It’s that time of year again.
The evenings are drawing in, the sky has that roseate blush so redolent of the dying of the year, and the air has that pleasing and invigorating nip to it that makes walking outdoors such a seasonal pleasure. And the ground is beginning to be covered by the bounty of myriad tree species – yellow, gold, russet, orange, scarlet, brown, umber, chocolate and dark brown – autumn leaves in all their magical hues.
It’s time for the plonkers to be outdoors for their annual blow jobs.
Since time immemorial, the task of sweeping up leaves has been the very quintessence of pointless and endless petty toil, in comparison with which, Sisyphus pushing his boulder perpetually up hill seems a trivial labour.
Perhaps no task in history has baulked effort so exhaustingly and been such a waste of time. However hard you work at it the leaves keep falling and building up in drifts, and just as you’ve very nearly and at long last cleared the bit of ground you’re working on, the trees mockingly drop another few bags-full. So you rake them up again. And again. And again.
Digging holes, doing the washing up, or listening to Johann Lamont at First Minister’s Question Time are tiresome and energy draining tasks, to be sure, but raking leaves has always been the absolute apogee of pointless, endless work.
Humanity has tried hard through the eons, but we’ve never been able to dream up a more time-sapping or interminable chore. Not even talking to a bank’s call-centre has been able to surpass this task for eating, digesting and regurgitating wasted lifetimes. If Tibetan monks had raked leaves instead of gravel, they’d have jacked it in and been off to Torremolinos on an 18-30 holiday before you could say “A pint? That’s very nearly an armful!”. It’s been the pinnacle of wasted human effort. Until now.
Yes, folks, we’ve finally been able to improve on it, and make it not just worse, but infinitely worse, through the invention of the leaf blower.
One day a particularly evil-minded inventor sat down and thought “what wonderful pointless, expensive but lust-inducing device shall I create today?”. It had to be something different. Something that people would look at and think ‘Yes, that’s shiny and techno, and makes a kind of kooky sense. I’ll have one’. Something so appealing but essentially appalling that people would buy it in droves, use it once or twice, and then dump in their garden shed beside their step exerciser, pasta machine and George Foreman Grill. There’s a sucker born every minute, and so the leaf blower was born.
A rake makes some kind of sense. You push the pole out, the tines dig into a swathe of leaves, and you drag it towards you. Repeat the task a few times and you’ve got a nice neat pile for packing into black plastic bags for casual fly-tipping, or more sensibly for putting on the compost (what’s with this burning leaves nonsense, by the way? You clear the ground of leaves to make it tidy, then fill your air you breathe with dirt to get rid of them?). But it’s just not good enough for your gardening technophile. It’s too simple, too unexciting, too physical, too . . manual.
What modern gardeners want is some whizzy gadget which will give the illusion of taking the physical work out of the process without actually doing so. Instead of the apparently too fatiguing process of raking, how much easier to be the horticultural equivalent of the couch potato and let a nice rasping little 2-stroke engine do all the work for you? The only problem being, of course, that not only is it no less tiring to use, but instead of gathering leaves together into discrete piles, it blows them all back up into the air and scatters them across the area you’ve just cleared. All the while spouting noxious, smelly exhaust, rending the air for hundreds of yards around with its nasty barking cry, and bathing its user in a sweat of furious, frustrated desperation.
It’s now clear what Shakespeare was referring to in King Lear, when he wrote ..
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Leafblower!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout cruel gases
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing 2-stroke fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-leaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick garden tools o’ the world!”
He was clearly furious with his leaf blower, knew that blow jobs are for suckers, and he’d much rather be a rake any day.
