Across the pond

The lawn is half-mowed. I gave up at lunch-time after reading an article in Guardian Technology. Apparently you can now get solar-powered robot mowers which cut the lawn with razor blades while you are doing something more interesting. And they send you a text message when it is done. They cost around £1000, but what the hell. I spent more than a hundred quid on the rotary electric I have been pushing up and down this morning. Only to have my wife ask, when she came out to inspect my progress: ‘Can you tell me which bits you have done and which bits you have still to do?’ I did not want to admit it, but I had had similar thoughts myself. The man at Homebase had said it would be fine for my not very big lawn. And it’s a Bosch, good make.

But the blades are as blunt as the razor blades that Gillette used to make when I started to shave. Blunter even than those blades when they were new. Blunter than they were when I had used the same blade for a week. Since then Gillette has spent a fortune on blade technology and the male chins of the developed world are as smooth as silk. But my high-tech Bosch electric does a worse job than the Qualcast I used for cuttting the lawn of the house of my boy-hood.

Ah, the paradoxes of capitalism. How come we put up with such miserable lawn mowers, when blade technology has advanced so much?

I don’t have an answer to that question. But perhaps it is less interesting than the subject I was going to address when I sat down to write this blog.

Hence, the headline.

So I end now. And deal with the original question in Part Two.