He's a lumberjack and he's okay

My other half and I have been together for eleven years now and I'm starting to worry that my barometer of normal behaviour has become alarmingly skewed. For example, I suspect that in other relationships, "darling, let's spend an hour tidying up the garden," doesn't rapidly turn into "let's embark on some amateur tree surgery and minor deforestation." Unfortunately I'd be lying if I said I was surprised when the husband-to-be decided that simple weeding was boring and started chopping things down.

We've been slowly working on our garden since we moved into the flat. Regular mowing and the creation of a rose bed have improved it, but any efforts were spoiled by the presence of a steep bank on the south side that was very overgrown. Holly, brambles, several mature trees (not subject to any Tree Protection Orders according to all the surveys and searches we had done) and a whole lot of ivy sprawled across it. It was unsightly, but worse it provided the ideal home for spiders of possibly the most evil looking species. In late summer it seemed as if the trees were raining arachnids, all with plump bodies and robust looking legs, some of them visibly hairy. I was keen to get the bank cleared before the weather warmed up this year and the spiders regrouped, so we set about it with gusto. We filled our two council-approved garden waste bins with ivy and we'd barely made a dent, but pulling the stuff up was curiously therapeutic. You grab a bit, give it a yank and metres of tendril start coming loose. Roots pop, snap and ping out of the ground and you just have to keep pulling, following the intricate snake in its death dance around the garden. After a while, though, while I was ripping up ivy, my man was starting to look wistfully up at the trees and stroke his beard.

He determined that he required a bow saw and possibly an axe, having established that I wouldn't let him have a chain saw unless he went on the appropriate safety course. We stopped off at Homebase on our way back from depositing a car boot full of ivy at the local dump. By this point the gardening and subsequent dumping had taken its toll on my beloved. His jeans were ripped and he'd covered himself in mud. A muddy stain spread from his crotch down to where the knee of his trousers should have been, but where instead a frayed remnant of denim flapped in the breeze. He looked like one half of a bad Bros tribute act fallen on hard times. People were staring. To make matters worse, Homebase only sold puny pruning tools, so it was back in the car and off to B&Q. It turns out that B&Q is the place to shop if you fancy a bit of weekend lumberjacking... or possibly a little light murder. They actually sell something called a "handy axe". Handy? Lip balm in your desk drawer is "handy". I've not yet felt the need to carry an axe within reach just in case I need it. Anyway, they also had a wide range of saws, so we left suitably equipped.

He started with some small branches which were close to the ground, preferring to denude the tree trunks of their limbs with the saw before reducing the branches to manageable chunks with the axe, which was indeed proving to be very handy. I lurked fearfully on the sidelines, phone in hand, ready to deal with any emergencies (thankfully there were none). There was a slightly manic glint in his eye as he moved on to the large pine tree, periodically looking over at me and shouting gleefully, "this is so much fun!" He managed to bring down quite a large overhanging branch without any damage to himself or the shed and with a mixture of awe and relief I cast my apprehensions aside, wielding the axe (handy) to help chop it up. As we loaded up our second wheelbarrow full of branches to take to the car, we realised that all of the choppings weren't going to fit in the boot to be taken to the dump. It was also starting to rain, the dump was shutting in an hour and somehow we'd forgotten to have lunch. It was probably time to stop for the day.

Instead of an overgrown mess along one side of our garden we now have a large pile of wood and some increasingly nervous looking trees. The saw and the axe were out again last weekend and they may soon be joined by a brazier. He thinks that it will be more satisfying to burn the wood and maybe use it to cook things rather than letting the council dispose of it for us. So soon I shall get to add pyromania to forestry on my list of things that young engaged couples get up to at the weekends. Such is normality, I guess.