The Cromer Chainsaw Massacre

Cast your mind back more than a decade, to 2011, when the Gees were thinking of doing some serious remodelling to the Maison des Girrafes. Around that time, a local DIY store was having a closing-down sale, so we went along en famille to see if we could pick up any budget tins of paint, brushes &c &c and so on and so forth in like fashion. Wandering around the store, Offspring#2, aged 11, piped up, in a very small voice:

Please may I have a paint roller?

to which Offspring#1, aged 13 and already showing signs of demonic possession teenage rebellion said

Please may I have a chainsaw?

a request followed by the rider

I’d use it responsibly.

since when I have adopted a healthy respect for all power tools and prefer to use hand tools wherever possible. Recent events, however, have exposed cracks in this resolution, which have now become yawning fissures as I have now bought – you guessed it — a chainsaw.

In mitigation m’lud I was driven to it. Down the bottom of the garden is a Buddleia bush thicket triffid tree which despite my efforts at pruning it, over years, just comes back even bigger and more brutally invasive than before, growing twenty feet or more into the air and with the trunk as tall as I am and as thick as a wrestler’s thigh. For the past two or three years it has got quite beyond my long-handled loppers or even a handsaw and the thing started laughing at me each time I passed. Rustling menacingly, at any rate. The time had come for a clash of the titans – it was either me, or that bush. This garden ain’t big enough for the both of us.

So, after the bush had finished flowering (people unaccountably like these horrible invasive weeds bushes presumably because they are supposed to attract butterflies) I hied forthwith fifthwith to my local Boutique de Bricolage and bought — drum roll — a chainsaw.

Just in case you were imagining some giant, gas-guzzling, ear-splittingly loud, smoke-belching devourer of rainforests, unliftable except by musclebound stogie-chewing lumberjacks, the chainsaw I bought is electric, and cordless. I mean, even cars these days are electric and cordless, so it was bound to pack some whoomph, even if it looked (relatively) unthreatening.

I read the instructions, which were less about how to operate it, than How To Use It  Responsibly. The chainsaw, the batteries, even the plastic bag in which it was packed, were festooned with warnings about misuse, so much so that I was almost afraid to turn it on.

Almost.

After a couple of false starts during which I learned how to tension the chain properly, I got to work. Mere minutes later, I could announce that VICTORY WAS MINE. The Buddleia lay in huge piles of brushwood all over the garden that I shall enjoy clearing up tomorrow. The thick sections of trunk I shall haul into the chicken run for the hens to play on.

I can’t express how good this feels.

A decade-long grudge match is now resolved. Only a remnant of the original plant remains. Yes, it will sprout again, because I have learned that nothing — nothing — will stop this plant short of a direct nuclear strike from orbit, but at least I shall be able to keep it in manageable limits. From now on, this Buddleia will know who’s boss.

I see the flowering currant bush that’s seeded itself next to the splintered ruins of the Buddleia could do with some attention. I swear that it quakes in terror when I glance in its direction…