One man went to mow - as long as he turned left

I have been having a bit of trouble with my ride-on mower, or lawn tractor as these vehicles are called in posher parts of Suffolk.

The main problem is the steering. Going left is fine – unfortunately turning right is impossible.

This is not too much of an issue when cutting the grass at IDGOM Towers but does involve a great deal of braking, adjusting the steering (such as one can) and reversing.

Needless to say, the fun soon dissipated and I had to bite the bullet and go to my garden machinery emporium. Could you collect my mower and check it over and give me a quote for any repairs needed (the steering was actually one of several niggling faults). No problem they said – my village was on the collection timetable for Mondays.

The mower was collected as arranged and all was well in the IDGOM household. A week later I still had not heard anything so I rang the emporium. Oh, said the nice young man, we have not had a chance to look at it yet.

My riposte was witty and swift – “When, then?” He replied: “We should be able to look at it next week”.

Glancing out of the window at the natural heathland that had previously been our front lawn (we have finally had a lot of rain after the very hottio scorchio weather) I explained I really needed it back soon or else visitors would not be able to see our house through the grass.

Six days later the emporium called and gave me the bad news – quite a bit of work needed to be done but, hey ho, I needed the mower back.

I gave the go-ahead for the work to be done and asked when the mower would be ready.

Well, he said, we will order the parts today and they usually take three to four days to arrive.

He couldn’t say when they would actually have the work completed.

Marvellous. The moral of the story is two-fold. One, remember to ask when making initial contact in situations like this what timescale people work to. Two, never, ever, book your mower in for any sort of work in the summer.