‘We need to get into bed and watch a really good Poirot,’ I said, for I had given him such a hard time I doubted anything else would fix it.

The builder boyfriend had cut down a tree I liked while he was working in the garden. This tree was no more than a fast-growing something or other and I’m not really a tree hugger. But I do get attached to certain sprouting things, for not always obvious reasons. We have a vast old twisted trunk in the round garden where the picnic tables are set up, for example, which I love so much, despite it looking half dead, that I have put my own personal Tree Protection Order on it. It is two trunks, in fact, departing from a round base and twisting off in different directions, so you can sit inside it. I have made its continued presence a bottom line for our romantic happiness.

Will Starmer’s last defender please turn out the lights

Devolution has failed. Try telling Andy Burnham

Revealed: How the Treasury abandoned numeracy to boost diversity

We also have a eucalyptus tree that is the biggest I’ve ever seen, and an acer that I’m forever campaigning for as it takes over. The poor BB hacks away at the burgeoning........

© The Spectator