I am sitting here basking in the warm afterglow that can only be experienced after putting a tree older than you are out of its misery… Wow… I think we should all be allowed to randomly hack down some personal heritage every so often, it helps to reassure you that, at times, man is slightly more powerful than nature… albeit rather rotten nature that has a wider range of diseases than some of the people I know… and I think pretty much everyone I know has some strange disease of one form or another… perhaps it’s a side-effect of the strange deodorant with hilariously macho names that I am strangely drawn to when faced with a supermarket shelf laden with other, respectable, products. I’m sorry but I can’t summon up any guilt for afflicting people if doing the right thing involves purchasing more dignified deodorants that don’t actually smell like a fifty year old cat in a sauna. Face it: I am one of those strange people who spends an extra couple of minutes pushing the nicely packaged smellies out of the way just to locate a long-buried tin of Ukrainian produced Thunder Active Sport anti-perspirant or some such similar dented and rusted ozone destroyer.

 

 If it was any earlier in the morning I would look around to find some more (probably more accurate) examples because I am one of those people blessed with a dozen random tins of noxious crap that have just enough mysterious liquid sloshing around inside them to merit their salvation from the bin. I have about a dozen tins for the sole reason that they seem to share the unique traits of biros, lighters, vital medications, and remote controls when it comes to disappearing without trace. Thus a fresh tin is purchased after much misguided consideration and the previous can slips away into the magical land of the forgotten… only to reappear unexpectedly during a random bout of spring cleaning in much the same way as in the period when I used to hear a knock on the door at midnight and within ten minutes a strange friend was sleeping on my floor… I had a period when I had quite a few strange friends.

 

 Well, I seem to have become distracted… back to the final death throws of the pear tree.

 

 Now this tree has sat in my folks’ garden since before they moved in to the house. I have vague memories of my childhood at the best of times and the only real impression I can drag up of my formative years regarding the pear tree are that it was nowhere near as interesting as the apple tree.

 

 The apple tree, a similarly diseased specimen yet one that seems to be mildly more willing to cling on to life that the pear tree, offered a wealth of childhood adventures… oh the happy days I had half-heartedly attempting to climb it before giving up and going inside to wash the blood from my bark ravaged hands… memories of harvesting box after box of tasty apples… The apple tree rocked.

 

 However, we weren’t big on pears in our family… in fact they mainly served for breeding vast quantities of wasps, a creature that I’m allergic to and will probably cause me to swell up to the size of a water-retentive yak if ever I am stung… The pear tree wasn’t a source of fruit… it just seemed to be out to get me, dropping its little buzzing landmines in an attempt to finish me off… In fact the pear tree hated me... there’s a lot of plants that hate me.

 

 When I promptly shifted out of home when I was eighteen I thought I was safe from those evilly gnarled branches that seemed to be reaching for my very soul… and yet every damn autumn day I went back to visit I used to have to spend ten minutes with a stick picking squashed brown pear remnants from the treads of my shoe while having to freeze every time a wasp the size of a golf ball decided to land on my eye.

 

 Yet despite all our shared history I must admit to a feint twang of nostalgia while my father and I took it in turns to whack the bastard with an axe three times too small for the job in hand. While I may be able to balm my conscience with the fact that the thing was deader than Glenn Miller, I still felt a little guilty when the thing finally fell apart. In retrospect we should have probably taken a moment of silence before the jigsaw came out and we proceeded with something that resembled a macabre timber autopsy…

 

 Ah well, the once mighty creation now consists of a lump of trunk emerging quite appealingly from the middle of my folks’ lawn and three exceedingly gnarled lumps of future firewood. The only minor worry I have is quite what strange and mysterious fumes will be unleashed when the branches’ strangely glowing mould catches fire… I fear the swine may claim another victim from beyond the grave… although, as I’m not going to be the one in the room when the matches start flying, I must admit that my concern is outweighed by my scientific interest…

 

 To try and lend a feeling of pathos to this remarkably pointless tribute to a fallen adversary I shall pretend that it had a name…

 

Percy the Pear Tree RIP…

 

Burn, if not in hell, at least in somebody I don’t know’s fireplace… and try and take a few of them with you.

 

 Time for a quick three verses of Abide With Me and then we can get on with reading the will.