A Christmas tree

A couple of weeks ago a very large tree on the green in front of our house was blown over by storm Darragh (Did you know you can suggest storm names for future consideration by emailing them to name our storms at met office dot gov dot uk?). The huge tree narrowly missed our car, then our garden, our house, and most terrifyingly, us. I would make some sort of joke about how I’d been planning on getting the Christmas tree out of the loft that day but let’s be honest I hadn’t quite got round to putting it back up there since last Christmas. There’s a point in the year when it makes more sense to leave a Christmas tree in its black rubbish bag in the messy room than it does to make that difficult trip up through the trapdoor in the ceiling. We don’t have a loft ladder and getting up into our roof space involves lifting myself up like a gymnast. Something that would be impossible at the moment with my stubbornly and relentlessly impinged shoulder.

I don’t know what type of tree almost flattened our house or how old it was at the time. I would have gone outside and counted its rings but didn’t want to look like a gawper. I do know the tree has lived outside our house longer than I’ve lived inside it. For years I’ve watched it change with the seasons. Its leaves going from green to a variety of browns, reds, oranges and yellows and those leaves eventually falling on the ground and remaining there until Lambeth Council’s one remaining street cleaner comes round with his broom. I’m going to miss the crows that hung around the tree, even though their noise could be irritating at times. I guess the crows are now homeless. Or treeless at least. I also think of the fly tippers. They would sometimes fly tip their shit at the foot of the tree. It happened often enough for newcomers to the street to think it was an official dumping place. It was only me anonymously filling in the online dumped rubbish form on the council’s website that prevented the neighbourhood from being buried under abandoned child car seats, broken wardrobes and soiled mattresses.

On the night the tree fell, me and Mrs Jim Bob sat at the window of our bedroom watching the fire brigade cut away the branches that were preventing two of our neighbours from leaving their homes. And we watched the following morning when four tree (yes I know) fellers chainsawed their way through the other branches, piling up the larger logs on the grass and sending the thinner branches through a wood chipper and covering our car in a film of sawdust. We were lucky. A neighbour’s car took the full force of the falling tree. Flattened it. Thankfully it was parked and empty at the time. When the four tree tellers were working on the tree, an uncharacteristic community spirit developed around them. Our next door neighbour made them cups of coffee while other neighbours came out to chat with each other about their lucky escapes and the deafening sound the tree had made as it crash landed outside their homes. I was playing guitar at the time and didn’t hear it. Even though Mrs Jim Bob had described it as sounding like an empty rubbish skip being dropped from a helicopter, I was oblivious to the noise. Lost in the world of creating new songs. Since writing a book about songwriting I’ve had trouble stopping. There’s going to be a lot to look forward to next year.

Some of my friends have had an awful 2024 and they will I imagine be glad when it’s over. I’ve selfishly and guiltily had a pretty good year myself. I even recently escaped being hit by a gigantic tree. After an hour of more chainsawing, work on the tough base of the trunk was abandoned. The men pushed it over the big hole left in the ground by the falling tree. They tied a bit of police tape around it and left a couple of traffic cones, one of which was blown over last night by more bloody wind. I imagine the leftover tree trunk will stay where it is for a while. It will eventually be covered in graffiti or hollowed-out and plumbed-in on an episode of Grand Designs and sold for a million and a half pounds to someone from Saudi Arabia. Happy Christmas everyone. Here’s to a peaceful 2025.

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