
I was asked[1] how many machines with petrol engines do we have here at The Phenelry?
The answer I think is 15.[2] All pretty needful on a country property.[3]
And in line with Kitchener’s Rule, which estimates that the number of such machines a chap has is approximately seven times the number of cars he has. Except Land Rovers, for which the multiplier is 14.[4]
[1] I need not trouble you, gentle reader, with what prompted this question.
[2] There is my car, which is a Jeep. And then my love car, which is a Bristol. Louise has a car. There is my Countax tractor (settle down; it is just a garden tractor) and a Toro Timecutter zero turn. There’s a drum mower for cutting the croquet lawn grass and my old lovely Hayter mower (by appointment to Her Majesty), which I use for the longer bits. There’s also a Toro walk behind mower which I use for getting to the bits which are inaccessible for the zero turn. There is a mulcher; it soon became apparent that the small electric mulchers which people have in domestic gardens do not really cut the mustard when you live in the country. And because there are some quite fierce fires in Australia, I have a firefighting pump. And because the last State government was obsessed by green issues, and hence there are frequent power cuts here, I have an emergency generator. And then there are the two-stroke machines. I have a Ryobi strimmer (or whippersnipper, as they call these things here) and also a Kawasaki one which has for some time been fitted with a metal blade instead of the nylon line. For the tougher sort of weed. And, of course, a couple of chainsaws.
[3] Well, more or less. To be honest, I could manage without the Toro walk behind mower, which is a pretty bad machine. For a start, it stops if you let go of the bar up at the handle, which is presumably an elf ‘n safety thing. But it means a lot more pulling of the ripcord, and that the shoot to the collection bag is more susceptible to clogging up, because you can’t leave it for a few moments running clean air through the shoot. Also, it has got two wheels at the back, instead of a single drum, which not only means that it can’t lay down the nice stripes which are necessary for a proper English lawn, but also that it slips around a lot more on hilly bits. In truth, I only bought it because the local repair shop had failed to properly fix my Hayter. And then my friend Jeff fixed the Hayter (it just needed the carburettor washing through).
And I suppose I could make do with just one chainsaw. Again, I only bought the orange one because the yellow one had stopped working. But once I had read the manual for the orange one, I understood that the yellow one only needed a bit of TLC to leap back into action.
[4] My advice is that you do not go searching on the Internet for the origin of this rule. I just made it up. For literary effect.