The Big Hedge Society

As it happens, we have gained responsibility for a large Afro-style hedge in a nice London square.  This hedge is a beast.  It is large and bushy and if you so much as ignore it for a second it sprouts like a crazy Amazonian patch.  "Yee-haa", it goes, wildly flinging out stiff leafsome tentacles in all directions, a green firework frozen in time. 

So every so often the ball and chain and I go down to trim the bush.  It's one of those jobs that is a bit - how do we put this - better in the abstract than in practice.  For starters, we do not really have the correct tools for the job.  Old slightly rusty shears that spring open with alarming enthusiasm, slightly wonky clippers, a long handled slicy thing that neither of us can operate with any degree of precision.  We are the Incapability Browns.

Still, we go at it patiently, armed with bins bags and brooms to clear up the rubbish. 

It's the comments that get you.

One elderly gentleman thinks we do not tend it enough.  He'll drag his scrawny carcass by, muttering vitriolically all the while.  "About time, too" he'll grunt, "That thing is an eyesore!"  An eyesore?  Dear boy, what do you call a shanty town?  I've taken him to task: "If in any way it bothers you, please feel free to trim it yourself".  He backs down.  Never trust a person wielding pointy shears.  Another lady was slightly too interested in proceedings.  She watched us with her child for just a little bit too long.  I mean, we're not doing a show here.  Finally, she said to her young one: "I wonder if she's going to make it into a shape?"  I look away to roll my eyes.  Make it into a shape?  I can barely get it even.  The child skips up: "Hello!" it breathes.  "Are you going to make it into a shape?"  I look down, teetering on my ladder: "Oh yes!" I say brightly, "I'm planning on it being a large nude lady!"  This moves mother and child along.

We don't have to make it look especially nice - but we do our very best.  If anyone out there sees people doing their very best whose best is manifestly not good enough, where possible, provided that they are not surgeons operating, just be kind, be silent and let them be.  Silence can be as golden as autumn hedge leaves.

With love from the pink thumbed,

M&T x