All play and no work make Ben a dull boy.....

..........and as a result I have started working again. It feels great to be getting up at 6ish in the morning and working through until 5pm.

I have done a week and a day at Clarke Cunningham Tree Maintentance and so far so good. I have been put with a very experienced tree surgeon called Tristan. He has been showing me the ropes and I will learn a lot from him. He goes up the trees and I am on the ground doing what I can. Small world that this is it turns out that LL's dad has met him when he was working near his house, a friend of ours is teaching him a musical instrument and LL went to school with his wife. It would have been unusual if this was not the case.

My first day was spent doing some glorified gardening work, trimming hedges and chipping some branches that were a byproduct of this and what Tristan was doing.


The second and third days we were in the South of Ireland at a stately home owned by one of the richest men in Ireland. It was 5km from the area with the highest levels of Granny murder in all of Ireland -

We initially got taken around the grounds, discussing what was to be done with one of the guys who works there (who of course turned out to be LL's sister's neighbour).  Since then we have shaped and pruned about 30 trees so that they can be picked up with a tree spade and transported to become part of a hedge. 


On Thursday we were back near Belfast and were greeted with a slightly more tricky job to take care of - 

As is the way we spent the first half hour or so discussing how we were going to set up the crane to pick up and lift over the house the two trees in the background which we needed to dismantle and get out of the garden.


By not rushing in all saws blazing we realised that there was a road behind the garden from which we were able to do everything without risking dropping many tons of wood through the roof of our clients.


We set up and Tristan got hoisted up by the crane and dumped into the top of the tree - 

From there he attached chains from the crane to the tree and cut the tree into large chunks to be brought down to earth.

We processed them by removing the branches and they went off to become firewood.

As we had some time to kill the boss sent us off to a garden to plant two young trees to make up for the two we just cut down. Sizewise they were pretty different so my carbon karma for the day was heavily negative.

Friday was more like what I thought it was going to be like. We were parked up on the side of a busy road, lopping down trees that would soon be in danger of falling into the road and chipping them up. This was proper hard physical work which is just what I needed to earn me a drunken weekend celebrating EB's 30th and my birthday with friends over from London as a surprise. 


Great to see you BF and Alex. Come any time. It did make me realise some of what I am missing not being in London. Things from London are just a little bit cooler. They even have special toothpaste there - 

Duraphat with a 'PH'. Flash bastards.