It was a hot, windy day when he decided to tidy up the garden.
He looked out of the back window and felt it was ideal weather for cleaning up the garden. He had been putting it off, but today he would make it happen. After all, he had the time to do it.
It took just eight minutes for him to walk around the back garden, looking to see what would need to be done to tidy the place up.
It took him seven minutes to change into his old gardening clothes and find his gardening gloves in the shed.
Six minutes to get the bucket from the side of the house and pick up sticks and small branches from the lawn and in the flower beds.
Five minutes to get the rake and rake up all of the dead leaves from the lawn and pile them up on a patch of open ground at the back of the garden.
Four minutes to take a last minute look around for anything else that needs to be burnt off. Return to the house, get a box of matches, go back to the pile and light the dead leaves, watch it until he was satisfied that the fire had taken hold.
Three minutes to hear the house phone go, return to the house to answer it, find the shopping list that his wife forgot, read the items out over the phone, then return to the garden.
Two minutes to discover that the flames from the fire were licking at the base of the back wooden fence, run and take the garden hose off the wall, connect it to the tap, drag the nozzle to the back of the garden, and put the fire out.
One minute to keep the hose going on the pile and the fence, until all of the smouldering had completely stopped.
And it took less than a minute for him to realise that it was not ideal weather for cleaning up the garden.