My dad was a keen gardener, proud of his flower borders bursting with colour and his pristine, weed-free lawn, which he mowed himself every week in the summer with a heavy old hand-pushed lawnmower without benefit of either petrol or electricity. Dandelions sometimes had the nerve to appear in the lawn, and on his way out to work, Dad would whisk a screwdriver out of his jacket pocket and use it to lever the villain out of the grass. The sight of him bending down to make a surgical strike on a dandelion with his trusty screwdriver stuck in everyone's minds. We all laughed about it and said it was typical of him to be too impatient to go to the garage and get a proper gardening tool. But as time went on and we acquired lawns and weeds of our own, we secretly tried out the screwdriver as a gardening tool when nobody was looking, and one by one we concluded that it was the right tool for the job.

What made my father's use of a screwdriver as a weeding tool especially funny was that the screwdriver was actually the tool of his trade (he had a ‘sales and repair’ radio and television shop). We were more accustomed to seeing the screwdriver being used to take the back off a Bush or Ekco TV.