You know when your bush needs trimming ...

You know when your bush needs trimming when someone knocks at the door and offers to do it, as happened on Saturday; I declined and immediately regretted it, thinking of the hours of getting twigs in my face and of the mess of clearing up which is often worse than the task itself.

Well, the embarrassment of the unsolicited knock at the door combined with a sunny autumn day after a wet Bonfire Night, got me going: ten minutes into cutting down the laurel bush separating us from the neighbour, I chewed through the Alligator cable and shorted all the fuses.  Forty minutes later I was back in business after rewiring the cutter with its shortened cable, that is after going to the shops to buy new fuses, of which there were naturally none in the house.  Some hours of dirty work later and with the onset of dusk the chainsaw dislodged and Alligator had to be taken into the garage and I had to discover its entire construction to access the chain positioning and, for some reason, one securing nut was fractionally larger than the other, hence one fitted neatly into the ring spanner and the other didn't and I chewed off the corners ... grrrrrr

With darkness approaching I sawed the last few branches but retreated before it was too dark to see as I value my fingers and eyes.

So it turned into two days' of work and totally at the mercy of the weather - one weekend lost, not to speak of the damage to my back and hands ...