I’m worried that grass is taking over my life

Desperate for answers, Will Gore is left stunned by some fatherly gardening advice

A summer lawn can be a thing of beauty but also a source of anguish (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Looking back, I sometimes feel I spent a disproportionate amount of my early years thinking about grass. Not that kind of course! (Indeed, when it comes to ‘that kind’, I remain an almost complete innocent – aside from a rather disappointing experience in Amsterdam about a decade ago.)

No, rather tragically, I really do just mean grass of the sort you’d find in your garden, or churned into mud at the local park. It was, in many ways, the source of great contentment. As a child, all I really wanted to do was kick a football around a manicured patch, with imagined white lines contrasting with the emerald turf. Later, when cricket took over, I spent hours examining rough patches just outside leg stump, and imagining myself taking diving catches on lush outfields.

But there were grassy downsides too: rugby lessons first thing on a Monday morning, when Mr Snape made us do commando crawls for no apparent reason over dew-saturated, worm-infested pitches; cricket matches played on fields where rocks competed with dog turds for supremacy. And the worst thing of all: our garden.