A Sideline View: Feeling chipper in lockdown

The orange chipper is back in use.

My husband bought a chipper a few years back. A bright shiny orange thing with a wide gaping mouth. Plenty big enough to swallow a pair of perfectly positioned pliers into its angry depths. And to then make a nasty graunching sound and grind to a halt.

He may have already recouped his initial outlay in dump saving costs before that fateful day but after that, it sat in the garage taking up precious floor space. With a very twisted pair of pliers inside waiting to be extracted.

Extraction day did finally come, the shape of the pliers now resembling something Uri Geller may have put his mind to.

Many months later — it may have even been longer — and not being of a particularly mechanical persuasion, the thing was pulled apart and fiddled with. A metal flap lay on the concrete garage floor, evidence the thing was in the throes of being fixed. There may have even been a tool of some sort lying nearby. Things were definitely progressing.

Fast forward another span of time and with a bit of flailing about, lo and behold the flails were fixed and she chugged into life. Mangled innards and all. The day had arrived, twigs needed seeing to and the beast was about to be rolled forth.

But no. In the ensuing time lapse between its meal of metal and the present day, the wheels had come off — well not entirely. More like the tyres had decided to flatten and perish. So there was to be no grand show of orange in the front garden. Another job now lay in wait. And lay in wait it did.

But just as well orange is the new black, as this beauty was about to hang about a bit longer. During the tyre-fixing process, a necessary part of the mechanism was inadvertently rendered useless. Lucky for us, a very handy brother-in-law, fixer of most things problematic, including flat and buggered chipper wheels, came to the rescue.

And very timely it turned out to be. What better way to spend lockdown than indulge in a bit of fruit tree pruning. Before we knew it, that metal eating machine was rolling its way to chipper heaven, devouring twigs, branches, weeds and leaves. And no pliers in sight.