EXTENSION CABLE STORY

The other day I was lamenting my troubles at a barbecue. The night grew dark, the chiminea flickered in the purple dusk, and I was warbling about gardening.

"I don't have electricity in my garden," I protested, "So I can't cut the grass."

"Oh you can," said Mike, "You just need a long extension... or a petrol lawn mower."

Gareth nodded to his twenty-metre orange cable, trailing out of his dining room window into the garden.

"I don't think twenty metres will be long enough," I mused, imagining the flex running down the stairs, out of the front door, down my neighbour's drive, past her wheelie bins, under my fence and into the middle of my garden.

"You can probably find longer," said Gareth. "Maybe somewhere like B&Q?"

"I can't go in there!" I reflexed brusquely. Mike and Gareth immediately leapt to the conclusion that I had been 'barred' from the DIY store, and that my picture was behind every till like some sort of do-it-yourself-criminal. They laughed about that for a full three minutes.

"I mean I have a phobia about tall shelves and high ceilings!" said I, emphatically and eventually.

They were right though (about it being the place, not about me being barred from it), so this weekend I decided to man up, go to B&Q, overcome the fear of being crushed by tins of paint and desktop-air-conditioners, and find a suitable extension cord.

Imagine my joy then, when within five minutes in B&Q I laid eyes on a 45m roll-up extension cable. Forty five metres! Forty five glorious metres! That's almost a twentieth of a kilometre! I immediately took a picture and sent it to Gareth. Then I bought it.

"I could mow the park with this!" I beamed to myself, imagining plugging my Dad's lawnmower in and pushing it out through the back gate to the park with a cheery wave to all the dog walkers and single Mums. Gareth messaged me back. "45," he said, "That's just showing off."

So today, I used it. Well sort of.

Now, a bit of description might help here: the extension cable is one of those ones that's on a wheel. You unwind it and then the wheel bit has the sockets on it. This one, unlike Gareth's orange cable, is bright blue, presumably so that it shows up well enough just before you accidentally hacksaw through it and blow yourself into next door's garden.

I plugged it in, then unwound it backwards down the stairs. Textbook. Then I trailed it under the front door, and, exactly as I had imagined, took it down my neighbour's drive (she wasn't in), past her wheelie bins, under my garden gate, and right into the middle of the jungle.

The sun was baking. I pushed my sun hat to the back of my head and wiped the sweat from my brow. Standing there in the tall grass, I felt a bit like l belonged in a Steinbeck novel, or a chapter of Tom Sawyer.

Out came my Dad's never-used (spare) lawnmower from the shed. Click went the plug in one of the sockets, and I clutched the handles ready for action.

And... nothing happened. I pushed the button again.

No power, no whizzing blades, no finely sprayed fountain of grass - nothing.

I trudged back upstairs. The extension cable was switched on and plugged in. I thundered back out to the garden. Still nothing. I pushed the mower over the grass and it silently flattened it. But cut the grass was not, nor would be.

"I'll have to ask my Dad about that," I said to myself, wearily. So I unplugged the mower and put it back in the shed.

Now at this point, what I'd like to tell you is that I simply wound the extension cable up, neatly unplugged it from the kitchen and put it back in the cupboard. But that isn't what happened.

What happened was that the 45m of long blue flex suddenly turned into a sort of uncontrollable snake, and started wrapping itself around the wheel in about as convoluted a way as could be imagined.

You know how it is with headphones? You wrap them neatly and then stash them in a pouch or a pocket or a pencil case or something, then when you unravel them, they've mysteriously formed a kind of plastic spaghetti that is knottier than a Shakespeare plot? Well imagine that - but forty five metres of it!

For the next hour I was poking that blue cable through loops of itself, pulling tightly and trying to figure out why the wheel was stuck, looping and unlooping fistfuls of flex around the handles with absolutely no idea of whether I was close to either solving the puzzle, or accidentally whacking myself in the face with the plug.

It's up there in my list of infuriating things, that. And forty five metres is so long! Why did I get one that is so ridiculously long?

I managed it in the end, by unwinding the entire length and then rewinding it round the wheel. But man was that annoying! My arms ached, my brain hurt and I was sweating like Huckleberry Finn.

Meanwhile, the grass is as long as ever. Looks like my feel-like-a-man-overcoming-the-garden-day will have to wait.

I didn't text Gareth or Mike about it. I have a feeling at least one of them will ask me though. And my Dad definitely will; I've still got his spare lawnmower.