I HAVE a deep felt fear of tools which make a lot of noise, and can make large holes in things in the blink of an eye, which is why my electric drill, which I have owned for some 20 years, has hardly been used.

I live in constant trepidation of drilling through a water pipe, or an electric cable, or possibly both, but I had to reluctantly root it out of the garage the other day.

It was all Mrs Hextol’s fault, through her over-exuberant autumnal tidying up of the front garden.

While I am more than content to let nature take its course, she is a firm believer in wielding the pruning shears on anything more than two feet high.

She thinks it encourages more vigorous growth, while I am of the opinion it encourages premature death, as evidenced by the attack on my much- loved, variegated broom bush, which had produced blooms for 15 years before a neighbour suggested it would benefit from a little radical surgery.

Within days, my vibrant eye-catcher had become a stick, and I have never been in favour of tree surgery since.

We have a particularly vigorous red rose on one side of the front door and an equally thrusting honeysuckle on the other, which arch together each summer in gloriously-scented harmony.

The rose in particular soars to the eaves in a profusion of blossoms that last from June until the first frosts.

Rose and honeysuckle alike seem to be doing fine to me, but Mrs Hextol decreed they should both be cut off at the stocking tops to ensure they hit the heights again next summer.

Wonderful though they smell, roses are vicious brutes, and I only have to look at one for it to sink its thorns into my tender flesh -– I sometimes think they are really white roses which have turned red because of constant feeding with my bodily fluid.

I try to keep my distance by eschewing secateurs in favour of some long-handled bolt croppers, of the type used to cut through scrapyard gates, and soon I had sliced through the main stems of both plants.

However, the foliage of both plants was so intimately entwined they refused to relinquish their hold on the door, and in her attempts to encourage them to hit the deck, Mrs Hextol ripped the entire garden trellis off the wall.

It was my fault, of course, for allowing this wooden structure, concealed from human eyes for more than a decade by wickedly-spiked, verdant growth, to get into such a lamentable state that a gentle tug caused it to disintegrate into splinters.

So off to the garden centre it was to purchase trellis, which somehow had to be reinserted behind the much-reduced, but still lethal, spiky stuff.

Sticking a small bit of wood to a wall may be the work of a moment for some blokes, but to Mrs Hextol’s wonder, it took me the entire morning and well into the afternoon to get the job even started.

I had to remove the remains of the old trellis and the screws holding it in place, which of course snapped off at the slightest pressure of the screwdriver.

That meant I had to drill new holes in the wall, hence the drill, which comes with more accessories than B&Q ever dreamed about.

Without ever actually buying any, I have acquired a bewildering array of drill bits of many hues and thicknesses, along with many thousands of Rawlplugs, and I have yet to work out the correlation between drill, Rawlplug and screw.

I once tried to put up a kitchen shelf, which required the insertion of two screws, and finished up with a hole in the wall big enough for use as a serving hatch.

After several hours, to my amazement, the trellis was approximately in place, and I was just tightening the final screw when the small stool on which I was precariously balancing decided enough was enough, and pitched me off, firstly into the rose bush, and then, as I staggered backwards, came back to rap me firmly and painfully on both my shins.

Alerted by the clatter of toppling furniture, my muffled curses, and possibly the drip of blood on the garden path, Mrs Hextol came rushing to the front door just as I was about to drop my trousers to survey the shins that were already swelling alarmingly.

“Don’t you dare,” she breathed with menace, before closing the door.