I’ve just been away from home for five days and returned to find an 80 foot conifer in our garden, that has dominated the local skyline for the last four or so decades, is now a horizontal rather than vertical adornment.

During the gales at the weekend it and two of its less lofty neighbours succumbed to the force of the wind, and aided by the fact that the ground is now as much water as it is earth, toppled to the ground.

I checked with my insurers to see if we were covered for the considerable cost of removing the vast green pile of ex-trees and the filling in of the crater left by the exposed root that is some eight feet in diameter. And of course the tree’s topple to arboreal oblivion took chunks of fence with it too.

The multiple choice option favoured by most institutions these days had as its first choice ‘For storm damage – Press One’. I was encouraged by this, rather naively it must be said. Having pressed ‘One’ a recorded voice declared that garden fences were not covered by their Home Policy. I remained on the line to ask whether the removal of the tree was covered. Apparently I was only covered if it had hit and damaged the house, garden sheds, conservatories or outbuildings. We have all those things and had until then felt ourselves lucky that the tree had with almost uncanny precision avoided contact with any of them.

I suspect even the most accomplished professional tree feller would have been challenged to achieve the same neat result. But now I can’t help but wish it had perhaps dealt a glancing blow to our eye catching garden shed, which at my wife’s instruction has been painted to resemble the beach huts she remembers from her seaside childhood.

We have a log fire but are already well stocked with wood that burns well, unlike the wood from conifers. So there lies ahead a truly mammoth task for someone in cutting up and removing something that (like most trees) seems ten times bigger on the ground than it did when standing upright.

But it does at least serve to explain how aeroplanes manage to stay up in the air. If a 70/80mph wind can do that, no wonder a plane flying through air at more than quadruple that speed can remain aloft!