big catch would be that while you were swinging such a thing, two handed, you would be quite vulnerable to a smart poke in the ribs with a lance. The swing time of the pick of several seconds would be more than time enough to slip with in the lance.

Maybe that was the point of the various sorts of gladiators; the ones with nets and tridents, the ones with swords and shields and so on: the soldiers in the audience would be able to evaluate the performance of the various tools of the trade in something like combat conditions, but at no risk to themselves. Maybe the swords & sorcery computer games are realistic enough now to be helpful in the same way.

Back with the lawn, make the hole with the pick, trowel in the finest lawn repair sand from Chessington Garden Centre, tamping it down with the dibber. Note the line in the background, keeping me on the straight and narrow; a line which used to belong to my father and must be at least fifty years old. Not sure what the line is made of; not sisal and certainly not man-made fibre, but whatever it is it has lasted well.

In three afternoons so far, I have done maybe 10 square yards of lawn and used up two bags of lawn sand. Probably not a good idea to be doing this sort of thing between the spring and autumn solstices when the grass is supposed to be growing, I am supposed to be stretched out on it and the ground is apt to be rather hard, even for the trusty pick axe. Or in the depths of winter, which leaves just a couple of months a year. So I have clearly got a job for life here, rotating round the lawn on what is looking to be a 5 year cycle.

For the sake of completeness I have tried to get https://www.chessingtongardencentre.co.uk/ to tell me what sort of lawn sand they sold us - the last empty bag now having been removed by the council's environment engineers this morning - but I am sorry to have to report the my request falls foul of Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.5466. No no joy on that front.