Glorious gadgets
Ursula Buchan
Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the knowledge that your gardening friends and relations are easy to buy for. Little twiddly gardening gadgets are the very stuff of mail-order catalogues, and thus available without you leaving your hearthside to sit in a traffic jam. If a paving stone weeder doesn’t quite fit the bill (although, trust me, they are very useful) you could consider a garden vacuum. I know fashion bullies think they are really naff, but take no notice, for they are brilliant. A 3000 watt Black and Decker or Flymo machine (somewhere between £50 and £60, depending on where you buy it) will suck up plant detritus and leaves, and cut them into little bits, small enough to put in the compost bin. If you cannot be fished to decant this mulch, the machine is also capable of blowing leaves into a corner or under a hedge, where they can simply be forgotten about.
However, none of this solves the problem of something big and expensive for your nearest and dearest. This is trickier. It is very easy to spend £50, but a little harder to spend £200. Harder but, I assure you, not impossible, for that kind of money should allow you to acquire the most useful garden tools to have come on the market in recent years: the digital camera and the iPod player. A digital camera gives you the capacity to capture masses of images, every day of the year if you like, enabling you to build up a complex and truthful picture of how your garden looks at every season. It has become a vital piece of kit for anyone who is as interested in the look of the garden as the nurture of the individual plants in it. It has a price scarcely below rubies but an excellent ‘prosumer’ SLR, such as the Canon EOS 1000D or Nikon D60, may be purchased on the internet for £300 or thereabouts. These cameras take sufficiently good pictures for you to consider inviting your neighbours round for a PowerPoint presentation. (Just an idea.) However, if all that is required is a substitute notebook, £50 may be all you need to pay.
I am a reasonably new convert to the iPod (£179 RRP for the iPod Classic 120 GB), because I was too mean to buy one for myself, so had to wait for others to think that I was worth the expense. I had long assumed that its greatest benefit was in making a rush-hour Tube journey endurable, by delivering the Mass in B Minor directly to both ears and thereby effectively blocking out the humdrum world. That is certainly of great value, but I have also discovered that the best way of enduring — indeed positively enjoying — the autumn garden clean-up on a misty, drizzly November day in failing light, is to tuck an iPod into a top pocket (so that you don’t catch the earphone wires when using long-handled garden tools) and listen to downloaded music or one of the many free podcasts, available from iTunes or the BBC. If the downloading were a difficult thing to do, believe me, I would not be doing it. When my allotted task is particularly long, dreary, repetitive and lonely — as can sometimes be the case at this season — I turn to the weekly TimesOnline Timeghost podcast from Armstrong and Miller, who put their finger, as they would phrase it, on the pulse of the cultural Zeitgeist. It makes me laugh out loud, which I hope is rather less disturbing to my neighbours than a blaring radio.
All this, you may say, is stale buns, but it is just possible that you have not yet discovered a cracking little refinement called the Robi. It is made by Roberts and costs £49.99 and you can plug it into any iPod — except the Shuffle — and it requires no other source of power. The significance of the Robi resides in the fact that it is a mini DAB/FM radio. Sure, that enables the listener to grapple with In Our Time on the bus but, more importantly, for me and perhaps also for you, is that it makes it possible to listen to Test Match Special on BBC 5 Live Sports Extra in the summertime, when out gardening or mowing the lawn. Armed with one of these clever gadgets, I have only to contain my soul in patience until the Ashes Series begins on 8 July next year. Happy Christmas shopping. ❑
Previous page
