Back to the future - the future is green

For the last fifteen years i have lived in a house with a garden to the front and three other sides, or more accurately two sides and a back. Originally much of it was grass, and the design was crap, and it took hours to mow. Over the years I have widened and tapered the drive, concreted part of one side to provide hard standing fro a caravan, and made the remainder of that side into a vegetable plot with a greenhouse. The other side has the "Scout Hut" on it, this being the nickname my neighbour gave our rather large shed, which at 20 x 10 feet is big enough to house several Chinese families, or in my case a home gym, a working scale model Landrover, five cycles, plus lawnmowers and garden tools etc. The back of the garden has been landscaped and planted with shrubberies and all that sort of stuff, but still has a sizeable lawn. The back lawn in fact has TARDIS like properties. When playing football with the boy child, or badminton with the young lady child it is not big enough, and even though I have few remaining friends even the smallest of barbecues fills the available space. Yet when it comes to cutting the grass the lawn expands exponentially.
I have over the years owned and used several lawn mowers and all took equally long to complete the task. I have had petrol mowers which would have been more effective if you simply poured the petrol on the lawn and set it alight. One I had was a posh powered petrol mower which would pull itself along, dragging the operator behind into the bushes and trees. Other simpler petrol mowers simply polluted the atmosphere and drank petrol like Oliver Reed and George Best drank beer. With the rising costs of petrol it seemed sensible to switch to an electric mower. These are not without their problems however, in my case not least being my habit of running over the cable. Avoiding doing this meant holding the cable and tripping over it constantly, and to be honest the TARDIS lawn simply got bigger and took longer to mow. It was enough to drive me to drink. It was not uncommon for me to finish my last night shift at 7a.m. and spend all morning mowing the lawn before retiring to bed at lunchtime, pissed and knackered but able to sleep like a baby. (i.e. getting up every three hours, crying and having pissed the bed)
I had noticed as well that every time I mowed the lawn my electricity consumption shot up by 5 or 6 KW/hs per day.
Now however I have the ultimate green solution inspired by the past. A hand pushed cylinder mower. No petrol or diesel, no electricity, no emissions. Why do we need 7 horsepower engines on our mowers simply to cut grass? Grass is a weak flimsy material that you can cut with scissors or pull up by hand. Why do we need electric motors doing 3000 rpm when 100 rpm is more than enough speed for the blade to cut a stalk of grass. We have been fooled by the manufacturers into thinking a flymo is great but it just isn't. It may have an electric motor to turn the blade, but it's still pushed along by human power. The traditional hand pushed cylinder mower requires little if any more effort, but the pushing motion turns the blades by clever little mechanical cogs that just don't go wrong. No spark plug to foul, no cable top sever an no running costs. The effort of pushing it gives a little exercise and saves money going to the gym. A win win situation all round. Why have I not realised this sooner?
This is saving energy in more than one way too, as Thomas, 9 years decided it looked so much fun that he took over, saving me a lot of energy in every sense of the word. And unbelievably between us we whizzed round both the front and back lawns in less than 1/2 an hour, thus saving time and money.
This has promoted me to think about other labour saving devices around the house. Do they really save that much time and money, or could we do without them. Now I'm sure I could lay my hands on a mangle if I really tried...........