Dom Joly: Where was I for the lesson on how to be a man?

When I took up golf, a whole new avenue of shopping opened up. Suddenly there were gadgets, clubs, clothes to peruse and purchase – heaven! I've pretty much exhausted that particular area now and have been on the lookout for a new area of consumer expansion. I think I might have just found it in the garden. I'm a very lazy gardener. In fact, I don't garden at all – I have a gardener. This doesn't mean that I can't invest in the thing does it?

We went to a friend's for lunch. He loves his garden. I mean really loves it. He is an obsessive lawn mower and can spend hours getting it just right. To help him do this he has a lawn brush. I've never seen one of these before. It's a huge two-metre-wide thing that he brushes the lawn with before mowing it. The brush does the same thing as a shaving brush and pops the blades up ready for execution. As we ate lunch under a Mediterranean-style pergola I could see his eyes dissecting his lawn. There was clearly something that was bothering him and I had a feeling that the lawn was going to have to be punished. Sure enough, straight after lunch he was up and on the lawn using some weird pronging implement to aerate the thing.

I wish I could become obsessed with my lawn. I just like lying down on it. Maybe I should make more of an effort? The problem is that I'm not a man's man. I can't do DIY things – Stacey is much better than I am. I did change the tyre on my Jag last week when it got a puncture. This was because it happened at school and I was surrounded by can-do dads. It would have been too humiliating to call the AA out. I nearly did it too, until one of the dads spotted that my jack was about to collapse as I'd put it on wrong – oh, and I couldn't work out that one of the nuts had a lock on it.

Where do people learn things like lawn maintenance and tyre changing? Did I miss a meeting? Back at the lawn man's place, he took me to a second, much smaller lawn where he had installed a cricket net. He wasn't going to stop there however. From his manly shed, full of man equipment, he produced a bowling machine. This was the most fun I've ever had legally in a garden. He gradually increased the speed of balls that were being fired towards me as I drove and cut and slogged to my heart's content. I gave up at 90 miles an hour. The ball was like an Exocet missile and I wasn't wearing testicular protection. I was pretty pleased with myself however – I had taken on the bowling attack and behaved like a man.

The lawn man seemed pleased with me and I felt a little less emasculated as we wandered over his third lawn to the house for a cooling drink. I announced that I was going to get a bowling machine and a cricket net installed in my garden. He looked at me with concern. This was not something you could just buy and play, he said. He described the two years of rolling and mowing, then the complicated plastic lattice he had installed just under the turf to stop the pitch getting boggy. I realised with great sadness that this was not going to be something I could do. On the way home I bought a croquet set – "Have you got a flat lawn?" asked the salesman. I need a word with my gardener.