I have to admit to being a little surprised by the lack of ‘stripe’ talk going on in these revered (yeah) blog pages recently. Normally you can’t move for blogs by Drew or Dick droning on about how to stripe your lawn, what equipment you need and how striped lawns are just an optical illusion caused by the light hitting either the thin pointy bit when the blades are facing in your direction or the broad bit when they are bent away. Still awake? Didn’t think so.
Not that I am averse to a stripe or two. I have many chums who live out in the country, a few in the sort of dwellings that would make The Crawley family in Downton Abbey feel inferior and a great many of these chaps and gels have stripes on their lawns.
In fact my very good chum Roddy Archington – a tremendous and generous friend who sounds not so much as though he has a plum in his mouth, as a whole bunch of grapes – has a stripy croquet lawn and a full sized cricket pitch on his estate and we do all pop own occasionally for a weekend of revels and to watch slightly unfit older men and keen thirty-year-olds knocking leather balls around and trying hard to be Joe Root or Ben Foakes but looking more like Norman Wisdom.
Green and Classic – Like A 1962 Morris Minor
Anyhow. The point is it is the time of year when lawn enthusiasts fetch out their classic cylinder mowers and run across their laws creating sharp, smart stripes that are the envy of their neighbours… unless that is their neighbours also own an Allett Mower… but that’s neither here nor there.
So, to get to my point (Please do! Ed) I am going to celebrate the delayed but welcome arrival of some warm and clement weather and the arrival of the perfectly striped lawn with a short list of my own favourite stripy things.
Some might say this is a frivolous and trivial way to use up my weekly allotment of blog time and to those people, I say…absolutely, haven’t you read my stuff before?
So here goes. My top 5 favourite stripy things.
- Breton Tops. We all know fashion is about as consistent as Theresa May’s Brexit policy, but The Breton Top has
‘Hello? Is that the fashion police? yes. It seems I am in the clear’
managed to remain a badge of fashion for a very long time. Loved by Fishermen, trendy North Londoners and Tin Tin and made famous by Coco Chanel’s nautical collection in 1917, the Breton top with its stripes is a shining beacon of permanently fashionable stripy wonderfulness. It has been seen gracing the top halves of such heavenly bodies as Alexa Chung, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Debbie Harry, Pablo Picasso, Jean Paul Gaultier and The Duchess of Cambridge, whose sister (‘Pips’ as I like to call her) also likes a bit of a stripe from time to time. The classic Breton top is also worn very often by my friend Desperate Dave. Now Dave is not a man of fashion, in fact, he’s about as fashionable as corporal punishment, but he wears the look because he insists he is from French Huguenot ancestry and therefore allowed to wear the stripes as a birthright. Mind you he also says he’s Scottish and part Jewish but you don’t often see him hanging around in a kilt and a shtreimel so it’s anyone’s guess really.
- The White Stripes. An iconic lo-fi rock band. Jack White and his Sister Meg looked like half a band that had fallen out with the other half over royalties when they first hit the scene in Detroit in the late nineties. However, but everyone soon realised that the decision to not have a bass player, keyboard player or anyone else musical involved was a masterstroke as Jack and Meg made more than enough noise to compensate and were a fabulous duo showing the world rock, garage and Americana could be done with serious cool as well as style and power.
- Tigers and Tabbies. Yes. I know they are not the same but I couldn’t have them as two categories as they are too similar so they have to share an uneasy category together.
You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry
I love stripy cats. big, small, tiny cute kittens that make everyone go ‘Ahhh’ or the dangerously beautiful Siberian tigers that peer at you hungrily through the glass at Regent’s Park Zoo and that you know could eat you faster than a UKIP leader resigns, I love em. More animals should be stripy I say.
- Toothpaste. The ancient Egyptians are often credited with creating toothpaste in about 5000 BC. Ra knows what they made it from but it can’t have been effective. Have you ever seen a Mummy with good teeth? Whatever, they certainly didn’t have stripy toothpaste. Where would we be without stripy toothpaste and the perennial small children’s bedtime question… how the bloomin’ hell do they get the stripes in there? In fact, it’s everyone’s question. I mean, you can’t get striped paint for love nor money. I know because a friend decorating my house, and to whom I was chatting while he worked asked me to pop and get him some once. So if science can’t create stripy paint, how come it can create have stripy toothpaste? It’s a stripy mystery.
- Blondie’s Parallel Lines. Recorded well before my time I know (Sorry Ken Bruce) but I became aware of this album through older friends and it’s the poppiest, toppiest, coolest album ever. Nobody does smart, melodic crisp yet still edgy pop music like Blondie and this piece of vinyl (yes I own it on vinyl) is seldom off my poor, overworked turntable. Sunday Girl, One Way Or Another, Heart of Glass, Fade Away and Radiate, Picture This… it’s like a greatest hits record for goodness sake. The longest song is 4 minutes and the shortest is 2 minutes 8 seconds. Now THAT’s what I call pop!
And that’s what I call the end. Hope your early summer/late spring is going well and don’t forget to visit MowDirect if you need any good quality, great value garden machinery, especially if you want to put stripes on your lawn. and if you need more advice on the many ways to achieve striping, why not have a look on our knowledge base MowHow
See ya. Holly
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