UNTIL about 2007, if you’d asked me what the hardest thing in the world is, I would have said diamond. That’s why they use it for drilling. And that’s what they teach you at school.
After that, I would have said verrucas. I had one on my foot for ten years. I tried everything to kill it – special medicated plasters, over-the-counter Bazooka Gel. The doctor even freezedried it twice, but the damn thing refused to give in. Then, one day – as I was considering attacking it with a hammer and chisel – I realised it had gone. It had presumably died of old age.
Anyway, I now have no doubt that the hardest, toughest most terrifyingly indestructible thing on the planet is Japanese knotweed. These giant, leafy beasts are what you end up with if you cross a bamboo with a Triffid.
They grow at a rate of about five feet a day and guzzle weedkiller like your obese room-mate at uni knocked back pints. I started war on ours six weeks ago. But killing these things is an impossible task.
Even after I chopped them down and filled their tube-like stems with industrial-strength weed-killer (the stuff you use to dissolve old tree stumps), they just kept growing back, this time with a ‘That the best you’ve got’ look to them.
In fact, one of our many knotweed plants – one which is essentially a line of five individual shoots – grew back the following week, but with the centre tube about three feet longer than the others. It genuinely looked like the cocky little thing was raising a middle finger at me.
So now I have no idea what to do. If anything, the weed-killer is just making them angry. Six weeks on I have made no progress and it’s starting to drive me mad.
I’m scared that I’m going to lose it and charge screaming into the garden with a can of petrol and a lighter and take everything out. Even then I’m sure they’d just rise out of the flames, like Arnie at the end of Terminator.
I’m at a complete loss. The only thing I have learned from this experience is that mining companies should do away with expensive diamond drilling and instead just plant a Japanese knotweed upside down and let it bore its way to the required depth.
Weedkiller given all-clear over cancer fears. Click here
