There’s a clematis at the bottom of my garden.  A vigorous, large-leaved, free-flowering variety called Madame Le Coultre, which produces glorious paper-white flowers the size of tea-plates, in great abundance, every year, in spite of–or possibly because of–my sporadic attentions.  Like this one:

This morning, I discovered that Mme had fallen under her own weight, and was drooping forlornly into the hellebores.  I say “fallen under her own weight” because I wouldn’t dream of implying that my neighbours had pitched her back over when she scrambled clean up the 6ft dividing fence and made determined advances on their trellis, rather like a dark green, many-armed Napoleon across Europe.

Besides, I planted Mme nine years ago; she’s been here longer than they have lived in that house, so I reckon that gives her dibs on the fence.

So now I have to untangle the 8-10ft long stems and somehow tie them in to the acres of clematis netting I provided for Mme, which she has studiously ignored thus far.  As anyone who has ever grown a clematis will know, they are largely self-supporting.  This means they will grab onto and coil round whatever they touch; in Mme’s case, this is usually herself.

Picture the scene, if you will.  Yours truly, unsteady of foot at the best of times, waist-deep in hellebores and flag iris behind the pond (yes, that pond), attempting to untangle this monstrosity without snapping too many bud-bearing shoots.  It’s like trying to knit a Fair Isle sweater without a pattern.  In the dark.  In reverse.

However, I’ve managed to achieve some sort of order.  Mme’s many armies have been separated and espalier-trained across the aforementioned acres of netting.  Casualties were limited to one finger (a Swiss Army knife related injury) and one leading shoot, that is now hospitalised in a jam-jar of water on the kitchen windowsill in the hope it may root as a cutting for next year.

Even though I know full well what I am nurturing, I can’t bear not to give it a chance.  Where the hell I’m going to plant it, though, I do not know–give Mme free reign and she’ll annexe Poland before she’s three years old.

The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ‘em like that any more.