The Writing Tree

The Writing Tree
It’s a sunny, breezy, afternoon. I’m sitting underneath the old Writing Tree in our local park. The tree is an ancient horse chestnut – actually two, growing from the same original trunk - on a little mound in the south western corner of the park. Many of the very old trees died after that very hot summer of 2003 and the Writing Tree has been going down hill since then – in fact part of it might be gone already and has had its branches cut off... the other bit has thin clumps of leaves on it. The summer is racing away.

I’m tired and wonder what happened to my enthusiasm about writing, but somehow I always get some kind of magic from the old tree that I don’t feel when sitting at my desk. Right now there’s an emptiness in me. I don’t yet know whether it’s a good emptiness, a feeling of stillness and groundedness, or not-so-good emptiness… sadness and frustration. I keep feeling cool breezes, but I know I’m imagining it. Perhaps it’s something to do with that end-of-summer melancholy that I still get every year.

This park is the landscape of my early parenthood, a slow life of walks to the childminder and the nursery or just ambling around looking at trees and naming them. That phase has pretty much ended. I feel the pull of the north. Or is it just ‘north’? What does that mean? Is it a euphemism for sensing impeding melancholy?

I look to the north. When I do that I can always imagine this vale before it was developed in the 19th Century, the rolling hills, the forest in the distance in what is now Finsbury Park. Why is that important to me? Does it matter? Yes – we are rooted to place, not just floating in brick boxes or our own minds. I constantly feel for old patterns amongst the modern template. Ermine Street is like that, too.

The wind is getting up. Time to pick the kids up from school.