Tim Dowling: a rake has it in for me – and the tortoise

On a weekend afternoon, with the temperature nudging 30C, my wife and I take the dog for a walk. Neither of us wants to go, so we go together, and agree to keep it short.

“Oh no,” my wife says when we get to the park. I look across the open expanse and see what she sees.

“Picnics,” I say. Under every tree, in every square foot of available shade, people are sitting on blankets with food spread in front of them.

“An absolute minefield,” my wife says. “I should have thought of this.”

To be fair, the dog has never disrupted a picnic in progress, causing the sort of mayhem my wife and I are both very good at imagining. That’s because the dog has never been allowed anywhere near a picnic.

We keep the dog on the lead until we are safely across some baked playing fields, taking a wide route that affords no shade and makes the walk twice as long as we’d anticipated.

When we get home, drained and listless, I find the tortoise on his back in the garden again, legs flapping helplessly. Like the summer heat, the tortoise going upside down used to be a once-every-four-years event, but this is the second time it’s happened in six weeks. I think: how careless can one animal be? I set the tortoise back on his feet, and promptly step on a rake.

To be fair, I was heading for the rake on purpose – it was leaning against the house and I was intending to put it away. But as I approach I fail to notice the tines are facing outward, and put my foot on them. The handle flies past my outstretched fingers and thwacks me in the face.

“Ow,” I say, feeling my upper lip, which has already begun to swell. Flinging the rake into the bushes by the back door, I am reminded that slapstick is the purest form of humiliation – simple and total. I resolve to tell no one about this episode.

“I just stepped on a rake, like in a cartoon,” I say to the middle one five minutes later.

“Really?” he says, not looking up from his laptop.

“A once-in-a-lifetime act of stupidity,” I say, although I recall the same thing happening to me about three years ago. At least it was dark that time.

“I guess the lesson is, put the rake away,” he says.

“I was putting the rake away,” I say.

The next morning my wife suggests a walk in a place she is sure will be free of picnics. “And it’s on the way to the dump,” she says.

We drive to a car park at the very edge of the borough, alongside a remote skateboard park patronised exclusively by men over 30.

“What’s that about?” my wife says.

“Dunno,” I say. “Some restraining order-based initiative, maybe.”

Beyond the skate park lies a small, empty field, recently mowed.

“On my phone it looks like it goes on for miles,” my wife says. But in front of us we can only see a couple of acres. We cross the field to a line of trees and follow a narrow path overgrown with brambles and nettles, emerging at a gurgling stream spanned by an improvised bridge of garbage: an old tyre, a partially burnt log and two of those long rubber feet used to support temporary fencing.

“What now?” I say.

“We cross,” my wife says.

Beyond the stream we find a vast space reclaimed by wilderness: stubby trees, wildflowers, wetlands full of ducks and herons.

We can see nothing beyond this oasis but tall buildings in the distance. There are no other people. The dog zips through the tall grass, leaving zigzagged indentations.

“It’s amazing,” my wife says.

“And so handy for the dump,” I say.

Back at home, the dog stretches out on the cool kitchen floor, exhausted. I go to open the garden door, only to find it jammed. The handle of the rake is leaning against it on the other side, wedged into the corner of the glass pane, holding it shut.

I think: this rake really has it in for me. I force the door open a few inches and squeeze past.

At the other end of the rake I find the tortoise, his back leg trapped between two tines. Evidently he was ambling past, caught his foot and pulled the rake over against the door.

“I can’t help feeling this is partly my fault,” I say, freeing his trapped foot. The tortoise gives me a look that says: this is all your fault.

I guess the lesson is, put the rake away.