BORIS JOHNSON: Sammy my robot lawnmower gives me hope for humanity

Ah! There he goes. I watch the latest addition to our household, out there on the lawn, and I feel all warm inside.

Nibble, nibble, nibble, goes Sammy, now pausing as he reaches the flowerbed. Munch, munch, munch.

He trims the clover, adjusts the moss, slices a blade or two, and then backs away as though to inspect, before nudging forward again to tidy things up. Then he swivels on his axis and in total Jeeves-like silence goes up and down the garden in stripes of Wimbledonian perfection.

I tell you, my friends, you will not find a hairdresser with half his accuracy. In all the perfumed salons of South Kensington, there is no coiffeur who can snip a wayward bang with anything like the precision of little Sammy.

He has brought peace to the garden. He has stopped the raging of my conscience, and he has given me time to do so many other things. I look at Sammy the robot sheep, and I feel a surging hope for humanity; that in these dark times it really is possible that some things, at least, are just getting better and better.

Boris Johnson’s ‘Sammy’ – The Husqvarna automatic lawn mower will save you grief, guilt, time, and money

I reflect that if we can produce an automatic lawnmower that is not only British built, but that also possesses such magical powers of tact and intelligence, then there is no limit to our Promethean* abilities.

My joy is all the more intense, because it follows such despair.

The thing about grass is that around about this time of year it starts growing, and then it really doesn’t stop for months and months.

Maybe it was just me, but last year I had the impression that it grew with a luxuriance, profusion and sheer photosynthetic energy that made it all but impossible to control.

If I turned my back on it for so much as an afternoon, the grasses seemed to shoot another head. If I went away for a week, I would come back to find the whole lawn lowering at me rebelliously like a shaggy-haired teenager.

So, late at night, I’d have no option but to heave myself aboard the ancient Countax Kawasaki ride-on machine the previous owners of our house had been kind enough to leave behind.

Fortified with a bottle of wine in the cup-holder, I would roar up and down, headlights on, like a combine harvester on the prairies of Saskatchewan.

In the morning I would study the results — the untouched tufts, the crazy meandering tracks through the pampas.

By day I would ride again, thugga, thugga, thugga, for so long I would go into a kind of trance and find myself accidentally reversing into a low-hanging branch, and almost bundling myself off to be chopped up, like so many other reckless ride-on drivers, beneath the murderous rotor blades of the mower.

My mowing was so sporadic that the grass was always too long, so the Countax would strain and groan with the effort of cutting, and all the rubber belts would keep spanging off: the blade belt, the transmission belt, the belt on the picker-upper jobby.

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I tried so long with numbed fingers to get these perished black belts back on their spools that I started to feel like some desperate tank officer trying to fix his machine before the enemy could arrive, because all around me I could almost see the grass growing, getting ready to trounce me again.

Then one evening, quite late, the motor mower conked out because I had managed, in the darkness, to run over my prized M&S lambswool sweater, and it had wrapped itself fatally around the blades — and I knew I was beat. I had to get help. So I recruited other kind souls to help me tackle the grass; and they brought even bigger machines with bigger decks of blades.

For a while it worked, but the costs were growing almost as fast as the undergrowth.

Then one day I was talking to my old friend Alister Jack, the Secretary of State for Scotland. As so often, he had the answer. Just as he found a way of taming the SNP, he had found a way to control his lawn. It was called a Husqvarna.

‘It’s not cheap to buy,’ said Alister, ‘but it will more than pay for itself in just a couple of years.’

He’s right. When you add up the cost of petrol, the repairs, to say nothing of the exorbitant cost of human labour, these robo-sheep will save you grief, guilt, time, and pretty soon they will save you money, too.

Sammy is tireless, and though his gentle little blades will wear out, they are inexpensive and easy to replace.

His battery will need changing every three years — but overall his upkeep is nothing compared with the cost, in fuel and maintenance, of a normal mower.

Yes, of course, he has his eccentricities, especially at first. He stole up on the two-year-old so silently that she freaked out and thought he was stalking her; and there was one bit of flowerbed where he regularly got stuck.

But the whole point about Sammy is that he learns, fast and in fantastic detail.

He knows how to go around the daffodils, and even the primroses. As for hedgehogs, this robot sheep is so herbivorous that he would probably avoid them, and anyway, the results of any collision would be nothing to the mangling that wildlife was getting from my motor mower.

I can be up in a plane over the Pacific and look at my mobile phone, and I can tell you exactly where in the garden he is and what he is up to, because he is controlled from space. He is in constant communication with satellites that allow him to plan his next move.

So to all those Luddites moaning about robots and artificial intelligence, I say: brace up! Look at Sammy. Technology doesn’t destroy good jobs. It destroys outdated and pointless jobs.

By ending my late-night weavings on the Countax, Sammy has liberated me to do things that correspond more closely to my skillset.

I look at Sammy, and I know we are in the foothills of a glorious new epoch.

I see robot delivery vans, and automated mass transit systems, and as Sammy moves around the garden with millimeter accuracy, I ask myself, for instance: why the hell do we still have human drivers sitting pointlessly in the cabs of Tube trains?

It was the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick who asked, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? — a novel later filmed as Blade Runner. Well, I now have an electric sheep, and as it runs its blade over my lawn, it does things I used to read about in the sci-fi novels of the 1960s and 1970s, but which I never thought I would see with my own eyes.

Now it’s all happening. The predictions of the great Isaac Asimov are coming true in our gardens and our homes.

I am not saying that these robots can solve all the ills of humanity, but they can certainly deal with your chronic aversion to mowing the lawn.

Classical corner

*Promethean: Of, relating to, or resembling Prometheus, one of the Titans of Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Associated with creativity, inventiveness and originality 

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