We need silencers for mowers

IT’S simplicity itself to kill someone silently. I know, I’ve seen it in the films.

You hide in a wardrobe till they’re sitting having their tea then you sneak out and flatten yourself against the kitchen door.

You take out your matt black handgun then reach into your pocket for a matt black tube the size of a Havana cigar, which you screw into the muzzle of the weapon.

You peek round the corner of the door, point your gun, squeeze the trigger, and with a sound no louder than the burping of the lid on a Tupperware sandwich box, your victim is dispatched, and the neighbours none the wiser.

This has been going on since at least the early 1960s to my knowledge, so here is my question.

If such technology can be developed to allow murders – still illegal in most areas – to be committed without alerting the general populace, why can the same not be done to allow garden maintenance to be committed without preventing the populace sitting in their own bloomin’ gardens in the summer?

I took a book and a glass of squash out to my garden bench where I planned to catch some of

It was as if the 5th Panzer Division was coming over the hill

the 20-degree rays we were blessed with last week. I expected no greater noise than the trilling of blackbirds, a musical sound that actually enhances the quiet.

But within seconds of my sitting down it was as if the 5th Panzer Division was coming over the hill.

Mowers and strimmers started up from all directions at a decibel level which the KGB would have been delighted to point at a captive Michael Caine in one of those movies. I lasted five minutes before retreating back inside.

Now, I thought the EU had a rule about this kind of thing. Probably the kind of rule that the landed gentry keep complaining about because they like to ride about their estates on a mower the size of a large family car, using the ancestral blunderbuss to take pot-shots at Lithuanian turnip-pickers on the adjacent farmland. So even more reason to enforce it.

Get mowers and strimmers fitted with silencers. Create an army of inspectors armed with noise meters and power of arrest.

And if Brussels really wants my vote it can send someone round to bazooka that Tiger tank on the other side of the leylandii.