I always say to my neighbours that they can use my mower as long as they don't take it out of my garden. But the Bosh Rotak 36 is different, a machine that entices you out of your deckchair and so attempt to make those neat lines and plaid on your puny piece of lawn like you see on premier league football pitches. I think its most men's dream to be able to retire with just another money and garden so to nurture a pristine lawn, maybe grand and big enough one day so to be able to purchase a mower with a seat on.

There is something very therapeutic about cutting the lawn for men as it marks out your territory, that smell and sound a mower makes mid April wonderful to your senses as you know summer is on the way. I prefer the blade type mower as the Flymo ones tend to fire debris all over the place and you can hit by ricochets if you're unlucky, worse still take out your neighbours kids eye out for an almighty row, even though just about everything has come over the fence their side of late, including the football through the greenhouse. Our other neighbours are mostly middle-class and so tend to buy a garden implement and machine for every job that needs doing on 'their land', all very 'Good Life', often for jobs that don't need doing at all. Sunday mornings are like some sort of garden convention in our road.



Technical Details

* Featuring unique grass combs that allows you to cut right to the edge
* 1400 Watt Hi-torque 'PowerDrive' motor offers superb cutting and collection
* 36cm Width of cut, with high speed steel blade
* 10 Heights of cut (20-70mm)
* Lightweight and maneuverable, only 11.1kg
* Rear collect grassbox (40 liters)
* 2 Years parts & labour guarantee
* Unique grass combs
* 10 position spring assisted HOC adjustment from 20-70mm
* Tool free height adjustment
* Fold down handles

Tech wise it's basic but does have some nice touches. The 10 position adjustment for the blade clearance is pretentious but it's always nice to be able to feel the blade closer to the floor. I have managed to use about three settings so far. The collection box isn't the biggest so you have to make a mountain of grass cuttings somewhere on your journey. The 'unique grass combs' are hardly that and serve little purpose other than to comb the grass blades that were missed although it does help it to cut right to the edge of your lawn without tipping into the flower bed.

You have about a 40cm cut channel and so it's up and down for quite a while, the 40m cable giving you enough stretch to do most of your lawn. There isn't a power extension with this so you will need to make a purchase there, no more than a fiver from Wilkinson's. The guard is set low to stop you cutting the cable and being electrocuted and it's not an urban myth that those things happen. Most of this mower is plastic and so that not likely to happen to you though. You can get those robot ones these days that cut on their own if you are lazy and scared of being fried.

At just 11kg in weight and fold down handles its easy to store and move around, not like the old iron jobs when we were kids. Although it was therapeutic cutting the lawn with dad with those simple old manual cutters that were just a blade and frame it is nice for the electricity to do most of the work. I don't like petrol lawnmowers and they are quite expensive to run these days and the slightest leak means corrosion and worse so always go electric. They also stink of all manner of chemicals and tend to be noisier.

The negatives would have to be the cable doesn't wrap neat to the machine and that smallish grass basket is also a pain. It's not great for lefties as the power button is on the right hand side of the mower. It looks nice though and not too noisy and a fair price at around £130 (£119 on Amazon) when I purchased it from Argos. It cuts through most grass types and surprisingly good for a neat finish, unlike the noisy and angry Flymo style cutters. In fact I really don't think you should stay with the Flymo style mowers as the blade types have come on so much since the days when you had to dig out your rusty Qualcast from the shed in the 1970s.