THE BED IS WET

I was mowing the lawn the other day when I realised that some people might find it strange that every time I mow the lawn I think of wetting the bed.

I know what you're thinking - it's the dandelions, what the French call "pis-en-lit" (pee in the bed).

No, it wasn't the dandelions, though I do remember that superstition from my youth. The fear then was that if you touched the white liquid in the stem you would wet the bed. Today, in checking it out in Wikipedia I find there is some science behind the superstition as the roots or leaves apparently have a diuretic effect when consumed.

But no, it wasn't the dandelions.

It was this thing. An illustration representing a lawn.

To explain this I have to go back deep into my youth. From an early age and into my teens I regularly wet the bed. This was a serious embarrassment to me and a worry to my parents. At one stage I was brought to the doctor who, in the course of asking me all sorts of questions, produced the above illustration.

"That's a lawn" she said. "Here's a pencil. Show me how you would mow the grass."

It took me a while to figure what this meant but I eventually drew a series of up & down vertical lines across the lawn and this seemed to go down OK.

I really didn't see the connection between mowing the lawn and wetting the bed until many years later when it dawned on me that it was really a brain test and nothing to do with lawns as such.

She simply wanted to establish whether I had the capacity to take a systematic approach to the task or not.

But maybe you can now see why every time I mow the lawn I think about wetting the bed.

I'll stop here but if I had a mind to, I could write a book.