Big Bush

For as long as I can remember (and therefore forever) there has been a big bush at the front of my house. Whenever I have had to give people directions to my house, I have instructed them to look out for the big bush and its ever-changing collection of dog faeces.

It started life as a rosemary bush. A single touch would make you smell indelibly of a potpourri pot. Unfortunately time allowed ivy, ever the Amazon.com of nature, to stage an aggressive takeover that sapped it of all that made it great. In recent years it has been little more than an untameable afro of ivy and fox urine.

This week we are having our drive done. The big bush is dead. Long live the big bush.

Here are some largely uninteresting memories of the big bush:

As a child I took great pride in being the weirdest kid in school. It was an affectation I worked hard to maintain. I went so far as to give my neighbourhood friends ‘mental lessons.’ These invariably culminated in an offensive approximation of disability and a headlong dive into the big bush. Mental.

If I couldn’t be bothered to go inside I would stand on the street and urinate into the bush. I thought of it as marking my territory. The big bush would return the favour: the merest contact made my penis smell of rosemary for numerous hours afterward.

A common theme of my childhood was being hopeless at everything. I trailed even the most basic of my peers’ accomplishments by several years. This included learning to ride a bike. While my friends were zipping about on BMXs I was still safely coddled by stabilisers. One evening I came home to find that my mother had removed and disposed of them. It was an ultimatum. I went straight outside to prove everybody wrong. Many hours and six painful falls into the big bush later, my skin torn to ribbons and covered in dog piss, I had learned to ride a bike.

Over the course of my life the big bush has been the hiding place of vodka, wine, orange squash, eggs, brownies, Doritos, assorted sweets, broken plates, newspapers, pornography, money, myself, and my fragile sense of self-esteem.

Godspeed, big bush.