Strimming World

Can you just, well, do one.

Here’s a challenge for you. Play the video below at full volume and leave it on for the duration of this post. If you get through it without turning it off, a mint tea and small biscuit will be winging its way to you, forthwith.

Yesterday evening, someone screamed like a banshee. A hot air-ballooned lung-full of angst across the valley. And boy did it echo. Julie Andrews, and even nuns, would have been proud, despite the expletive.

It was all because of a strimmer. A gasoline-fuelled piece of equipment that an acquaintance up the lane admits are always poorly-utilised. They’ve been driving him insane for years.

Users turn them on and off like hornets caught gasping their last breath, only to leap back into life every ten seconds. And that’s the problem, the off-on nature of this noise pollution.

Cocks crowing, helicopter blades battering treetops as they drop water onto fires – choirs of dogs set off by the tamest of barks – are all fine.

But strimmers? no.

Julie would have been proud

Surely, we hear you ask, strimming is an essential task – like collecting figs to stop them seeding everywhere? Yes, but it’s always carried out when it suits the strimmer – that is, in the relative cool of the day when people are doing stuff outside, like enjoying each other’s company. And the ground the strimmers clearly need to cover means it lasts as long as a Bruce Springsteen concert. And that’s bad enough.

So what is the best time then, when people are having their siesta? Maybe not – but how about between 8am and 1pm?

We need a campaign to ban the three-hour strimmer sessions at inappropriate times. Who’s in?

By the way, the banshee cry worked immediately – the person either understood English or was flattened by the verbal cannonball.