I Have Become the Old Man Who Complains About Leaf Blowers, and I Regret Nothing

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I want to be honest with you about how this started, because there is no dignified way to frame it and I've stopped trying. I stood at my own front window on a Tuesday morning with a stopwatch — an actual stopwatch, the kind I used to time engine-room drills with, not some app, because apps feel like admitting you've thought about this too much, which I had — and I timed my neighbour clearing his drive with a leaf blower. Forty-one minutes. I counted the leaves afterwards, once he'd gone in for what I assume was a well-earned rest. Nine. Nine leaves, Northumberland's finest, seen off in a campaign lasting longer than most of the battles I read about as a boy, using a machine that sounds like a Boeing 737 experiencing a bad morning.

It's been going on six weeks now, this business, though I didn't clock it as a "business" until about week three. He's out there most days it isn't actually raining, sometimes twice — a pre-emptive strike on Tuesday for leaves that, as far as I can tell, have not yet had the courage to fall, and a proper campaign on Friday for the ones that have. He wears ear defenders, the industrial kind, and a look of total, monastic concentration, sweeping the blower left to right in slow, deliberate arcs like a man metal-detecting a beach for something he's fairly sure isn't there. I've watched him herd a single crisp packet the length of his drive and back three times before it finally escaped under the gate, at which point he stood, hands on hips, and regarded the gate the way you'd regard an opponent who'd got lucky.

I want to be fair to him. He's not doing anything wrong. There is no bylaw against a man clearing his own drive of organic matter using equipment he is legally entitled to own. I've checked — of course I've checked, we'll come to that. But there is something about the particular thoroughness of it, the sheer unnecessary completeness of a forty-minute campaign against nine leaves, that I recognised the very first week, with a jolt that had nothing to do with the noise, and everything to do with the uncomfortable sensation of watching a stranger do, in public, on a Tuesday, something I do privately and would deny under oath.

I used to find men like this faintly ridiculous, and I mean a specific man, not a type — there was a fellow three streets over from where I lived thirty years ago, a retired postmaster, who used to stand sentry over a single flowerbed for the better part of an hour most mornings, and I'd walk past him on my way to the harbour and think, with the particular contempt of a man who has an actual job, that here was proof of what happened to you once the big commands stopped needing you. I had a command to run. I had a watch to keep, actual weather to worry about, real consequences hanging on whether I got a decision right, and here was a retired postmaster treating a rose bed like the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember thinking, with the smug certainty of someone who has never had a Tuesday with nothing in it, that I would never become that. I had depth to me. I had purpose. I would find better things to be furious about.

Reader, I did not find better things.

I found leaves.

What I haven't admitted to anyone until this sentence is how far my own research has gone. I know, for instance, that a domestic leaf blower of the sort he owns produces somewhere in the region of 90 to 100 decibels at the operator's ear, which is roughly a petrol lawnmower, or, for context, a low-flying light aircraft, and I know this because I looked it up, twice, at hours of the night I'm not going to specify. I know the council's guidance on residential noise nuisance start times, which he has never once breached, more's the pity, because it would have given me something to actually do with all this. I have, God help me, started checking the Met Office forecast the night before, not for my own benefit, but to work out roughly when he'll be out there — a sort of unpaid, unwanted, entirely uninvited meteorological consultancy service for a man who has never asked for one. I have not complained to anyone. I have not so much as mentioned it to him directly. I have simply accumulated, week on week, an entire dossier of grievance against a man who has never done anything to me except own a slightly more modern garden than I'd have chosen, and I file it all away in the part of my head that used to hold weather routing and fuel calculations, which tells you rather more about the current state of that part of my head than I'd like.

The quiet humiliation of it — and I do mean humiliation, not embarrassment, there's a difference — is that I know precisely what I sound like when I complain about it. I sound like every retired man I have ever gently mocked. I hear myself begin a sentence with "the trouble with these modern blowers is—" and some distant, younger version of me, the one still doing actual work in actual weather, looks on with the particular contempt only your own past self can manage. He'd have had that drive cleared with a besom broom in four minutes flat and been back inside for his tea before the blower chap had even found the extension lead. I've caught myself, more than once this month, standing at that same window at half past nine on a Tuesday for no reason I could defend to a magistrate, just watching the drive, waiting to see if he'd come out, the way you'd watch a kettle you already know is going to boil. I want to tell that younger man something, and it isn't reassuring.

And here's the odd part, the part I keep circling without quite landing on: I didn't learn this particular brand of fury on a Tuesday morning at sixty-seven. I learned it a very long time before that, on a bridge, from a man who never once raised his voice, and who I hadn't thought about properly in years until a stranger with a leaf blower dragged him straight back into my kitchen.

There's a reason I clocked this in myself so quickly, and it isn't flattering — and it's the part of this story I've never told anyone, not even the neighbour whose leaves started it.