How we battled the triffids – with the help of Simon Cowell of course (From Bucks Free Press)

How we battled the triffids – with the help of Simon Cowell of course

1:21pm Friday 8th May 2009 in

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I HAVE Simon Cowell to thank for the fact that the huge triffid-like bushes at the front of my house were finally shorn at the weekend.

Yes, the Simon Cowell of TV superstardom and not a gardener who happens to share the same name.

For years, we have battled unsuccessfully to contain the massive shrubs that grow ever larger each summer.

I have called in gardeners in the past to look at the problem, but it’s either been too expensive or too difficult. And, as you know, I have twin allergies to spending money and doing any hard manual labour.

So the jungle carried on growing and we sometimes wondered if Lord Lucan was living there with Shergar.

Naturally, Mrs Editor’s Chair and I discussed the issue many times, and I often walked out with a pair of weedy clippers to snap off a few twigs.

But the beanstalk kept on growing, threatening to blot the very sun out from our world. Okay, I exaggerate, but it was at least 20ft high and showing no signs of letting up.

Then something awful happened. The picture on EastEnders began to get fuzzy and break up.

I thought initially it was a clever BBC device to show viewers the world in the same way as alcoholic Phil Mitchell sees it.

But then the picture froze completely and never returned. BBC was dead to us.

It was okay, though. We still had the ITV stations, and Mrs Editor’s Chair’s favourite show, American Idol.

She is obsessed by a contestant called Adam Lambert who apparently is going to be the biggest thing since Elvis, David Bowie and sliced bread – and he’s in with a chance of winning the talent show judged by the great Cowell.

However, to our horror, ITV suddenly began to play up as well with the screen continually breaking up until it, too, stopped dead.

There was one rational explanation. Summer had just begun in earnest and the triffids were back in full force, blocking the satellite dish.

I climbed up and began snipping away with my weedy cutters, but to no avail because I couldn’t reach up high enough.

We rushed off to a DIY shop and bought the most expensive and longest telescopic shears we could find. It was a brilliant device that enabled us to extend the cutters up for miles into the air and then pull a rope to snip the branches.

It was neck-breaking work, because we had to look upwards constantly as we pulled.

But, amazingly, it worked and the triffids began to fall away.

Sadly, just before I managed to cut away the last of the sky-high branches, the tool gave way and just stopped working for some odd reason. And, despite a tour of DIY stores on Monday, we couldn’t find a like-for-like replacement.

So the triffids are still alive, still up there 20ft high and still ready to come back and destroy our lives even though they have been massively thinned out.

We haven’t won the war, but we’ve triumphed in the battle, because our strategy worked.

The satellite dish was able to break through into the ether and pick up signals again – and Simon Cowell, Phil Mitchell and the rest of the TV world were back in our lives again.

Cowell is, as we know, a judge on another hit show, Britain’s Got Talent. Maybe someone should tell him he has a talent for being able to sort out impossible gardens.