TRAGEDY. My lovely peahen Peepee has died. She had gone broody, sat five eggs for several weeks, and then left the nest when it was apparent that all of the eggs were addled.

Since then she has drooped about the farmyard, wings down, and required the ultimate temptations in foodstuff to persuade her to eat anything. I even plucked some of her favourite petunias and mixed them in with teacakes and chick crumbs to try to tempt her. No good.

We found her laid on top of the haystack close to her abandoned nest. A poignant huddle of feathers, her once-proud little crown of feathers flat across her head.

I do not know why we all feel so sad about a dead bird. After all, as a neighbour said, she was only a large pheasant. But she did have character; call her name and she raced across the yard for her teacakes, sit and have a sandwich outside and she was there demanding a beak-full of bread. I am now summoning up the courage to phone her previous owners, especially as they were coming to see her this next week. They raised her from a chick and will be far more devastated than us at her loss.

During this past week, as well as tending to Peepee, I have also been spending some time helping Jo, our youngest daughter, to move into her new home. She and Matthew are buying a Victorian terrace house, and are obsessed with worktops, storage space and mirrors. Every time they go out they seem to come back with another one. Matthew must like looking at himself as much as Jo does.

Once everything was moved in, I felt lost for a job. No paint was available, as no colour scheme has been sorted out; and as the kitchen was also a demolition area, I turned to the garden. Or back yard as a more accurate description. Somewhere under the weeds, thistles and couch grass I found two paved areas, a few flower borders and an outside toilet. The next-door neighbour passed over a large tub of sodium chlorate and advised me to soak all the paved areas in weed killer to "kill anything that grows".

Fortunately I had taken a hoe, spade and fork, and could clear most of the growth manually, although I filled all the black bin liners and wheelie bins in the vicinity.

This made me think, though. John is strictly limited and proscribed about the chemicals he uses on our land. He keeps records of all chemicals he uses. Here, in the city, house owners are probably drenching their gardens in more chemicals per acre than any farmer would dream of using. Jo's new neighbour had a shed full of fungicides, insecticides and fertilizers and, from the information on the side of the tub, explosives as well. "Just tip anything you don't want down the drain," I was told. "We do."

Well, we don't. Jo's neighbour may not have drainage that runs immediately into a dyke system, as ours does, but eventually all the city run-off must accumulate in water purification schemes, rivers and the sea. The neighbour's garden boasted any number of tinkling wind chimes, dream catchers, feng shui items, dolphin mobiles, plastic squirrels climbing up the fence and Tibetan prayer wheels. The windows of their car and kitchen were plastered with Chinese philosophical sayings of being at one with nature and exhortations to honour the world. Their wheelie bin overflowed with containers for organic foods (before I crammed in more garden waste at their kind suggestion). And thankfully they are also due to move in a few weeks; hopefully before they blow the whole neighbourhood up with their accumulated tubs of weed killer.

Updated: 09:42 Thursday, September 13, 2001