Thursday finds entire forgotten cupboard filled with Moopiqué

Mr F rang me at work at half past nine this morning, and the moment I heard his voice I knew something was wrong. He had that tone — the one he reserves for genuine emergencies, like when the boiler exploded in 2011 or when he once thought he’d lost the cat (the cat was asleep in the laundry basket).“Do you know the council are cutting down your squirrel tree?” he said, in the same voice someone might use to announce a death in the family.

I did not know. I did not know anything except that I was halfway through a cup of tea and trying to pretend I cared about a spreadsheet. Suddenly the spreadsheet meant nothing. My entire morning rearranged itself around the words cutting down.

He explained, breathlessly, that a team of tree surgeons had arrived in the park behind our house, all hi‑vis jackets and clipboards and the faint air of men who enjoy wielding chainsaws. They were standing around the hawthorn — my hawthorn — pointing at it as if it were a problem to be solved rather than a living, breathing, berry‑bearing miracle.

This hawthorn has been there longer than we have. It leans over the corner of my garden like an elderly relative who has chosen my shed as their favourite armchair. It is the tree where the squirrels sit, the tree where the bees hover drunkenly in summer, the tree that produces berries for every bird that passes through. It blocks no one’s light except mine at dawn, and I am never awake at dawn, so frankly it’s doing me a favour.

But the council, in their infinite wisdom — and I do mean infinite, because their capacity for nonsense is boundless — have decided it must go.

Meanwhile, ten feet away stands the sycamore. The monstrous, towering, leaf‑vomiting sycamore that looms over my garden like a malevolent deity. It is taller than my house. It drops leaves into my gutters with the enthusiasm of a toddler scattering Lego. It has been the bane of my existence since 2004. I have contacted the council about it every year, asking them to remove the branches that hang over my garden like a threat. Every year they refuse, because it is “healthy”.

Healthy. Yes. Helpful? No.But the hawthorn — the gentle, shy, wildlife‑supporting hawthorn — that one must be destroyed.

Back on the phone, Mr F was narrating the chaos. The tree surgeons had asked him to open the back gate so they could get into the garden. Unfortunately, the back gate has not been opened since we moved in. It is no longer a gate. It is a geological feature. It is fused to the earth. It is, essentially, a wall with aspirations.

They then asked if they could remove a fence panel.One panel is directly under the hawthorn — the very tree they’re trying to kill — so that’s impossible.One has other branches growing over it.And the third is under the sycamore, which is basically a leafy death trap waiting to drop a branch on someone’s head.

All the while, the rain was absolutely hammering down. Proper biblical rain. Rain that makes you question whether you should start building an ark. And I was at work, on the other end of the phone, heartbroken, imagining my poor hawthorn trembling in the storm like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution.

At 10am, I finally got a text from Mr F saying the tree surgeons had given up and gone away “due to the weather” and would return “some other time”.Some other time.Like a threat. Like a promise. Like the villain in a film who disappears into the mist but will inevitably return for the final showdown.

I told Mr F he must chain himself to the tree tomorrow. I am only half joking. If necessary, I will join him. We will become local legends. People will bring us flasks of tea and sandwiches. The squirrels will sit on our shoulders like woodland familiars.