Hacked Off

Hatchets - they stock bloody hatchets, but not machetes.  Following on from Monday's musings on the unavailability of machete-type gardening tools on the High Street, I decided to widen my search to DIY superstores like B&Q, where I found them equally unavailable, but discovered that hatchets, (not to mention full sized bloody axes), were available there as supposed gardening implements.  I mean, Jesus, if they won't sell machetes because of their perceived association with killers in slasher movies, then why hatchets?  Have they never seen a horror movie?  Hatchets feature just as much as machetes.  There was an entire series of slasher films called Hatchet, for God's sake!  Not to mention giallos like Hatchet For the Honeymoon, or Dario Argento's Tenebrae, which features a whole series of hackings to death with a full-feldged axe).  Then there are even older films like Night Must Fall, which, if memory serves me correctly, features an axe murderer.  It's something of a tradition.  Yet machetes are beyond the pale, while axes are OK.  The world's gone mad.  I did discover that I could buy a machete online from the likes of Amazon, but would doing that set off alarms somewhere and trigger a visit from the police on the grounds that it is illegal to send weapons through the post?  (I know that you can't obtain air pistols and rifles by mail order any more - you can only buy them in person).  It seems pretty bizarre, though, that, in the case of machetes, I can buy them online, but not in person.

Obviously, I don't want a machete - or similar bladed implement - in order to start a reign of terror as Crapchester's resident crazed slasher.  Rather, I want it for my version of gardening.  I mean, if you could see the state my garden has gotten into, you'd understand.  I cut a lot of it back at the start of Summer, but it just keeps growing back.  It's depressing really.  A never ending battle that can never be won.  At times, I look at it and I know how Sisyphus must have felt eternally rolling that bloody boulder uphill.   Anyway, it has got to the stage where the likes of lawn strimmers (even if I could get my ancient example to work), simply aren't up to the task.  So, I determined that a more formidable hand held bladed device was need to hack everything down: a machete, or even a scythe.  Now, despite recalling that father once had a garden hand scythe, such things now seem as impossible to easily obtain as machetes.  Do the retailers think that people are going try and emulate death in those Final Destination films, scything down teenagers, or maybe set up in business as rivals to the actual Grim Reaper?  Why is it so difficult to obtain such simple gardening tools nowadays?  Damn it, all I want to do is hack down some overly persistent weeds!