As today is a bank holiday, I’m off work, and as it is May, and therefore summer here, my father rings me up as always to prepare for non-arboreal gardening duties.
‘Brian?’
‘Yes Dad?’
‘It’s grass time.’

Now I would like to point out that as far as I know, my dad Ralf has never cut grass since my older brother Sean (now 29) learned how to use the mower without mutilating himself at age 12. It is a sacred duty; passed as soon as the next child comes of age (I have an older brother, younger brother, and two younger sisters), and sadly since my younger brother Paul broke his arm playing darts (a whole other story) the duty has reverted to me, something I thought had ended. So I arose at nine o’clock this morning, walked the few hundred yards down the Rock Road to my parents’ house, and took the old Castelgarden 150 out and got it running. Paul came out, took one look at the petrol bottle, and immediately used his one good arm to waft fumes into the air.
Sniffing petrol, another Damage Family tradition.
‘A ha ha … you have to be the grass bitch today!’
‘Don’t you have a Leaving Cert to study for?’
Anyway, when he was gone back in, and I had said my greetings to my parents and sisters, I adjourned to the shed and spent the following five minutes inhaling delightfully toxic fumes.
Man, I got seriously high. When I started cutting the grass, trees were totally talking to me and one of them even starting playing a jingle like an ice-cream van (my sister later told me it was in fact an ice-cream van and not a tree) … the mower turned into this giant beast of a machine that did the work itself, and a nice gentle setlist of classical music by Bach, Beethoven, and Strauss was playing throughout.

The lesson? When cutting grass, aim and get high.