How doing your best gets you into trouble

Him Outdoors has taken on most of the outside jobs in our rented house in England, including cutting the grass. He's always liked lawns and is happy to walk up and down behind a mower. Here there is a ride on so he can play on a machine too.

The disadvantage of a ride on is that if you leave it too long between cuts (due to the horrible wet weather) then you get left with a cut hay field. We have a private lawn which we have kept raked up but the main grass was a hay field. Eventually his tidiness and boredom got the better of him and he raked it up by the barrowload and dumped it around the property in hidden corners.

BIG MISTAKE, HUGE.

Letter from neighbour asking him to pick it up again from their edge of the bridleway. Visit from landlady asking him to move the pile he had made.

Apparently the neighbour had had a goat eat cut laurel from the bridleway and died and the landlady says that horses die if they eat cut grass. The grass dies if you leave the cut grass on it so could he please spread it out again.................................

My main horror is that I had no idea that horses died of eating cut grass - apparently it ferments in their stomachs - and might easily have given it to them. I know they break their legs just running along which seems daft enough but to not be able to eat grass????