Lack of handball makes men do desperate things - even gardening

Cavanman's Diary

The thing I’m missing most over the last year is handball. There have been no tournaments to play in and very few to watch, no events to look forward to. When Leo Varadkar made that famous speech in Washington DC on March 12, 2020, everything changed.

The handball season was shelved and for the vast majority, it hasn’t come back. Like a lot of niche sports, those who are into it are really into it. Suddenly, we have hours to fill and it hasn’t been easy finding other ways to pass the time.

I’m not one for television; the evenings drag on and I count the minutes till we return. It’s been seven hours and 381 days, to paraphrase Sinéad O’Connor, since they took my gloves away.

I played golf last summer while the courses were open and enjoyed it and took up table tennis and, latterly, kayaking and of course, covering the club championships and Ulster Championship were brilliant. But it’s not the same.

Lately, out of sheer desperation, I toyed with the idea of gardening. I came up with a project; I decided to dig up the lawn and re-seed it, turn my patch of weed-ridden grass, full of humps and hollows, into a modern day version of what Breffni Park was known as when it was officially opened in the 1920s, “the Croke Park of the north”.

I asked a friend what to do. “You’ll need to kill off the existing grass,” he said. On the other end of the line, I nodded sagely and took a note on a piece of paper lying on the desk: “Grass must die.”

The killing of the grass would take 10 days to a fortnight, he told me. After that, I’d need to hire a rotavator (this is an engine-driven machine, not a person) and churn that baby up.

Then, she – this lawn is feminine – would need to be levelled and re-seeded. Fertiliser would have to be spread.

Oh, he added, you’ll have to pick the stones off it too. Now, this is a job that I can do. When it comes to stone-picking, I am an old hand. In my time at St Pat’s, a new football pitch was laid and on the first few days back in school in September, a gang of us were corralled into spending a few hours picking stones.

It was tedious, back-breaking work, with a teacher stationed on each 45, like linesmen, overseeing the various chain gangs. I’m not sure how the other lads felt about it but it taught me a valuable life lesson – manual labour wasn’t for me. And I definitely wasn’t for it.

Anyway, my days as a stone-picker are not all that relevant only to point out that while I am no Prunty or Hyland Turfcare, I am not altogether a newbie to this caper either. And being a man, it wouldn’t take much for me to pronounce myself an expert on the whole thing.

Anyway, before we got going, predictably, we hit a snag.

One corner of the lawn tends to be wet. Now was the time to sort this, I figured, so, again, I sought advice from someone who knows, a handy boy who has made a couple of cameo appearances in this column before.

You may recall, if your memory stretches back pre-Covid, last year, I got the job of helping take out the kitchen in the house. The mission statement for that particular enterprise was “rip it and skip it”; when in doubt, we tore it out.

As well as turning his hand to a bit of building from time to time, this man is a farmer who is up on matters of drainage and how to grow grass and all that jazz. How could I sort out this soggy spot, under the kitchen window?

“Dig a shore,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Which, to him, it probably was.

Being unhandy, I needed him to explain this premise further.

“Dig a trench, about nine inches wide, across the width of the lawn,” he recommended.

“You’ll need to be about a foot and a half deep at the shallowest part and taper it off then by about an inch per metre so you’ll have a fall to bring the water away.”

“What will I use to dig it?” I texted back.

“Haha,” he replied, “are you for real?”

I was but of course I couldn’t let him know that. “Hahaha,” I replied, adding an extra “ha” so that he would think I was joking all along and was laughing loudly at the good of it.

I presumed it was, in fact, a spade I needed, although I half-hoped there would be some use for the sledge-hammer on this job. My experience last year has taught me that the sledge is truly the rooter’s best friend.

So far, stages one and two are complete. The trench is in place and a perforated pipe laid and I got my hands on a product called Round-Up and scorched the lawn. As I look out, the whole thing is yellow and withering away. I check the progress every morning; I was saying, lockdown truly does mad things to people.

We’re all looking for ways to fill our time, for distractions from the goings-on around us. Did you ever think you’d read an 900 -word column about the digging up of a garden? I certainly didn’t think I’d ever write one but there you go.

The sooner the alleys open again, the better. This cat is going cracked…