I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Jeff 1, Hedge 0 It took all winter, but I have triumphed. With a pair of loppers and a handsaw, I have removed something like sixty cubic meters of hedge. Look at how unhappy my wife looks in that first picture, and how pleased in the second. Look also at how much taller she looks. The problem was that the hedge was so tall that it was unmanageable. There was no way to get up there with the trimmers and keep it tidy, not to mention that fact that it was starving that strip of lawn to the right of both sun and water. So we asked the landlord if we could knock it down by about four feet, and he said yes. Suddenly I had a winter project. It needed to be done by March 1, since at that point, you aren't supposed to do that kind of work, since it disrupts the nesting birds. I went after it with a pair of loppers and a hand-saw. The loppers were inadequate, so we bought a new pair. I got scratched up. A lot. We used trimmings as ground cover in the garden, burned some of it, and took a lot to the tip. I made a Christmas wreath out of few bits. Bit by bit, the hedge was pushed back toward the house. Now, from the front it looks pretty good, but from above it looks like a stage set - there's no top on it, and the far side is naked since the trees over there cover it. Victory sometimes smells like pine resin. The hedge, by the way, is a leylandii, and left unchecked, it can grow to look like this. (P.S. The walking tour of York will resume next time.) Luddite'sLog, 11 February 2015 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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