BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a particular quality to a Saturday morning in the Surrey villages. It is not peace, exactly. It is the absence of the City. The silence left behind after the 23.42 from Waterloo has taken its last wretched soul back from the big smoke. For the man in question – a commuter, a husband, a prisoner of the screens – that silence had become something close to a myth.
He had spent five days being traded like a futures contract. His life had been reduced to spreadsheets, South Western trains, and the faint, lingering smell of other people’s coffee. By Friday night, he was no longer a man. He was a husk in a pinstripe suit.
So when Saturday arrived, and his wife presented him with The List – lug the compost, fix the drip, call the boiler man, eldest to rugby, pick up the mother-in-law, ad misericordiam – something in him did not break. It simply left. It went outside, lit a cigar, and looked at the Flymo.
Now, the Flymo. That glorious, vulgar, two-stroke beast. The hovercraft of the petit-bourgeois lawn. He pulled it from the shed with the reverence of a gamekeeper lifting a Purdey. He checked the fuel. He checked the oil. He knew, with the quiet, subversive certainty of a man who has spent twenty years learning how to survive domestic détente, that the blade was away.
Away. At the sharpeners. The teeth of the thing were sitting in a drawer in some workshop in West Horsley, probably next to a biscuit tin full of washers.
He pulled the cord anyway.
Roar.
The engine caught. The noise was magnificent. Not a Ransomes hum. A wall of sound thick enough to stop a howitzer. He took a long, slow draw on the cigar – a Montecristo No. 4, if you must know, because if you’re going to commit a small act of marital treason, you might as well do it with a Cuban temptress.
He began to push the Flymo across the grass. The machine vibrated. The noise filled the garden. The blades, of course, were not turning. No grass was cut. The lawn remained a shaggy, unrepentant wilderness. But the performance of mowing – the posture, the pace, the furious concentration of a man engaged in honest toil – was flawless.
From the kitchen window, the wife appeared. Her mouth moved. Her jaw performed the distinctive gymnastics of a woman who has just realised her husband is pushing and swinging a lawnmower with no blade. She was screaming. I have no doubt she was screaming. The words would have been something like: “The blade! It’s at the shop! What on earth do you think you’re -”
He did not hear her.
Let me be precise. He chose not to hear her. He lowered his chin. He let the Flymo’s roar become a Gregorian chant. He took another draw on the cigar. The smoke curled up into the damp English air, and for fifteen, perhaps twenty, perhaps twenty-five glorious minutes, he was not a husband, not a father, not a commuter, not a man with a mother-in-law to collect.
He was a man, alone, with a noisy machine and a small fire in his hand. He was in heaven.
There is a great unspoken truth: Men do not need a study. They do not need a ‘man cave’ with neon beer signs from The Range or a dartboard that says The Dog House. They need an alibi. They need the appearance of labour. Because the modern world has made one thing abundantly clear: a man sitting still is a man who can be tasked.
“What are you doing? Are you okay? Can you just -”
So we learn to weaponise utility. We paint fences that do not need painting. We wash cars that are already clean. We mow lawns with blades that are currently in a drawer in West Horsley. The Flymo is not a mower. It is a permission slip. It is a passport to a small, noisy, sovereign state where the only law is the two-stroke engine and the curl of cigar smoke.
When he finally let go of the throttle, the silence that fell was almost ecclesiastical. The wife was no longer at the window. The storm would come. He knew that. The row would arrive, as punctual as the 6:02 from Guildford back to Waterloo. But for one brief, beautiful, uncut Saturday morning, he had stolen something priceless.
He had stolen nothing.
And nothing, as any true country squire will tell you, is the rarest commodity of them all.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024) and Dear Townies (2023).