OUR arborist (such a great name) – like the woodcutter in Little Red Riding Hood – charged to the rescue with a big saw.
He introduced it to the old tree out the back.
We love the tree but we also like light – and when the sunlight pours through on to the garden it’s a bit of a religious experience.
The woodcutter said “let there be light” and there was indeed light.
There was also a thin layer of sawdust from here to the front gate – if Mrs Hinch had seen it, she’d have had words. But we’re not house proud.
What surprised us was the grip that the ivy had taken… once cut back, you could see thick branches clutching the tree trunk… like the throbbing veins on a weightlifter’s biceps.
At least now, the light is dappled and beautiful. I think it’s a weight off the old tree. It has been cut back but the ivy was suffocating it. We’re all breathing easier.
The rose and the striped iris and the bamboo are thriving in the light.
We’ve spotted a tiny wren, our pair of blackbirds, the robins and coaltits, flitting about in the undergrowth.
But two magpies have also taken advantage of the tree cutter’s work.
They’ve taken over a particular sawn-off branch which gives them a true vantage point of all that happens down below.
The pair of them perch up there, chests puffed, all black and white like two bouncers in tops 'n tails outside a fancy nightclub. Dare you try to get past those two.
They are lords of all they survey and the small birds know to dodge them and make it snappy.
We watched as one of the magpies pecked at the other’s tail feathers to get it to shove over on their new favourite branch.
“I’d shoot them,” I say. “I mean it and I’m a pacifist.”
“Couldn’t you just go for a super soaker water pistol,” says my other half.
Our boy shakes his head. He thinks I’m a bird racist: I favour the smaller, more charming varieties – the goldfinch; the wagtail - but turn murderous at the ugly chirrup of a marauding magpie.
“It’s just nature, ma,” he argues.
But when you’ve seen magpies lunching on the blood and guts of a small dead cat on the road, there’s no luck in them.
I’ve picked broken egg shells and the remains of baby birds from the ground out our back.
No mercy will be shown to the marauders.
It seems no mercy will be shown to any of us, given the soaring costs of living and the summer of discontent to come. Yes, I like to misquote Shakespeare too.
The numbers chug up at the petrol pump and everyone is counting their pennies.
“Do you like the garden now?” I ask the other two inhabitants of our house.
When they say that indeed they do, I say: “Good, that’s where you’re going for your holidays.”
But the truth is that we are lucky to feel insulated from the soaring costs.
We’ll cut back on our Netflix subscription and I’ll gird my loins and do battle with the internet provider.
But we’re not sitting looking at an electric meter spin around and wondering how we’ll pay the bill.
We’re not having to choose between heating or eating and we’re not even going the yellow pack road… well, only occasionally.
I’m not sure anyone can tell the difference. I have trifled with the idea of keeping the outer box of a well-known variety of breakfast cereal and sticking a plastic bag of ‘own brand’ inside.
It was never very far from own brand I was reared.
When I think back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was another world... one where dinky indicator sticks dropped out of the side of car windows and the mangle was having a moment.
Then, a fridge was a luxury.
On a long ago summer’s day, a friend from primary school invited me to her home and offered me a glass of milk. But it was warm and I still remember thanking her and smiling and trying to swallow it down.
I have a clear memory of the rag 'n bone man steering his horse and cart up our street.
People weathered hard times before… ma always used to say: “This too shall pass.”
So we’ll watch this ‘summer of discontent’ pass with a cup of tea in the dappled sunlight of the garden.
