PALE RIDERS
A Missouri couple are facing charges after they were spotted riding a stolen lawn mower in the nude. Responding to a 911 call about a naked man driving an orange lawn mower with a nude woman in his lap, Jasper County Sheriff’s Office deputies encountered Tanya Hopper and Larry Webster in front of a friend's residence. The riding lawn mower was parked outside the home. The suspects claimed that they were skinny dipping when their clothes were stolen by a man who emerged from the adjacent woods. Instead of walking home nude, the duo said they opted to drive away on a mower they claimed to have found in the woods. Since Hopper and Webster did not own the lawn mower in question--a $5000 Kubota 'zero-turn radius' model--they were arrested for theft.

LEADSOM’S LEGACY?
I know it’s a bit of stretch from nude mowing to Andrea Leadsom, but the would-be Prime Minister just a couple of weeks ago, has landed the job of spearheading the future for British farmers in the Brexit era. Writing in the Farmers Guardian today (now in an impressive magazine format) she highlights the UK’s ‘continued investment in state-of-the-art science and technology making farmers amongst the most efficient and productive in the world’. Let’s hope that investment is firmly underpinned in the possible absence of EU support.

DODGY BRANDING
Dewy summer days, harvest in full swing, picnics in the countryside. The fulsome image of the British countryside is well presented by advertisers. So trawling the shelves of Tesco looking for proof of the providence of food British food you spy brands like Woodside Farms, Boswell Farms, Nightingale Farms and Rosedene Farms. Suggestions of family farms in perhaps Cumbria or Somerset. Except they don't. They are ‘fake’ brands, auto-suggesting their source, when in fact the products they adorn are often sourced from outside the UK. The NFU have formally complained to the National Trading Standards Institute who are investigating the wide-spread use by Tesco.   

LTA
Talking about branding, for months we at Service Dealer have been told of an ‘impending’ re-launch of the industry’s Landbased Technician Accreditation scheme (LTA) which was launched in a blaze of enthusiasm and positivity in 2007. Almost 10 years on, the scheme has not grabbed the attention of the industry as a whole. Yet it has so much to offer our front-line staff that it really needs industry leaders to grab its potential by the neck. Perhaps they were waiting for Mr Chilcott to finish his other job.

GUNNERS UP FOR MOWING?
With the football season just around the corner, I see that Arsenal defender Per Mertesacker is describing himself as one of the teams ‘new lawnmowers’. Probably something to do with translation from German unless a home loss might mean that Arsene Wenger imposes groundsman’s duties on the highly paid stars as a penance.