The curse of the electric garden gadget menace

Or to be more correct the neighbours can’t.

I’ve become obsessed this summer like never before with the constant noise we create in our gardens.

Listen on any weekend day to the sounds of the suburbs.

Do you hear the lullaby of the skylark, the chirp of the cricket, the swishing breeze through the long grass or the creaking branches of the ancient oak?

No you do not.

What you get is the sound from dawn to dusk of dozens of buzzing, hacking, whirring garden appliances designed to impose order on our tiny corner of nature.

It seems that more and more electricity consuming or petrol guzzling gadgets are invented each year for us to fill the summer air with high pitched whining tools with which to bother our neighbours.

High branch rotating loppers, lawn hoverers, bush hackers, dentist drill strimmers, they answer each other’s calls until the sun goes down.

No wonder the wildlife is confused.

It’s thrown the breeding cycles of half a dozen creatures, reliant on mating calls, out of kilter.

Some females of the species, thinking they’re being serenaded by a show-off male, are finding themselves falling for a Black & Decker edge trimmer.

It wasn’t so bad back in the day when everything was mechanical.

The clip, clip of the shears and the low rumble of the push/pull mower was almost poetic in contrast.

You could still hear the distant bleat of a lamb or even the sound of leather on willow in the nearby sports field.

Wait a minute – scrub that last sentence.

I went a bit too John Major there.

A bloke three doors down from me cuts his lawn to within a millimetre of its life with full Formula 1 roaring contraption at 8.50am every Saturday morning.

How do I know? Told you I’ve become obsessed. I’m waiting for it now in full Pavlovian dog mode.

Surely there’s an answer to this new curse of the middle class neighbourhood. Can’t the authorities give us little windows for such activity. We’ve all got to be whirring and churning and rotating between the hours of noon and 2pm, for instance.

Have patrol men in vans cart away curfew breachers and their implements and put them to work in local parks as a sort of community service.

Or better still, do what I do in my garden.

Let the weeds grow man.

Some of them can be truly beautiful.

I will be at Glorious Goodwood (or should I say Qatar Goodwood Festival) on Friday. It’s one of the few luxury days I allow myself.

I love horse racing on the flat (or in this case the undulations) and the trappings that surround it.

Watching a horse bred for speed up close is awe-inspiring, the flared nostrils, the pent up kinetic energy, the skittishness, the sheer beauty of the animal. And perched on top the gnarled-faced little men in garish silks, dismounted mumbling and awkward, on horseback pure artists.

There are few better sporting places to lose yourself than Goodwood on a Glorious day.

The Gods created it to soothe the ills of life. It’s a once a year meeting place for me and a couple of far-flung old friends.

We drink too much Pimms (whatever that is), stuff our noses in the back pages of the Racing Post pretending we know more about the form than we do and catch up on old times. And always the epiphany.

Somewhere between the fourth and the fifth the world will stop for a few precious moments, smiles and laughter will reign and The Man is banished. It can’t last of course but it’s wonderful while it does.

On rainy days in autumn at work you catch yourself asking why life can’t always be like the space between the fourth and the fifth.

Your humble columnist may not always be ahead of the curve, capture the zeitgeist, as readily as others but I was out in front on the big topic of the day: seagulls.

You may remember back in April I wondered whether Sussex gulls were getting bigger and more feral.

Would we wake up one day to find they had taken over society without us noticing, running the council, sitting on the bench at the magistrates court, squawking the news on the teatime telly?

That sort of thing. I called for action. Urged the authorities to consider using them for tasks like litter picking, car park attendants (with caps of course) or deckchair monitors.

That way we could bring them under control. I sat back and felt sure the Government would soon be in touch with me to discuss my ideas in full. But now even the Prime Minister is involved still the phone doesn’t ring. Fools. You’re almost too late.