Breaking the ice

I arrived at Mrs L’s and someone answered the door so I said ‘Hi, Mrs L’, I got an abrupt response, ‘I’m not Mrs L, you’ll find her in the kitchen’. I said, ‘I’ve come to tidy the garden, to which I got a ‘not this garden your not! It’s too overgrown’. This was Mrs L’s daughter, she led me through the house to see her mum. There was a little discussion about whether the battery powered lawn mower worked, the daughter seemed defeated, insisting that it was always cutting out. Hmmm, so this wasn’t a great start but I tried to stay positive and got a grip on the lawnmower. Mrs L’s daughter was right, it did keep cutting out about every 10 seconds so I kept stopping, emptying it out, clearing the blades and then trying again. Mrs L’s daughter shouted ‘Lady!’ I looked up and said ‘er yes?’… ‘I’m talking to the dog’. Ha ha, I was relieved. I started making some progress with the lawnmower and then Mrs L’s daughter offered me an ice lolly. It was a real ice breaker. Her demeanour softened and she told me about her mum’s health problems and how looking after the garden had been very difficult. Heetu arrived, I was so glad to see her as the garden really needed two pairs of hands but she missed out on the ice lolly! By this point the lawnmower was giving nothing, couldn’t even get it started. We felt the batteries and they were boiling hot so we had a brainwave. We put them in the freezer and did some weeding at the front of the house while they cooled down. Once they were cooled we charged them and got about 20mins more mowing out of the charge but it was really frustrating that the charge took so long and we were running out of time. We managed to mow the middle of the lawn and weed the front. We were a bit frustrated that we hadn’t been able to finish but we garnered that two more battery charges would do the trick so we hope Mrs L gets booked in for a revisit. On a positive note, Mrs L’s daughter reassured us that at least they could now see the dog (Lady) when she ran to the bottom of the garden.