Glastonbury comes to KT6...

...but without the mud. It was our daughter’s 18th birthday and the lawn experienced the closest thing to Glastonbury it’s ever going to be subjected to. Loud music, seventy teenagers jumping up and down on it and the odd can of cider. Mercifully it came through the experience a lot better than Worthy Farm.

Our daughter’s birthday spree was planned some time in advance and because we had the space and her birthday was July, it seemed the obvious choice to have a party in the garden. A quick look on e.Bay reassured us that a large gazebo could be had for £65*. This would be much cheaper than hiring a venue.

With our own sound system and disco lights (the vestige of a 2010 staff party) we already had everything we needed for a disco explosion. Except a dance floor. Could they dance on the lawn? With a ridiculously high moss content our lawn certainly has a lot of spring in it. And as fans of the band Half Man Half Biscuit know: “the greatest surface under foot is springy turf”.

If we put on a whole load of grunge music they could try ‘mossing’ as well as ‘moshing’.

A drone photograph taken from above Langley Avenue would immediately show the difference in lawn quality up and down the road. On either side we have professionally-tended lawns, and the one to our left looks like it comes straight off the front of a lawn fertilizer advert. They spent a ton of money getting their garden redesigned and it looks spectacular.

Ours, on the other hand, has a 17-foot trampoline dragged across it once a month, suffers the installation of the wife’s heatwave deterrent every summer (a large inflatable swimming pool – once filled, watch those temperatures plunge) and played host to our dissembled log cabin for six months. Added to that it’s cut by an asthmatic lawnmower that cannot manage one complete stripe of the lawn without needing its box emptied.

So you have to say letting loose a bunch of teenagers on it wasn’t going to ruin its chances of getting into the National Gardens Scheme.

I’m happy to report that a lack of a dance floor didn’t ruin the fun. The only element that was likely to cause an upset was the imminent departure of the gazebo that was about as flimsy as a supermarket bag and showed signs of wanting to turn itself into a box kite. The merest hint of wind sent it billowing and straining at the inadequate guy ropes. In gusts the following day it did take off.

In Surbiton we are not that far away from the Heathrow flightpath and it would have been the ultimate embarrassment to have planes diverted because of my daughter’s airborne 18th birthday gazebo. As it was, we got off with no serious incident at all, it was a wonderful occasion.

The grass now resembles a Wimbledon tennis court baseline in Week 2, but I have every confidence that it will recover as we’ve thrown much worse at it. Who knows? Sixty teenagers jumping up and down to The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’ might have got rid of the moss for good. In which case we might have to schedule a ‘going-off-to-University party’ pretty soon.

*NEVER buy one of these if you are expecting a wind speed of 10mph or more.