Doing God's work

The interesting old church at South Wraxall.  I think it is Norman at the core with mainly 17th century add-ons, and bits and pieces from all eras inside.

If you embiggen the photo you will see the groundsman in the mid-ground, close to the door. Were it not for his petrol strimmer he could be straight out of my 1950s childhood.

He is a large, balding man wearing brown overalls. You see him attempting to fix the strimmer. He carried on trying to either fix it or start it for the whole time I sat on a tomb drinking a cup of tea.

When he got it to run, the noise of the tiny two-stroke engine was horrible. In the old days he would have used sickles and shears for the edges and a Suffolk Punch for the main job. Not the horse, but the mower named after the horse.

As I took my seat on the tomb, he managed to start his machine after about 15 pulls on the starter cord. He began to add to the noise by whipping at the dry grass fringes of the yard, then he snagged on a stone and broke the plastic line.

He turned off the engine, walked to his van on the road and came back with yards of strimmer line. He cut a piece off, then turned the whole thing upside down and fitted it.

Another 15 or 20 attempts to start it meant the he lost concentration and took his eye off the end of the machine where he had just fitted a new line and, when the engine fired up, it was right against the edge of a gravestone and immediately snapped off again.

Knowing how difficult the strimmer was to start, he let it run while he attempted to fit a new length of cutting line to the business end. One wrong move with his other hand on the throttle and he would have lost a couple of fingers.

I couldn't bear to watch, so I finished my tea and left him to it.