• WITHIN a little-known council property near Kilburn High Road, a group of generally happy and smiley-faced old folk dwell in a sheltered housing complex.

It is an ideal of communal living where everyone looks after each other, is friendly, well kept and is a model of beautifully run social housing by genuinely wonderful people.
That is on the inside.

On the outside there is a secret garden that bursts with rain-soaked, glossy-leaved, evergreens, dripping pools of scented passionflowers and perfumed buds of pink polyanthus that are about to burst open over the coming months. Robins and wrens nest in the walled hedgerow and blackbirds sing their hearts out each evening for their elderly listeners.

The only thorn in the jewelled crown of this wonderful place are the five overly tall birch trees that waft around like creatures gone berserk in the midnight air, their capes of silvery black shadows swishing and waffling in the amber darkness. [From poled orange lamps]. A crow screeches out, a fox barks and leaps for its life over the high wall as yet another wayward branch falls from one of the old and leaning birch trees.

Daylight brings a dawn of littered sticklets that trip and twirl ahead of the shuffling old lady that is just coming along the main path for her morning constitutional. Bang goes another small branch as it hits her on the head, catches at her hair and scratches the corner of her eye as she passes.

Crouching over to pick up a particularly large branch that she knows her lesser – friends could trip over she hurls it with abandonment into the flowerbeds, satisfied that she has done her bit for the day.

The five birch trees not only are a dropping hazard but come April their catkins emit a poisonous pollen that ekes itself out over the course of four weeks and is an irritant to eyeballs and old noses.

Please come and either drastically trim these trees for us or replace them under the “unsuitable trees of Camden” policy that is taking place at the moment.

‘A dewy-eyed old person’, NW6