Of legends are us.a as a

1990 –
Top hedge.
I was involved with a hedge cutting job at what was known to be the highest property here in the town, or more precisely in the suburbs. As an equal to the property then, the hedge row in the garden would be the highest hedge row in town.

A guy named ‘Pluto’ (Greek meaning ‘wealthy and rich’) ‘Dareios’ (Greek meaning ‘possesses a lot’) the owner of this property, was happy to see me turn up to have a look at this hedge in his garden. I had been told he wanted it cut back.
I was channelled this way by a guy named ‘Abbadon’ (Greek meaning ‘spoil’, because that’s what he did) Amon (Greek meaning ‘builder’, he was a builder.)
I did know Abbadon Amon.
Abbadon Amon and Pluto Dareios were good buddies at the time.
With me having connections to Abbadon Amon meant that I was going to get the job before I even knew about it.
Good thing, or bad thing, that’s the way it was..

Turning up here at the property to look at the hedge row and after knocking at the door, I had to introduce myself to Pluto Dareios as having been sent by Abbadon Amon. Pluto Dareios, in turn introduced himself to me and followed this up with a whistle stop tour of his garden.
Having the highest property in town was something he was snobbily proud of. For that alone it was worth for him to give me a running commentary of his garden on the way around. He obviously spent loads of time in the garden and it showed. Either that or he employed someone else to.
Planted in a patch area and surging upwards was fennel; the centre piece. I felt senses awakened with that smell of liquorice, or aniseed. In the evening damp the fennel was stand out crop in his arrangement of vegetables and fruit bushes.
After a complete circuit of his property we were back around the front once more, back where we had started. We’d been all around. I wasn’t sure if I was that enamoured by what I’d seen. I liked his veg and fruit plot. The rest of it was all a bit uninteresting.
We went indoors to discuss the hedgerow and I sat down at the kitchen table, as offered. I was getting a liking for this place. Nice smells hung around in the kitchen; percolated coffee, and cheese. I’d heard once somewhere that if you want to sell your house, just brew up a percolated coffee, bake some bread in the oven and leave the cheese on the sideboard. Almost guaranteed to sell. Bit of a wives tale really, but the general gist of it is right.
It’s definitely worth remembering if you want to make an impression.

Pluto Dareios was a likeable bloke. He spoke with public schoolboy accent. Together with his tweed jacket he didn’t really need to sell the job to me. I liked him so I was sure I could make it work.
Whilst sat on a dining chair at the table in the kitchen and from out of nowhere, a fox appears on the window ledge outside. It stands there looking through the glass window. I pointed this out to Pluto Dareios who was busy knocking up a coffee at the sideboard. He acknowledged in a perfunctory manner without looking around; (like it was normal.)
With that, Pluto Dareios retrieves a saucer from a cupboard, fills it with some left over food scraps and opens the window. The fox didn’t move, not bodily anyway. Old ‘Trixibell’ (or whatever name it was that he gave to the fox) appeared to be used to this.
It obviously was normal. The window was closed and the fox scoffed the lot.
Well, you know what? I’m thinking that driving all this way for a bit of extra work might not be so bad after all.

Once sat down at the kitchen table, Pluto Dareios asks me what I think about the hedgerow. I smothered the urge to laugh out loud: I hadn’t seen a hedgerow. Well, not one of noteworthiness. Good job I had already decided that driving right out here for a bit of work wouldn’t be that bad after all. There was a simple and short hedge running between a herb garden and the lawn; which frankly didn’t warrant my time and effort; it could have been done by any half competent gardener.
Abbadon Amon had promoted this hedge cutting to me so much that to be honest, in reality – from what I’d seen so far, was disappointing. But when I had spoken with Abbadon Amon, he was sure that this was a nice little number for me, (as he had put it.)
After our cup of coffee I asked Pluto Dareios if we could go and take another look at the hedge.
I had to be sure of what we were talking about here. I must have walked right past the hedge without noticing. Between the kitchen table and the walk out the front door, I had to think quick to come up with some suitable chat to distract from any small talk with regard to the invisible hedgerow.. 
The fact that I felt a draw to this place and its likeable qualities was irrelevant. It was important for me to know what I was about to take on.
So once outside, Pluto Dareios and I walked out to the middle of the garden where we stopped. Pluto Dareios proudly surveys his garden and asks “well, what do you think?”

It hadn’t taken me long to like this place and I didn’t want to upset his feelings so I did another quick sweep of the garden.
“Not quite sure just yet”, I replied. “You do mean this hedge here don’t you?” I said. My hand was pointing in the direction of the hedge that split the herb garden and the lawn.
Pluto turns to look at me as though we’re not talking the same language. “No, not that one, I can do that myself. That’s the hedge I would like you to cut”, Pluto Dareios replies pointing towards the line of trees between the garden and the field beyond it.
I looked again and couldn’t see a hedge. If he was indicating the trees that formed a boundary between his property and the next door field, it wasn’t a hedge, at least not as I know it. It was trees. Big twenty five foot high Leylandii trees. So I said, “That’s not a hedge, it’s trees.”
He was polite in reply.
Waggling his finger towards the trees and then spreading his arms to indicate the scope of the place, Pluto then carries on with “Didn’t you know this is the highest property in town? And with the highest property in town you have to have a hedge capable of acting as a suitable windbreak, cause when it’s windy up here, it’s very windy.”
I was equally polite in reply, embarrassed too. “Well yeah, I guess so. I didn’t realise that was what you meant by hedge, I thought it was this one”, I replied back, pointing  to the short hedge between the herbs and stuff and the rest of the garden. I didn’t want to loose this job. I liked it here.
I asked Pluto how this hedge had been managed in previous years, if it had been cut annually and who did the cutting. Pluto Dareios replies to me that he had always trimmed the trees with his wife and that they had managed together.
“OK”, he says, “so it has been a few years ago, the last time. It’s gone over a bit.”
And that was that. Apparently they had always coped. I struggled to see how. I looked at him as he was making his reply, wondering to myself how on earth the pair of them (even though I had not met his wife) could possibly have cut those trees in years gone by.
I said “How were they cut previously?”
Pluto said back “extension ladder and hedge trimmer, petrol not electric, not enough cable.”
From my angle I was left with two options here: In or out, it’s one or the other.
“OK”, I say, “I’ll do it.”

An immediate resolution for sure, at least for Pluto Dareios for what must surely have been an ever increasing mind fuck for him. Well I was here now, retained to complete this task, which was in all honesty going to tax me to the limits.

Breaking the rules –
We arranged a date and I turned up with an extension ladder on the roof bars of my van, all ready to go. On this date, the shredder had already been set up by Pluto Dareios and so I set up the ladder and extended to the maximum safe length, allowing for a few rungs at the top of the ladder to act as a margin for safety.
As was my way, I asked which way it was that he would like the trees to be cut.
“Side swiped to look tidy and cut the tops off”, he said.
Looking at the trees, the top of the ladder wouldn’t reach that far. Not that it needed to go right to the top, I suppose. So I asked just how much he wanted cut off the top.
“About three foot should do it”, Pluto says.
Three feet? I was puzzled. He had been insistent on these trees needing to act as a wind break and now he says he wants three feet cut off the top. These trees obviously haven’t been trimmed for quite some time, if at all. I questioned the length he wanted removed, but was reassured that three feet was what he wanted off.
So allowing for the line of the tops to follow the line of the ground I cut the necessary length off of the top in order that they would remain in a straight  line across the top.

The specifics of each yearly cut don’t seem too important to highlight in retrospect. Each year went by with me side cutting the trees to a tidy angle. A fairly precise practice in essence. Too much off and all the green turns to brown and that’s that. The results were always a clean tidy look and I was justifiably proud each year I walked away from that job.
The tops by contrast in the first year took on a completely different look. We ended up with a full grown tree that looked as if it had had its top cut off – which it had. This was Pluto’s idea and it was the way he wanted it to look. He was happy. I thought they looked ruined. He couldn’t have been happier.

The second year that I turned up to cut those trees was a surprise to see that the trees had carried on growing as though nothing had happened. They actually looked really good.
And so that job continued into the third year without trouble or incident. There were many close to call situations that I had luckily avoided becoming something more. Each year I resumed the job in the manner that I had left it the previous year.

I was well used to cutting those trees and shaping, sawing the tops off to a lesser degree each year, and levelling. They always grew right on up again. They were incredible trees.
My side cutting practice was home grown. In itself it was very dangerous. There was no other way of doing this and whilst it worked to good effect, proved beyond doubt that no husband and wife partnership of their calibre could possibly have completed this task. So from the beginning it was obvious that the trees had been left to go – and good they looked for it too, I thought.
My devised practice involved climbing the ladder a little by little with the petrol hedge trimmer held off to one side, stopping at intervals to side cut the tree whilst holding onto the ladder by my knees. It was perilous and wrong. But it was the only way, and I succeeded in making it work.

Year three saw me completing the job to the high standards I had set myself – right up to the last tree. This last tree was a spindly tree in comparison to the others. It hadn’t developed in quite the same way. It was high, but not as dense.
I moved the ladder once again as I proceeded down the hedgerow to allow the cut to progress up the last tree for this year.
The last tree. This was as far as the hedge row went before it reached the house. And what a fantastic achievement for me it was. I had tamed the trees. I had created the hedge. It could be a signature cut. Each year I walked away from that job I did a double take to admire my own work.
I was at the finish line once again. Year three, all done – nearly.

For three whole years I had been cutting this impossible hedge. I had managed it alone. I had learnt new things along the way. I now knew the preferences of the Leylandii tree, how it would react to certain cuts. I felt as though the task I had completed each year here wasn’t normal, therefore I had to praise myself in actually managing it.

Pluto Dareios had always shown his appreciation and accepted me into his house without question.
I had in myself accepted the job for two reasons, one being that I liked Pluto Dareios and the other more out of obligation to Abbadon Amon.
I didn’t have the desire that I had started with three years ago, to carry on.
Never one to shy away from hard work, this was beyond hard work. A risk assessment would have stipulated other ways of completing this job; none of which I was using.
And although this was the candid world Pluto Dareios and I did enjoy those surroundings, it was different. Pluto showed the most generous of respect and appreciation in completing what to him must have been an insurmountable maintenance task.
But I was at this point in time now whereby I felt the negatives actually outweighed the positives. The deeper I looked the more I came to the realisation that I wasn’t here for the right reasons. For work yes, and for obligation to Abbadon Amon too. Also because I had allowed myself to be sucked in whilst knowing that the job was inherently dangerous. Despite taming this job, it wasn’t an enjoyable experience.

On the last tree of year three – that’s when I fell off the ladder. I’d come close on many occasions. To be expected after all. You don’t perform tasks like this without that ever present feeling that it may not go to plan.
This was a job that shouldn’t be conducted this way under any circumstances. Here on this task though, there seemed no other way.

Falling was very quick. It was too quick to stop.
The ladder reached near to the top and I was past the centre of gravity on my way up.
When I went down the hedge trimmer came down with me. I was holding onto the ladder with my knees and at a certain point felt the sensation of the ladder moving beneath me. I never stood a chance of saving it. It was all too late and I ended up falling off the tree. I fell into the neighbour’s garden.

I was on the ground with a hedge trimmer having cut through the leg of my jeans. I didn’t know what happened at first. I was on the floor with damage. Had I been knocked out? I wasn’t sure. Stupidly, I seemed more aware of the fact that I wasn’t where I thought I should be. A hedge trimmer was by my side running on idle.
I didn’t feel hurt badly, but my pride was damaged. I could remember what I had been doing and I tried to calm myself. I knew of shock and how it can manifest itself. I had to do something quick to avoid that.
So I got up off the ground and picked up the hedge trimmer. I shook myself down and looked around. I was in the next door neighbours garden on the lawn. I’d gone over the top and landed next door, the ladder having given way beneath me.
As I stood there the next door neighbour approached me from the other end of the garden. He was pushing a rotary mower mowing the lawn.
As he neared me I spoke to him and I said “morning”.
He kept pushing his mower forwards, past me. He also spluttered ‘morning’ as he passed me by. I began to wonder.
How could this be happening?
The neighbour just kept on mowing his lawn.
I walked away towards the road in slow motion.

I never cut those trees again. I never went back and I never picked up the telephone.
I was asked through a middle man once in the following years if I would be interested in resuming where I had last finished off. I turned it down.