When I tried to fire up the mower a couple of weeks ago, it coyly resisted my loving caresses with the recoil starter. 'Blast!', thought I, and promptly filed the subject under Too Difficult. With bad weather in prospect, and the grass just about dry enough to walk on following a lengthy dry spell, I thought today that I'd better have another go. I advanced on the mower with a plug spanner and tommy bar, intending to take the plug out, go and get a new one, and then set about the electrics with WD40. First I thought 'let's give it a tug and see what happens' (as the actress said to the bishop). The requisite pushes on the primer button didn't feel as though they met any resistance. What I'd forgotten was that the mower, like its owner, responds well to a suitable libation. A generous measure of Sainsbury's lead-free later, the primer felt as if it was priming, and after one cough, the brute fired up on the second pull. So, gentle reader, the grass has had its first cut, with the mower set a couple of clicks up from where I'd left it in the autumn. Thus begin the annual seven or eight months' servitude, though succeeding cuts ought to be less muddy and slithery. And what's better, I haven't yet had to pay the local mower fettlers this year. FLWs.
I must admit to having felt quite shaken by yesterday's events in Brussels, given that they happened on such familiar territory, and close to a team of nice people to which I belonged for a number of years. What I feel is of course utterly irrelevant in the light of the suffering of the victims, the bereaved, the injured and those left wondering and worrying about their friends and loved ones. I imagine that the fellow arrested the other day in Molenbeek will be having an interesting time in the high security nick in Brugge. It seems that press reports of his co-operating with the Belgian authorities precipitated yesterday's massacres, those responsible fearing that their cover might soon be blown. Belgian surgeons report meanwhile that they have been picking nails out of the injured.
Commentators remark that the situation is not helped by the fragmentation of Belgian police forces, nor by the lack of communication between the intelligence services and the police. Let's hope that yesterday's events will be enough to get their several arses into gear. I'm reminded of the dreadful child killings in Belgium in the late 1990s. It turns out that I (and countless others, of course) had bought petrol from one of the murderers, a cheerful, chain-smoking, hail-fellow-well-met type who at the time had the decomposing body of little Loubna in the cellar under the forecourt. He'd been banged up before for paedophile crimes, but released, 'cured', after a scandalously short stint in Forest nick. So at the very best, the Belgian authorities have something of an uphill PR struggle ahead of them.
1 comment:
Mowing. That's why some of us have paved gardens, but ours is a small space. As for the events in Brussels, one would think that after 50 years of hijacks, attacks on civilians, bombs, etc., by numerous terrorist groups, including the IRA, new recruits to the allure of terrorism and blowing people up has one major drawback: it doesn't work. Of course, when the next outrage occurs in the UK or the USA, some brain puke will doubtless say, "They had it coming."
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