Goliath Undefeated ...

In defence: my Phyllostachys nigra is very well behaved and has stayed in an approximate 1 m diameter circle. It has had a couple of pieces lopped off and given away.

 

This is also something to do with a neighbour but in a very different context; for 25 years, we had the most wonderful neighbour; he was a completely eccentric multi-millionaire recluse (but the kind of reclusive personality who – whenever he came to us – was the life and soul of the party, as well as the soul of wit; he was kind, generous, and very quiet; he had an encyclopedic mind and was interested in everything. The trait relevant to this story is that he was a hoarder and this attribute led him to develop a passion for mail-order catalogues from which he would endlessly buy all manner of useless and interesting objects which, more often than not, remained inside the boxes in which they were delivered. As he lived alone, there was no one to curb his insatiable craving for possessions and after a decade or so, he literally could no longer move in his house, having as it were, painted himself out of every single room; so, he built a giant shed at the bottom of his garden where the invasive properties could be stored and forgotten. Nothing in all that to be concerned about, except that the said shed was so big, so wide, so high, and so grim, that it looked for all the world like one of those dismal concentration camp structures you see in documentaries. A few weeks after completion, he came to us for tea (we regularly baked him pies containing his garden’s blackberries, after one of his mother’s recipes), saw his shed from our perspective and said: Oh my God, what have I done? and immediately suggested he would commission an artist to paint the structure with a camouflage of imitated leaves and twigs so that we wouldn’t have to stare at this expressive evocation of man’s inhumanity to man. True to his word, he had this done forthwith and it was effective. To be safe, however, we decided to plant a small bamboo plant in the hope that, as well as hide the structure, it would add a note of naturalism to the trompe-l’oeil effect of the excellent artwork. Fifteen years later, the small bamboo had turned into a voracious giant (there was a lesson to heed in The Little Prince where his baobabs are an apt metaphor). Sadly, our generous neighbour died last November. The shed is now a shell, all its treasures gone to auctions. Ivies have crept along its brutal walls, rendering our bamboo obsolete; little did we know when we decided to remove it that it would present such a formidable challenge.

 

Yes ... this begs for another quote and I'll get this one right: "Here was a Caesar, when comes such another."

 

With pleasure. I look forward to digging it up; it will be a lot easier than the bamboo!

 

As you see in the attached, in some places, the vegetation in my neighbour’s garden (the one on the left), reached his roof and created a kind of echo of the conundrum prevalent inside his house; for instance, despite having all manners of vacuum cleaners – from Hoovers to Dysons, not forgetting Henrys (hooray!) – there was no opportunity for hoovering since he couldn’t get into any of the rooms; similarly in the garden, there no longer was any possibility of reaching the shed (I should say “barrack” [currently hidden behind the hawthorns which had been strategically planted to hide the structure]). This impenetrable jungle could have been a cause for concern, were it not that bramble uninhibitedly thrived; there used to be a fantastic profusion of them and, every summer, our children (to whom my neighbour had always been very good at Christmases and birthdays, showering them with imaginative artefacts discovered in the Ali Baba mail-order publications) would help him harvest enormous quantities of them which ended up in our freezer and, in due course, in pies (no quote here of Titus Andronicus!) which reminded the dear man — with mixed and tender feelings — of a mother who, allegedly, had induced his aforementioned compulsion to surround himself with the defensive shields which protected his over-sensitive nature, and of which herewith is the recipe:

Blackberry and Apple Pie

The Crust

6 oz butter
2 oz Trex
6 oz plain flour
2 oz corn flour
Pinch of salt – pinch of baking powder
1 Tsp caster sugar
½ Tbsp lemon juice
One egg yoke
A few drops of water if required

The Filling

Bramley apples and Blackberries ad lib
2 oz butter (Normandy is best)
4 oz caster sugar
Cinnamon stick (to be removed in due course)
Rosewater to taste (experience will teach restraint)
½ Tbsp lemon juice
1 good ounce corn flour

Method

Make short crust pastry with cold fingers light and nimble, incorporating diced fats to flours and powders, adding optional egg yolk

Rest for an hour – roll and line pie dish with two thirds of pastry, reserving one third for roof

Caramelize Bramley apples in butter, sugar, cinnamon, rosewater

Remove apples and thicken juices with corn flour

Return apples to thickened juices and add blackberries

Fill pie, close up with decorated roof (not forgetting to provide a small hole as chimney)

Brush roof with beaten egg and sprinkle roof with coarse sugar

Bake in a fierce oven to seize pastry for ten minutes; reduce heat to medium and bake further until golden

(This will get you a handshake from the great man himself!)

 

It’s been a while; you must all be wondering if I am still alive; well, JUST!

The creature, in infancy, must have been fed on tempered steel, or come from Krypton; it has tried to break my back and, though it partially failed, it has succeeded in shattering Donner’s favourite tool:


At first, it seemed a case of “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again, so that you can fail and fail again”; luckily, we are not here dealing with mastering a musical instrument, a sport, or a lawn and, inch by inch, the beast must die and, if I survive the ordeal, I shall report further; will it be Rheingold’s rainbow, or one of Götterdämmerung’s diminished chord (read corpse)?

This is the array of tools, all of which, at one stage or another, has proved essential:

As you see, there is light at the end of the tunnel; we live in hope that it is not an on-coming train.

 

Getting there LawnAndOrder. I don't see a mattock or pickaxe amongst those tools?

 

@Loofah Have you tried the pie yet?

 

Well observed, the pickaxe missed the photocall; it’s in the shed, punished! In the long run, it proved too heavy to wield repeatedly and, also, it would embed itself into the wooden mass (the individual bamboos have, under ground level, fused into a solid trunk) and, once sunken in, I couldn’t get it out anymore (nor could my wife)(my sons just laugh).

I am (sort of) considering buying an axe but — never having used one before — I am worried that, should the bamboo blues develop into something more serious, I might turn into Jack Nicholson; although I grant you that “Here’s LawnAndOrder” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “Here’s Johnny!”