Human progress is erratic, meaning that, whilst it tends to go in a vaguely constant direction, it does not go in a straight line.
From around 1100 BC, there is evidence that the Chinese were using what would still pass for rakes: along handle with a head attached to some thin tines, about four of them. Before this, there is sketchy evidence that we used our hands and fingers to do raking jobs.
Because all tools were handmade before the industrial revolution, there tended to be a greater value- and longevity- attached to them than there is now. These days, it is one of the things that even the most basic gardener in even the smallest plot of land equips themselves with. I have four of them, one of which is a massively heavy old one that I inherited from my grandfather, and must be older than me. There are two small hay rakes that are losing their tines like an old dog loses teeth, and then a blue plastic one that I have spent the last couple of hours sweeping leaves with.
Sometimes, I think that all I was put on earth for was to sweep leaves. It is a conduit for quiet thoughts and gentle exercise, a giant and joyful recycling exercise where plant matter is removed from the surfaces that don’t want it (lawns and terraces), and placed on surfaces that do (compost heaps and flower beds.) I am simply the agent of the exchange, and it makes me pathetically happy.
Or, until this morning, it did.
From down the road came the noise of a two-stroke engine starting up. Nothing strange there, you might think, and you would be right. People who have been busy or away all week need the time to mow the lawn (good luck with that, at the moment), cut hedges (in the summer) and remove fallen boughs.
What they manifestly do not need is petrol-driven leaf blowers.
I can find no possible justification in a sane world for a machine that uses fossil fuel to noisily help push a loose pile of organic matter from one place where it is not wanted to another, where it is wanted even less. None at all. Does it magic it all away? No. Does it recycle it? No. The leaf sweeper is the penultimate peak of Man’s search for ludicrous things with which to fill his time, and empty his bank account, which started with the Hostess Trolley and ends with plastic grass. The burgeoning into life of a two-stroke leaf sweeper announces to anyone within earshot that the power of the marketing men is still greater than the power of the human brain to filter out the worst of their blandishments. We can send men to the moon alright, apparently, but we can’t rake a lawn any more.
Any Garden Centre that sells them, or so much as offers them as so much discreet online horticultural porn, should lose the right to be called ‘garden centre’, and join instead, the ranks of the novelty shops. In a world where even the most fervent climate change deniers are driving smaller cars and recycling their newspapers, the petrol leaf-blower is a monument to that same curious human quality that allowed Michelangelo to paint the Sistene Chapel roof at the same time as the Italian states were plundering and killing their way through the Wars of the Holy League.
Art and idiocy, it’s what we do so very well.
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