THE tree surgeons came this week to topple the beech tree that had grown too large, blocking out the light at the front of the house.

They brought a machine which ate up all the branches and leaves, spitting them out as shavings. But the large chunks of thick tree trunk were left on the ground.

 “Do you want us to take this lot away for you?” I overheard one of them saying to my husband, who was nodding his head agreeably at them.

I was out there like a shot: “Don’t worry, we can use these. We’ll keep them,” I assured them.

“What did you want to get rid of those for?” I hissed into my husband’s ear. “There must be a few hundred pounds worth of fire wood there. We can use them.”

He looked at me as if I was mad: “But they’re not logs. Look at the size of them. Who’s going to cut those up? You’re just creating more work.”

Now, I wasn’t expecting him to chop them up, any more than I would. Apart from the fact he has a bad shoulder after breaking it in a sledging accident a few years ago, it’s not as if he is a trained lumberjack.

“I’ll get a man in,” I said.

I can never understand why he appears so offended every time I announce I’m getting a man in. It’s not as if I’ve said I’m getting a real man in. Just a man, any old man, to do the job.

I’ve already got a man in to unblock the drains, replace a broken window pane, fix all our wobbly kitchen chairs and mend the broken guttering.

“It’s about division of labour,” I told my husband. “You do what you do and let the man do what he does.”

But the latest battle over getting the (real) man in wasn’t helped by the fact that my mother-in-law appeared in the middle of it.

“You’re never going to chop those up yourself,” she said to her son. “You’ll have to get a man in.”

He disappeared into the garage and emerged wielding a large axe: “But what about your shoulder?” said my mother-in-law, adding that she was sure one of the lads from the wood yard down the road could chop it all up in about half an hour.

That didn’t help: “My shoulder is perfectly fine now,” said her son, who is finds it difficult to accept that his physique and strength might, possibly, have declined just a little since he was in his twenties.

I had to take our youngest into town in the afternoon, so I left them to it. By the time we got home, several hours later, there was a pile of neatly cut logs on the driveway, with just a few small bits of stump left.

“You’ve done a great job,” I said, surprised. But then our 20-year-old student son Patrick, who had been in bed when I left, emerged from the garage with the axe: “You owe me £25,” he announced. “Dad said I could have some money to go out tonight if I chopped up all this wood.”

After he had gone, his dad appeared to survey his work: “He’s done a good job, but he didn’t finish it off properly,” he said, reaching for the axe.

 He chopped up the last few bits Patrick had left behind and proceeded to clear away the mess: “These young ones might be fitter and faster. But they just don’t have the stamina.”

OUR living room has been taken over and trashed once again during exam season, when the boys traditionally like to spread their paperwork out on the big table, floor and sofas and shut themselves away in there. I think they are working but, who knows? We are not allowed in, lest we disturb their thought patterns, or Facebook conversations. Now the AS levels and end of year exams are over, I was looking forward to getting back in there again. But I hadn’t counted on Euro 2016, which, in a house full of football addicts, means weeks of a succession of largely dull matches and even more dull commentary, spread out over far too many hours, replacing all my favourite programmes. I’ll be in the kitchen watching Netflix.