And finally… green fingers

Topiarist Keith Tyssen, 84, has been carefully fashioning his privet hedge into the shape of a Greek goddess for more than three decades at his home in Sheffield.

However, he has woken dozens of times in the middle of the night to drunkards interfering with his property.

He told The Telegraph: “Drunk passers-by climb on top of her and pull apart her legs.

“It’s too banal to talk about what they do to her. Even the girls go crazy and hysterical with laughter as they jump around on her.”

Named “Gloria”, the hedge began life as a male but was transformed into a “sexy goddess” as the years passed.

Mr Tyssen said: “Most people are amused and the students from the university often come to pose in front of it for their graduation photographs.

“It’s a local figure of fun and amusement. That’s how I like it, but it’s awful how it gets molested in such vicious ways.”

He explained that the hedge wasn’t his “serious work”, saying “it just morphed into something as I wanted to make the lady as sexy as possible”, which is difficult he added because “she is just a privet hedge”.

“If there are just a few leaves out of place she loses it. I have to clip her very carefully every week. She needs a lot of attention. She possibly doesn’t get enough.”