The price is right
Alex James The Christmas tree is big enough for the children to climb. The small ones could get lost inside somewhere. Every year that guy gets it exactly right. His expertise is one of the most pleasing things about the run-up to Christmas. The top is an inch from the ceiling. He has an eye for these things. He grows them and he knows them, brings one round on a lorry with bits of rope for lashing it off the banisters. I am a knot man myself, but his tying skills are in a different league, special Christmas-tree knots that fly the thing plumb perpendicular up the festive feng shui leylines. He's a supreme genius of the spruce genus. Not bad for 50 quid.
Trees belong to the class of things that cost as much as you're prepared to spend — like pianos. If you're patient, you can always get a piano for nothing, especially grand pianos. If you need one right away you can buy an upright that will stay in tune for a hundred quid, one that will tune to concert pitch for about a thousand, and it keeps going up from there, way up.
When I bought my piano I did the research. I was quite flush at the time and I wanted a really good one. 'What's the best piano?' I asked Blur's producer. He said, 'Get a Bechstein, you'll never need another one and nor will your grandchildren.' I called Bechstein and they told me how much it was and I then had to call the producer back and ask him what the second-best piano was. Second-best is always the real best.
If you like the look of a tree, presumably it's enough just to swing by in the autumn, grab an acorn, fruit or whatever, and plant it. That should work. In Long Island specimen trees can change hands for sums that would swallow a pretty decent helicopter.
I bought a mulberry shortly after we moved in here for about 50 quid and it has exhausted my patience. Yew trees are famous in the canon of things that happen slowly, but the £2.50 ones I planted at the same time are as bushy as a bear's eyebrows and going some by now. The mulberry looks exactly the same as it did when it arrived: a stick. The glamour of an instant mulberry was irresistible so I've re-entered the mulberry-tree market at the £400 level and a moms nigra arrived this week, from Holland.
Our gardener's clients tend to be impatient rich people who haven't got time to wait for their mulberries to grow and she's always getting container-loads of forest canopy shipped over; so I snuck one on the Christmas lorry. She's phoned me a couple of times to warn me it's coming and what to do with it when it gets here, and all the rest of it. It arrived last night. The delivery guy was a panicker. He broke everyone with his anxieties. I was having a rest when he arrived. I like a kip in the afternoon more than anything. More than mulberry trees, that's for sure.
Claire woke me up to tell me the tree guy was here as if the fire brigade had turned up. He didn't know what to do with it. She didn't know what to do with it. 'Look, he's a tree guy, with a lorry full of trees. What's the problem? How big is it? Can we move it with the digger?' I was starting to think the thing must be absolutely massive. 'Tell him to dump it. I'll get a crane in; the kids'll love that.'
Then the au pair came up in tears, saying a man in a big lorry had let the chickens out. Then the lorry blocked the drive and the cheese man couldn't get home. So I joined the maelstrom in an executive capacity.
Outside, the chickens, the cheese and tree men had all disappeared and standing in a tub in the middle of the drive was a mulberry twig exactly the same size as the one I've already got. I moved it out of the way. It's not as tall as the Christmas tree. I could have had a whole Christmas tree grotto if I'd spent the money on spruces. I suppose there's not as much demand for mulberries. I'm still not sure what mulberry trees look like. Hey, ho. They won't be getting a Bechstein, but they'll have a couple of nice mulberries.
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