Welcome to my blog; it pokes my head out once a week to say hello and tell you what I’ve been thinking about or writing about during the last few days. Upstairs is sleeping, I hope, someone who knows the publishing/creating world far better than I ever will and could probably help me no end, but these is so much to learn. Just last night he was showing me his iphone – I wanted to ask is this an iphone but thought he’d be unable to believe I didn’t know – and telling me all the wonderful things it can do with its apps while sharing with me some of the wonderful photos that people were sending him from all over the world via Twitter, facebook, and other media which I haven’t heard of, and I thought, I’ll never find the time to understand all this and probably will continue to every now and then get something together to send off by snailmail and never find out how to think just few words and then moments later find them echoing around the world. So it goes. At least he told me not to record interviews on a MP3 player which is just as well because I never did grasp what one of those was.
Meanwhile, what happened to my publisher? Two weeks since I sent him the script, not a whisper of response. Does this mean that in a couple of days I’ll have to write and say, ‘by the way, did you get my script and become so overwhelmed that you couldn’t reply? Or were you disappointed? Tell me!!!’
On Monday the plumber came. He arranged 9.00 a.m. Turned up at 10.30. Talked a lot. Told me he was going to reduce the noise of the water in the pipes by changing a switch. Three hours later he was finished. £115. No discernible difference in the pipe noise. On Wednesday and Thursday, I had a wall built between mine and the neighbour’s house; probably seven foot high and a metre across. £280. It had to be done for security reasons. Because my neighbour is away and because I can’t really work with people in the house, I took the opportunity to remove some branches of my pollarded paulownia tree which overhung her garden and also chop down a self-seeded buddleia which had intertwined itself with one of her trees and begun to bring the (my) fence down. It was a long job with a crap saw and blunt shears. Her brambles put up a good fight and both arms are satisfactorily scratched. The havoc done to her garden is quite considerable but I’ve got two months for it to heal before her return. I live in a mid-terrace of three, in a street where most of the houses are identical in size and layout, so much so that if someone pops in from a house up the road they become disconcerted. I’ve been here, off and on, for twenty years but this was the first time I’d been into next door’s garden. It was a revelation! For a start, the sunlight falls differently on her garden, even though they are joined together. Over the back of her fence I could see clearly both where the noisy parties have been held and who owns the big ash tree that takes away everyone’s light; two mysteries I have been trying to solve since returning here last February. The fact that such a small change in perspective can release such new information, is one of those lessons that I endlessly learn and endlessly forget.
The downing of the Empress Tree has been quite contentious among my friends and family although everyone in the end acknowledges it had to be done. It should never have been there and its presence is a testament to the hubris Sof three people; me, and two friends of mine who were a couple, Henno (male) and Terri (female). Their passion was trees, especially varieties that they found abroad and introduced here. The Paulownia that we planted in the back garden, from just a twig, and the variety of Eucalyptus they chose for the front garden, were both truly exquisite and both vital in their growth. (I think we planted them around 1995.) My hubris was to want big big trees. When I very rapidly received what I wanted, the very good quickly turned into the quite troublesome. The Paulownia flowers are beautiful beyond belief with an aroma that would suit nectar. I’d look at them and smell them and want to cry for the magic of it. After a few short years, the flowers grew too highly up to bring down to the nose, though of course their perfume filled the garden. When the flowers went, the giant leaves would arrive and beneath this Empress’s skirts dark mini-worlds would form and then become flattened in the autumn when the leaves fell and covered three gardens with their carcasses. A decade on and the beautiful paulownia is massively tall and increasingly removing the sunshine from people’s gardens. Meanwhile in the front garden, which I’ve judged measured as 14ft by 14ft, the Eucalyptus also flourished and before long was having to be annually beheaded to keep it out of the telephone wires.
So the order went out from high - I was being landlord rather than resident at the time – to destroy.
The Eucalyptus was bebottomed. An irremovable and awkward stump remains. The Paulownia, it would seem, used emotion to protect itself, so although the tree surgeon took away three quarters of its body he couldn’t bring himself to completely finish the job. Subsequently the branches and leaves regrew but in four springs it didn’t flower. This time I’m trying to finish the job, yet there is objection. Why don’t I use what’s left as a feature? Or turn it into something? Of course if I knew how to use my friend’s iphone, I could take a picture, put it on here and let you have an opinion. I hereby promise myself that within six months I’ll know how to do that.
What has made the Paulownia decision more difficult is that Henno and Terri are both dead now and these trees were their gift to me.
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