Not the best pear I've had the pleasure of.

I have discovered the further perils of gardening.

Not that I have much to tend to after the recent house move into the City.

At the last place the back garden was 30 metres long, mainly to lawn with a few planted borders and trees. It took a lot of work to keep on top of the basic tasks and not having enough time due to earning a living did mean that I inevitably got a bit behind. The consequence being a scruffy and unruly wilderness. I enjoyed the winter snow cover because it made my garden look as good as those well tended ones in the road.

The opportunity to catch up was therefore over the occasional, time and energy permitting, long weekend and it was a period of concentrated work to trim the long hedge boundary, cut the grass and sculpt the edges , pull out the weedy growth from under the mini-orchard, tidy up the herbaceous borders and then take the accumulated green waste in a series of trips to the Civic Amenity Site on the far side of town.

There was no sitting back with a chilled beer and a cornish pasty upon completion of this work because the front of the house called out for the same attention.

This added another 40 metre run of high privet and a few screening shrubs just inside the boundary wall.

A large garden can be as much a source of stress as a pleasant place to try to relax and enjoy the results of your labours.

In the course of tending to that small suburban estate I self inflicted a few nasty wounds through enthusiastic but mainly mis-use of the hedge trimmer, lawn mower, hosepipe and pressure washer amongst the collection of power tools at my disposal. I was equally gung-ho with the traditional hand tools of sharp spade, fork, secateurs, edging tool, shears, trowel, hoe and rake. I still carry the scars on hands, legs and latterly my upper right side temple from the hazardous tanglings with these tools. The most recent seemingly an attempt to trim my sideburns with the electric hedge trimmer.

You would think therefore that moving to an inner city house with no meaningful garden land would increase my average life expectancy.

I have found that assumption to be flawed.

The forecourt faces north and so has had very little suitability to grow and sustain anything living apart from those hardy and indestructible leylandii's. They are horribly boring plants as well as contributing to many disputes between otherwise reasonable and peacefully co-existent neighbours.

My son has cleared the wooded thicket in a scorched earth approach and as a consequence I have i) a blank canvas and ii) very little exposure to dangers and perils. Sweet.

The back of the house is really just an extension to the shared Service Road with our bit being marked out in that ubiquitous block paving in a herringbone pattern (is there any other?) and a few flush mounted pin kerbs.

Sounds fairly innocuous and again of low peril.

Well, just beyond the bisecting road is a small recess of ground that apparently falls within the red line of my Title Deed Plan. It has a large and as yet unidentified species of weeping tree but severely choked by ivy and other parasitic growths.

Against my better judgement and just to conform to the male stereotype for stupidity when faced with danger I waded, just today, into the wilderness to try to save the tree from the stifling presence of the ivy and to clear out the recess which had become a bit of a litter and dead leaf trap in the eddying currents of the cul de sac.

It was a breezy day, apparently the starter on the forthcoming menu of the biggest storm front to hit the UK in years.

In a quiet moment between the gusts of wind and the usual inner city traffic noise I paused to catch my breath. I became aware of a dull thud of something passing close to my head and then making a "splat" sound onto the tarmac road. I could have been mistaken. It could have as easily been a blood vessel in my ageing brain or a reaction to the strain of work by the aforementioned scar tissue on my temple.

Within a minute or so of having resumed activity the same happened again but even closer.

A bow wave of disturbed air and a faint whiff of fruit invaded my personal space. It was a near miss. Not in the category of an aircraft event but a warning that the next incidence of the same action would involve injury for sure.

Retreating back onto the block paving some 15 metres away and towards the shelter of the house I stood still and waited. With every increase in the blustery wind came the thud, thud of more falling debris. The neighbours caravan took a direct hit and the object bounced off the roof so as to roll and land at my feet even at what I had considered as a safe distance from attack.

It was a large pear.

My experience of a pear tree was based on one that we had planted at the old house to celebrate the birth of one of our children. That sapling had struggled to get beyond a few feet high and at best gave forth, unwillingly, one or two rock hard fruits every fifth year.

The now evident source of the projectiles was a huge gangly monster of a growth adjacent to the lock up garages of the adjoining residential street. I had of course noticed and registered it as a tree but just not a fruiting one.

Now tuned into the impending hazard of being concussed or worse by solid, and to my inquisitive disgust, wholly inedible, pears I decided to take appropriate action.

My new neighbours must have been much amused by the sight of the new kid on the block wearing a builders hard hat, padded shouldered jacket, knee pads and steel toe capped wellies just to cut back a bit of stray foliage.