The Cherry Tree

About 15 years ago a sapling appeared at the side of my garden. A self-seeded cherry tree. It grew quite rapidly so I cut off  the top. It produced two new top branches and carried on growing. Within a few years it was as tall as the house and produced a mass of blossom but not many cherries, which were black, small, intensely sweet and mostly impossible to reach, except for the wood pigeons, and they had to perform ungainly acrobatics.
It's branches spread right across the garden, only 4 metres wide and made it quite dark in the summer. To make matters worse, ivy appeared and started to climb the trunk, spreading out in a dense, dark mass as it rose. With some difficulty, I thinned out some thinner branches and removed some lower large  branches, plus loads of ivy, which lightened up the garden quite significantly.
The leaves turn a delightful colour in Autumn, but a lot of work when they fall, so I got a leaf  'suck and shred' machine, which gave me backache in a short space of time, but made an instant mulch for the flowerbeds.
Then one year I got a massive crop of cherries, much of which I harvested with the aid of a long lopping pole. I got about 6 kilos, which in cash terms, is quite a lot. It made a very rich wine. The woman next door enjoyed collecting them and eating them too.
Inevitably, the following year, the crop was down to the usual handful of windfalls and the tree was to become an issue.
I live in a row of terraced houses which have shared side and rear access, so rarely used, that it was mostly impenetrable. Access from the road was via an old wooden door with no lock, occasionally used by the water authority to unblock the shared main drain. I once used it, with the aid of a machete, to take a motorcycle into my back garden to rebuild it and one of my neighbours used it to bring in building materials for his house extention. No one has any responsibilty to maintain it.
It became a liability. Burglars used it to gain access to my back door and rob me and some bad tenants who had been evicted used it to break into an adjacent rented house to reclaim their stuff. So a new lockable metal door was installed by the owners of the adjacent houses, who kept the keys.
One day, after years of total disinterest, the owners of the rented out house next door decided to erect a proper fence between us, to replace the hedge I had developed over the years, consisting of various flowering shrubs. They wanted to bring the materials via the shared rear access, rather than through the front door, for which they needed a key. This was refused by my other neighbour, who regarded this as a violation of her security. The ructions which ensued are too tedious to relate, but relations with this neighbour soured significantly with the other householders who had rights of access, including myself.
I had always had cordial, if somewhat boring, relations with her, but now she refused to speak to me and deferred communications with me her daughter. This fat slag had always been trouble, and this was her opportunity to throw her considerable weight in my direction. She demanded that I pay £10 for the gate key and cut down the cherry tree. I agreed to to pay £4 for the key and to organise tree surgery.
My son, who had some experience, was employed to do the tree work. I had an electric chainsaw, but the blade was blunt, so I bought a new, petrol one, which was utter rubbish. I got a refund and got a better one for less money. My son was only available for a short time as he was going back to New Zealand, but we removed the half of the tree which overhanged their garden, cleaned up the mess and removed all the wood. I got no acknowledgement, let alone thank,s for the time effort and expense involved, just complaints that I hadn't cut down the whole tree.
Some people...