You might know it as the verge or the grassy bit between the footpath and the road, or maybe you do not have such things at all where you live.

The verge in front of our house is a kind of motley collection of various types of grass and well, lots of weeds. We’re on a quite busy road and it gets quite a lot of sun – it’s a pretty harsh environment.

In Sydney in some areas, maintenance of this area is your responsibility, others the Council takes care of it. We’re in the latter group. In our case “takes care” means a lawnmower on a setting so low that it takes it down to the roots and exposes bare patches of earth.

In summer this brutalisation happens once a fortnight, but because it has been raining quite a bit this year the usual Council mowing hasn’t been happening as regularly as it otherwise might.

As an experiment to see if there was any hope for anything out there beyond grass and weeds, earlier in the summer I planted a very straggly geranium and cast about some marigold seeds I’d liberated from some dead flowers. They’re both going better than expected (expected being quickly dying) but the grass was growing even better and swamping the plants entirely.

Council mowing has been happening in surrounding streets in the past days so I thought I’d trim back the long grass around the plants to see if they were left untouched by the mowers. If they weren’t, no real loss.

So after our morning walk and while the coffee was brewing, I went outside and started trimming.

Because of the busy road, I was very careful to not trim too closely to the gutter and tried to be very conscious of where my hands were. Unfortunately I clearly have very little idea of the rest of my body in relation to my hands.

And so it came to pass that my head was poked out into the road and I happened to glance up and see a fast-moving bus about a metre from my head.

Not very illustrative illustration below.

not to scale

I drew back pretty quickly and felt the whoosh as it passed.

I’m absolutely fine, but it definitely gets you thinking!