Man on mower a mood-lifter

Grim morning, fit for a funeral, under ratbelly clouds so low you could touch them. And with a head full of the loathsome Trump I drove the dog to the recreation ground as a way of cracking the gloom. You can see Trump’s plan. He’s hopelessly corrupt, so if he’s to prevail he has to defeat the rule of law. To this end he’s put a stooge in charge of the Department of Justice, and what he hopes are stooges on the Supreme Court, and he’s tried to vilify the special counsel who by now knows all his crimes.

And Trump has fawned to the military. Because when the conflict comes, when Trump finally defies the order of a court, he’ll need the military on his side, along with the three-headed hydra of Right-wing American politics, the bigots, the Baptists and the billionaires.

Trump shouldn’t prevail, of course, but by the same token he should never have been president. And if he does prevail, darkness falls.

Indeed you can already see it falling. Ah well.

The recreation ground had been mown. At the age of 19 I had a job as a groundsman and

I discovered the joys of mowing. Seated on the tractor I looked ahead of me at disorder

– daisies flowering on the cricket field, grasses sprouting to uneven lengths – but when I looked behind me there was order, a grass carpet, uniform in length and colour. With my fierce and spinning blades of metal I’d imposed dominion on the earth and it was good.

Even today, if I am sour of mood, I find that mowing the lawns can lift the clouds, as can imposing order in some other way – cleaning the fish tank, say, or picking the clothesdrift from the bedroom floor. Order is balm.

But not for dogs. They like things natural. At the recreation ground my dog went straight to the margins, the unmown vestiges of wilderness, where the swaying grass heads and the unkempt shrubs told stories of what had passed that way, stories echoing back to the plains of Africa and the birth of his species.

‘‘Even today, if I am sour of mood, I find that mowing the lawns can lift the clouds ...’’

On the far side of the rec was a patch that the mower had missed for its last few visits, a few square metres of longer grass, and with the dog engaged elsewhere I wandered over to see what was what. And what was what was clear. The unmown patch was a swampy depression and the council mower man, reluctant to risk his machine in the bog, had simply skirted it. It ruined the uniformity of the mowing but one could hardly blame him.

But even as I was on the point of turning away, in the midst of the swamp a duck’s head popped up like a periscope. The bird eyed me a moment, decided I posed a threat, stood and lurched a little further away from its nest in the endearing manner of ducks. As it went it quacked quietly and it was then that I saw the brood of ducklings, fluffballs that could not have been more than a few hours old and that clambered over the ridges of the swamp as if over Himalayan foothills.

And what was what seemed newly clear. The mower-man hadn’t been avoiding a bog. He’d been saving a nest. And if a man on a council mower can steer round a duck for a month, well, that would do me.

‘‘Don’t you worry, dog,’’ I said, as we got back in the car a while later, ‘‘We’ll see Trump in prison yet.’’