This morning while I was having a meeting with our parish priest, we heard a sharp crack. I looked out the window, but nothing seemed obviously amiss. That's because I wasn't looking in the right spot.

At the end of our meeting, when I was on my way to my next appointment, I found that a previously pollarded poplar tree in the churchyard had blown over in the wind, its fall broken by the old stone boundary wall. The root ball was still in the ground, but the trunk had rotted through. Nobody was injured when the tree fell, but because of it hitting the wall it was potentially unstable and dangerous. The crown of the tree was leaning out into the pavement quite alarmingly! It was also blocking access to the main door we use for Soup Kitchen deliveries, and the rubbish and recycling bins.

I am a dab hand with the secateurs, and I even have a very small electric chainsaw, but this needed professional attention. So after cutting off the branches that were blocking the pavement, I spent most of today contacting and liaising with tree surgeons. They came and deconstructed the tree very neatly. The logs will be used to edge beds in the Soup Garden. The small branches I will cut up into very small pieces and compost. Because it is a previously pollarded tree, there weren't any medium branches yet. We got a significant discount by not needing the tree surgeons to take away any parts of the tree.

Still, this was not cheap. We hadn't budgeted for it. We couldn't afford to shop around much, because an unstable fallen tree is quite dangerous and this had to be dealt with immediately. And there is always a premium for rush jobs.

We also have no idea how much it will cost to repair the wall. I am trying not to think about how much it will cost to repair the wall. The wall is listed, and has needed work for a while. That bit of wall appears to be safe, for now, but has been seriously undermined and will certainly need repairs much sooner than we otherwise might have left it, and that's also a problem, because we just spent most of our working cash on tree surgery.

If you're able to help us out with this unexpected cost I will be very grateful.

Anything we raise over the cost of the tree surgery and wall repair, we will spend on our Soup Garden, where volunteers and guests grow vegetables for the Soup Kitchen. And maybe tomorrow I can get on with the churchwarden jobs I actually came to church to do today.

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