Social Distancing

Imagine a world high above the world, a world full of budding life, far from the ills of the world, where even the strayest human passes distantly beneath the world; a world of nooks and canopies giving out onto blue skies and blackbirds, a world we can explore anew, like we did when we were new, when hours would pass before anyone came calling; a world of secret hideaways and free isolation, where perspective comes easy, far over and above schooldays and workdays; a world where we might find refuge, shelter and peace.

This world is here. Up here. In the trees.

Last Saturday was the International Day of Forests and I accidentally observed the moment by climbing no less than six trees.

Crouched in the branches of a pine that grows like a climbing frame over the gate to our garden, watching the toings and froings of pensioners and parents in their two metre bubbles, I am struck by a memory of one of the first short stories I ever wrote.

Perched was written more than ten years ago, during the dying days of my office-based career, written while sitting at the foot of a willow along the banks of the Thames in August, on an evening before and after long days as a stifling data entry clerk.

It wasn’t obvious until a month later, when I walked out of the job without notice, what this story was about. Now, as I perch on this flaking old pine, I’m jolted back to its secret yearnings to escape the day-to-day, up and away, into the canopy.

He was perched high up in the tree with his fingers curled around the branch like a bird. He was frozen still, but his muscles were taut as if he were about to fly away. Which of course he wasn’t, because, aside from being a man in a bowler hat perched in a tree, he looked perfectly normal.

If you’re keen, you can read the rest of the very short story here.

Orion, DC From the days of Gilgamesh, the days of Achilles, the days of Saladin he’s been drawing that bow and the barb will always lodge in my heart: a merciless wound that, never fatal, will bleed whenever the night draws in.

I wrote this last night after reading a passage in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy – where he writes so beautifully it makes you want to give up trying – on the subject of an unrequited love. But it got me thinking about the phantasma that is the imagination and specifically about the water and powder of fantasy and memory…

I have a fantasy about lying in the summer grass with a girl – we lie at right angles to each other; she rests her head on my chest, and plays with a piece of grass, laughing sporadically and gazes, twisting her head back, into my eyes which focus on the skies above. One hand rests, cradling her head; the other, holding a straw, casts a swathe across the heavens.

I’m talking into the soft evening twilight, speaking gently of Cassiopeia, of Cygnus, of Cepheus. As the pink fades into violet velvet, the stars pick their patterns through this tapestry thrown across the horizon. Summer suffocates our senses and the evening releases a hundred herbal scents into the air, the earthy planet warms our bodies and the softening grass supports us. Continue reading Orion, DC From the days of Gilgamesh, the days of Achilles, the days of Saladin he’s been drawing that bow and the barb will always lodge in my heart: a merciless wound that, never fatal, will bleed whenever the night draws in.