The sun is shining and the birds are singing. White petals from next door’s cherry tree are drifting by my open office door. My wife crosses the garden and sticks her head in. “Is this a good time?” she says. “It certainly is,” I say. “I mean for filming,” she says. “Again?” I say. My wife has a product she wants me to demonstrate for her business: a handle that can be installed halfway along the shaft of a rake or spade, to make it easier for old people to garden. We had tried to film the demonstration the day before with the roles reversed – me filming, her raking – but the collaboration ended in acrimony. “It was unusable,” my wife says. “You are terrible at filming.” “I did exactly what you asked,” I say. “But I also saw how bad-tempered and rude I was,” she says. “I’ve had to have a word with myself.” “In that case,” I say, “I’m going to film you all the time. Then we can review the footage together at the end of each week.” “This won’t take long,” she says. I’m dreading being in front of the lens, and not just because I consider myself too young to need an extra handle on my rake. The real problem is: I can’t act. When I say I can’t act I don’t mean I find it difficult to draw repressed emotion from the well of my subconscious in the service of character. I mean that I am incapable of performing simple tasks if I know a camera is pointing at me. The last time I acted, in a music video, I had to open a fridge 17 times before I got it right. Out on the grass, my wife is already unhappy with my acting, and struggling to find a constructive way of saying so. “Can you make it look as if you’re actually raking?” she says. “It’s spring,” I say. “There are no leaves.” But I think: what’s my motivation? Am I angry with this rake? “You’re going the wrong way,” my wife says. “Come out of the shade.” We have a long way to go: this is still the before bit, with the handle unattached, demonstrating the extent to which the ordinary garden rake is the older person’s worst enemy. “Bend over a bit more,” my wife says. “You’re in pain.” “I’m just pulling up grass now,” I say. “This is ruining the lawn.” Eventually my lower back does begin to ache, and something authentic creeps into my raking that pleases my wife. “This is better,” she says. She is less pleased when, as part of my performance, I drop the rake, clutch my heart and fall over. “That’s not helpful,” she says. “Keep that one,” I say. “I won’t do it as good as that again.” “Now we just need a closeup of you putting the handle on,” she says. This is the bit I was really dreading. Installing the handle is the work of seconds, until my wife presses Record, at which point I immediately drop one of the nuts and lose it in the grass. “Oops,” I say. “Just hold up the allen key so I can see it,” she says. My wife positions herself at a tighter angle for take two. “And go,” she says. A long silence follows. “I started with the bolts too loose,” I say. “That’s why it’s taking so long to tighten them.” “Keep going,” my wife says. “I can edit a lot of this out.” By the fourth take we are both a little exasperated by me. “So much pressure,” I say, under my breath. “Move your other hand out the way,” she says. “There,” I say. “I could probably do it faster, but that wasn’t too bad.” “It’s on back to front,” she says. “But yeah, we’re getting there.” We work our way through the garden tools – rake, spade, fork – swapping the handle over, until I find myself sweeping the brick path using a stiff-bristled brush, with what my wife considers insufficient joy. “It’s supposed to be easier with the handle on,” she says. “I know, but my arms are tired,” I say. “I’ve been doing this for an hour.” “It’s been 20 minutes,” she says. “Bear down a bit more.” It occurs to me that at this point she’s just trying to get the path cleaned. That evening my wife shows me the finished clip, with the installation sequence whittled down to a few painless seconds. She seems pleased enough with the result, but when I watch I just see an old man trying to exorcise some buried trauma by taking it out on a rake.