Yesterday evening, when we walked up to the allotment, we passed a guy on a ladder in the small front garden of his house who was cutting down his cherry tree. It was quite a big one and the entire front garden was already full of branches and twigs. I am a shameless opportunist: I instantly stopped and asked him if he had any plans for the cherry wood and if we could take it away. No, he said, you can have as much as you like. I explained we had a woodburner and were always on the lookout for free wood. Well, he said, there's even more round the back -- you can have that too.
So today -- I should have been working on something at home but successfully procrastinated -- I set off at noon with my new raker-toothed bowsaw and my trusty Fiskars loppers. I knocked on the guy's door. No reply. Okay, I thought, he did say yes, anytime, so now is anytime.
My activities drew quite a bit of attention. A neighbour stopped by and commented favourably, and also told me that the guy had a woodburner himself. Very strange -- why would he not keep his own wood then? Fair enough, it needs to be seasoned for a bit but probably not for that long.
After an hour and a half, a woman with a dog came down the path to the front door. Turned out the guy had been in after all! I carried on working for about 2 hours and then looked up to see OH who had popped round with a bright yellow thing: the new sack trolley I'd ordered and which had already arrived. By this point I'd more or less lopped through the head-high thicket of whippy, snaggy cherry shoots and twigs and had sawn the bigger branches into smaller logs. OH took over sawing the rest and we spent the third hour transporting the logs and smaller bits back to the car. Two runs it took, three if you count the on-foot run with the trolley.
By hour 2.5 I was knackered and cold but OH insisted we wouldn't cherrypick and leave our friendly donor with all the twiggy mess on the floor. Fair enough, I argued, but you've got to remember we've also just done him a great big service, for free. We've chopped up his entire cherry tree and are taking all the wood away. That's normally a £30 to £50 job for a gardener, or 3 hours work for him that we've relieved him of. And he never even offered me a cup of tea! If I had someone do a job like this for me, even if it was on a una mano lava l'altra basis, I'd bloody well put the kettle on and made them a brew.
OH could tell I was getting cranky and eventually relented even though there was still a little pile of twigs left in the middle of his front garden but the rest was really quite tidy now. Perhaps OH was getting cold too. In any case, I've decided that the guy can keep his bloody tea to himself if he can throw in the pile of old floorboards that were under his window -- these would be great for raised beds on the plot.
Back home our driveway was blocked by the gas emergency van. Next door had sprung a leak somewhere and they'd had to switch the gas off. "What are you doing, trying to blow us all up?" I said to P, by way of a hello. P was tigering up and down the driveway and was even crankier than me so I gave him a hug. He and his wife were expecting the in-laws this evening and now it looked as if the house would be cold and they couldn't even cook a meal. "Take them out to a restaurant", I said, every inch the pragmatist. "Give them Chicken Ding, the speciality a la maison", OH said, helpfully. Chicken Ding -- this had to be explained to me -- sounds Chinese but is just any ready-meal with chicken in it that you put in the microwave, and when the clock has ticked down to zero, it goes "Ding!" and it's ready: Chicken Ding.
It was definitely not our gas main that did it. Apparently, our gas pressure was perfect. Still, I was feeling guilty. "Could it have been me with my enthusiastic wood-chopping last night?", I wondered aloud to OH. I'd spent an hour and a half on our patio with Betty my big axe and Big Bertha (mallet) and Small Bertha (the wood grenade), pounding the steaming crap out of the maple wood from the driveway. What if the vibrations had travelled and ruptured their gas main, like some sort of man-made tectonic plate shift, or a North Korean nuclear device? I did after all go pretty nuclear on the wood last night because I had to work off a lot of tension from last week and was therefore prone to taking any wood resistance very personally. "Oh no," OH reassured me and then gave some sort of technical reason for why the neighbours were having a problem and we didn't.
P didn't want the tea I offered him so I decided to get out of the cold and into my kitchen. I was hungry and thirsty and a pint mug of cocoa had never tasted this good. As I sat on the living room sofa slurping it, I could hear the gas men's detector gadgets outside sound their warning beeps. The house may soon be flying round our ears but I can be reasonably safe in the knowledge that it was neither my explosive axe antics nor the methane from the blocked downstairs loo drain that will have caused it.
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