Andy Richardson: Too many machines when one man went to mow...

The Flymo, however, has not found a happy home. Like an unwanted fourth child, when a couple were set on three, it is skulking in the corner, unsure what role it will play.

We are heading towards Christmas, of course, a time for buying expensive fripperies that convey a message of love, gratitude and excitement.

Or, alternatively, to neck the Prosecco and eat the pigs in blankets.

We are not heading towards a period of lawn mowing. Unless you are me. Unless you have called upon the services of Kumar, DPD and Flymo. And I have.

I’ll unpack my dilemma. Having lived for 15 years in a drafty old house, we spent a fortune on double glazing. For the first time in nearly 200 years, the spiders couldn’t pass between the interior and the exterior with relative ease. Having burned through the best part of it – muffled sigh – we did what any self-respecting whimsical nincompoop does; put the house up for sale and moved to an even older, even draftier house. As you do. In a pandemic. When it’s the least sensible thing you can possibly do.

The new pad had – has – gardens. There’s lawns. Lots and lots and lots of poorly maintained, moss-stuffed grass. Actually, there’s not much grass. It’s just moss. But it still needs cutting.

And so I bought a mower. And I knocked the brake lever on so I thought it was broke. But it wasn’t.

So, while mower one sat idle, me thinking it was out for the count, it knowing I just had to flick a cord, I bought another mower. This one was even better. I filled it full of oil so it would never run out and something really bad happened to the engine.

She Who Must Be Obeyed watched on, horrified, as the moss kept growing, the bills kept increasing and the lawn kept deteriorating.

Her beloved madman hatched a plan. I took both mowers to a man who knew what he was doing. He fixed the one easily – flick the switch, was the gist – and managed to get the other back on track. Both, however, were only to be used when the grass was relatively low.

“Are they sensitive?” I asked. He ignored me, which was probably for the best.

The only trouble was, the grass was now about knee-high to an elephant. And so I strimmed what should have been cut and made hay. Alan Titchmarsh has nothing on me. I even found frogs hiding in all the long grass, though I’m not sure they were pleased to see me.

And then I got busy doing other stuff while the grass grew back to elephant-knee level and I couldn’t bear the prospect of any more strimming.

And that’s where Kumar and DPD and Flymo intervened. The man I bought the first mower from – the one that worked when I thought it was broken – told me he’d got seven. Why, I thought, does any living creature need more than one mower? And now, just over a year later, I find myself on a fast-track to catching him up. There is the Flymo, for cutting long grass that shouldn’t have been left to grow long. Then there are the beasts, that make the lawn look like a face that’s just undergone a wet shave at Harrods. Frankly, if I’m not playing cricket or crown green bowls within a year, I’ll be astonished.

She Who Must Be Obeyed has given up, as well she might. A cupboard near the back door is now so stuffed with lawnmowers that it’s impossible to enter. Curiously, there’s also a wheelchair there that doesn’t belong to us and that seems to have magically appeared. Perhaps it’s for me to attach to one of the mowers so that I can wheel myself round as though I’ve made a not-that-fast garden go-kart.

I’m up for any gardening work that any of you might need doing, of course. I know a gleeful idiot with three lawn mowers who’d be perfect for the job.