A Little Book About Trees, by Tim Burr

Tim felt at once they were not a receptive audience. There were few truly earnest faces among them, while others pretended, thinking perhaps he had more authority than he did, when in fact he had none. Worse, he felt empty of a sudden. It had seemed such a little thing at the time, just to come along and talk. But an audience’s attention isn’t guaranteed, especially not a captive one like this. He’d have to work at it. Then having won it, he’d have to come up with something worth saying, and fast. What he’d planned to say, aided by these stilted notes he clutched in increasingly his sweaty palm, just wasn’t going to do the job.

It had started as a joke. He’d written a little book about trees called, well, “A Little Book About Trees.” It had taken him all of an evening, and he’d posted it online, like he did with his other stuff. And like all his other stuff, some of it going back twenty years, he’d not given publishing a second thought. Maybe someone would appreciate the joke and leave a wry comment. There were some real wags out there in cyberspace. But then the impossible happened, and a publisher emailed him. This really doesn’t happen, ever, he’d thought, and especially not for a title like: “A Little Book About Trees” by Tim Burr. I mean, the publisher knew it was a joke, right?

The publisher wasn’t one of the big six, of course, but a small, local press, who handled history and nature. The book would be a good fit, he said, after cautioning Tim there’d be hardly any money in it, but he’d like to print the book anyway, if Tim had no objection. Well, Tim had no objection. It would even be funny, he thought, seeing it on the shelves. Trees weren’t exactly his forte. He’d simply blagged the information from a dozen places around the web and put it into his own words. Then he’d illustrated it with his own photographs. Literature it was not. Poetry it was not. And of all the things he’d ever written, this, he felt, was the least worthy of anyone’s attention.

What he had that he felt was of infinitely more value was a dozen epic novels of a romantic and metaphysical nature. With all his heart, he still believed in them, but they sat up on his web-site with the rest of his stuff, and hardly anyone read them. Still, he wondered if one thing might lead to another, and then, well,…

With publishing, there also comes marketing, so Tim found himself on a bit of a promotional book tour. Or rather, he had a ten-minute phone-in slot on the BBC local radio station. Then there was a morning in a bookshop with a pile of his books for signing. He dressed up in tweed for that, but no one got the joke, just like they didn’t get the Tim Burr bit, and no one was buying the books either. Tim didn’t mind that so much, and even understood it, having by now seen the cover-art foisted upon him by the publisher’s graphic designer. It looked like it had been dashed off in half an hour, which was fair enough, this also being about how long it had taken Tim to write the book.

That said, the book did go on to sell a thousand copies, which just about broke even. You’ll still see the occasional one in publishers clearance, but it’s fair to say Tim’s brief moment in the spotlight faded back into obscurity. So it goes, thought Tim. It never did lead to anything else, and nobody got the joke.

But then there was this teacher who taught English to adolescent students. She was the sister of a friend of a friend of Tim’s, and she’d arranged a speaker to come into school for the annual Book Week, but they’d cancelled at the last minute. This was an esteemed professor, author and arts critic, who sounded to Tim like the real thing, except he was too busy, and also rather rude having cancelled at so short a notice. So, there was a desperate trawl for anyone who might know someone who knew someone half resembling a writer. And that, to cut a long story short, is the only reason Tim was standing there now.

“Just talk a bit about writing,” the teacher had said.

Simple enough, thought Tim. Except, right now he couldn’t think of a thing to say. And he wondered if part of the reason was he knew nothing about writing after all, or if he did, he’d forgotten it, and his dozen novels of a romantic and metaphysical nature meant nothing in the scheme of things. So there was no point trying to enthuse such a reluctant, and by now fidgety crowd of youngsters over the wonder and the mystery of the literary creative arts, when Tim was losing the plot of it anyway, and when the surest route to the high-street bookshelves turned out to be a spoof title called “A Little Book About Trees”, and a subject he knew nothing about.

The teacher, a trim, middle-aged lady with a permanently harassed expression, and greying hair, was starting to look less harassed, and more worried. Was Tim all right? I mean, he was a writer, wasn’t he? And there was nothing writers liked more than boring the pants off others about their writing. So go on, Tim, just say something. Anything.

There came a titter from the back of the class. In Tim’s day there would have been spitballs to follow, but they did not seem an overly violent bunch, and he took comfort from that.

“So,…” he said, a little too loud, and while it got their attention, it didn’t stop the kids from looking at their watches. It was a half hour slot, but there was a risk this was going to be the longest half hour of his, and their lives.

“So,” he said again, softly this time. “How many writers have we got in the room? Put your hands up.”

Tim put his hand up. No one else did.

“All right, he said. “Let’s call it something else. Who keeps a diary?”

He put his hand up. Glances were exchanged. A dozen hands went up, shy at first, but helped by the hand of the teacher.

“So, you were having me on,” he said. “I’m not on my own after all. There are lots of writers.” Titters again, but this time he felt they were with him, and he relaxed. “Can you tell me this, though,” he said: “Would you ever show your diary to someone else?”

There were no takers for that. “Why write it then?” he asked. The atmosphere had changed. Already they were five minutes in, and he’d barely scratched the surface. “That’s a mystery, isn’t it? Let’s think about that.”

Then he remembered why he was a writer, and realised he’d just woken a dozen kids up to the fact they were writers too. And those who weren’t? Well, by the time he was done, he’d have shown them they could be writers as well if they wanted. He was doing none of them any favours, of course, because it was an odd thing, to be a writer. But the blood-writers among them would know that.

And they’d do it anyway.

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Holding on, or letting go?

Durleston wood is the setting for my novel “In Durleston Wood”. It’s where I grew up. I changed its name to protect it from visitor numbers, should the novel ever become a bestseller. Well, stranger things have happened. It didn’t, but Durleston, like many of our green spaces, is suffering anyway. I’ve written about this before.

In the book, there’s a beech tree, overlooking a bend in the river. It’s hundreds of years old. The protagonist sits under it, talks to imaginary people, and contemplates things. Like him, I’ve known that tree since childhood, and treasured the idea that it would be there forever. However, over the decade since I wrote the story I’ve had intimations of its mortality. A few years ago it lost a substantial proportion of its branches in winter storms. The more optimistic side of me hoped the rest of it would recover, other branches filling the void, plus I thought, it’s been there so long, it seemed unlikely it would fall down on my brief watch on earth. But fall, it has.

I’ve been away from Durleston throughout the pandemic. It’s an attractive bit of countryside, and social media did what my novel didn’t: it put Durleston on the map. Throughout the furlough periods, more and more people have been coming to what I once thought of as a secret domain, largely unknown outside the local area. The paths became clogged and churned to slime with processions of shuffling, noisome people, sometimes literally by the coach-load. So I’ve stayed away.

Now the pubs and shops are open, things have calmed down, midweek at least, and I returned today to find all that remained of the beech tree was a stump. Now, I can hardly blame this on the pandemic. It actually looked pretty rotten inside, like it’s been dying for a long time. It lies crashed to earth, scattered as habitat for bugs and fungi, all part of the natural cycle of the woodlands. Still, it was a shock, the loss of its sheltering canopy transforming the light in this corner of the woods into something eerie and unfamiliar. But more, I can’t help the feeling, that it should have fallen on my watch, is darkly auspicious of events in the wider world.

There have been other changes here in the year of my absence. The path along the river was bordered in places by lush, rolling grassland. It’s been used for livestock grazing – cattle and sheep – for as long as I can remember. But now the green is silver, the meadows covered in plastic, hundreds of acres of it. I’m not well up on farming practice and I don’t know what the crop is here, but the change is sudden, and it’s all the same – has the feel of a kind of all-eggs-in-one basket desperation to it, tearing up and rendering the picturesque landscape as something industrial and horrific, and then what do we do with all that plastic? Do we send it to Turkey, to be burned, along with all the rest? Dare I hope the stuff is in some way bio-degradable?

Then, other meadows that border Durleston are to be built upon. There is a long running battle with a national house-builder who is looking to put up two hundred houses on the greenbelt. This has been ongoing for a while, and though rejected by the planning department years ago, the council is losing the fight, ground down through one doggedly vexatious appeal after the other. The intent is clear, and so far as I’m concerned, the land is lost. I wonder why this bothers me, since I don’t actually live around here any more.

When a man we know grows old and dies, it’s a time for sadness, but we recognize it’s unnatural we should go on forever. We mourn, we pause in reflection, and in celebration of the man’s life, and we accept that he is gone. Why can we not treat our memories of places like Durelston in the same way?

I did not think I would be having to deal with this in my lifetime, the actual death of Durleston. It had seemed such an unchanging place when I was a boy. But now the beech tree has gone, the buffer zones of green meadow are covered in plastic sheeting, and the houses are coming down to the edge of the wood, which will transform it into little more than a dog’s toilet.

In town, if a coffee shop is changed into a charity shop, or vice versa, there is no personal sense of loss. Indeed, I couldn’t care less. Town is town; it is a literal representation of itself. But in a landscape the representations are fluid. A meadow at dusk is also a canvas on which to let play the imagination. The starry heads of the allium in the shady deep of the wood speak of something fey, until the mind trips over the vulgar beer-can, and then they do not speak at all.

I don’t live around here any more, but travel back when I can, because in many ways this place nurtured me. I like to pay homage to it, and have taken comfort down the decades from what, for so long, had been its unchanging nature. But I’m going to have to find a way of turning my back, and letting go, as I have similarly let go the lives of friends and family who have passed away. Of course, Durleston is still here. It still has a physical presence, a scrap of ancient woodland on a bend in the river, but in a deeper sense, it’s finished.

There is a story taking shape here, and it’s not the same as the one I wrote “In Durleston Wood”. And it’s not about nostalgia either, nor corporate greed, nor political corruption writ large. Such things are so obvious now they’re barely worth a mention. It’s about looking at the land and seeing more than what is physically there, and whether that’s important or not. And if we say it’s not then the world moves off in a particular direction, one that is uninteresting to me. But if we say it is, then that’s a thing worth exploring, indeed one of the few noble things left to us, but places like Durleston are vanishing fast in England. The towns are all merging into one another as houses are thrown up on greenbelt, and none but the rentier class can afford them. So it’s already looking like a lost cause.

I look at my broken tree-stump and I do indeed read it as auspicious, that it should have fallen on my watch. The future isn’t a road to the sunlit uplands, certainly not looking at it from the perspective of the north of England, and based on the direction of travel so far. But then we’ve known that since the eighties. Still, it’s looking like I may get another story out of it. Let’s call it: “Leaving Durleston”, or how about: “Letting go”? Or more simply: “A Lone Tree Falls”.

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The stories told by trees

Lone tree in a puddle

I don’t know what sort of tree this is. I’ll have to wait until it’s in leaf for a clue. I see it once a week or so on my rambles across the plane, as I continue hiding out from Covid, so I’ll get to know it in all its seasons. While it wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, it has the distinction here of being alone, so it can be more expressive. It’s also a valuable way-marker through the confusion of drainage channels and boggy potato fields that make up this part of the world. And to top it all, there’s this puddle, shaped just right, that reflects it. I think it tells a lonely story.

There’s a school of thought among photographers that scorns the use of filters. They don’t like fancy post-processing techniques either. You should tell it like it is, they say. A skilled photographer doesn’t need software to make an impact. A skilled photographer reads the light, squeezes the shutter and bang. There’s your dinner! And fair enough, if that’s your thing. But there’s also a school of thought that says no two people will see a scene the same way. We always overlay it with our mood, with our imagination. The camera sees things one way, and we see it another. And if we want to bring what the camera sees closer to how we saw it, we use whatever pre and post-processing techniques there are to achieve that.

So, I shot this five times in rapid succession. The first image is correctly exposed, the others are under and overexposed to varying degrees. The underexposed ones exaggerate the texture of the sky. The overexposed ones bring the details out of the shadows. Then I used some free, open-source software on the computer called Luminance HDR. This overlays the images and lines them up for you, then adds some tone-mapping to bring out detail and colour. It also changes the mood of the scene, depending on the tone-mapping algorithm you use. This one is Mantiuk ’06. It adds a bit of noise, which I didn’t like at first, but now I do. Then I use RawTherapee, another free open sourced tool for cropping and fine-tuning. RawTherapee also seems to convert images well for displaying on a screen.

Bleak and wind-blasted. That’s how the scene appeared to me this weekend. A single, normally exposed, shot told a different story, but Luminance seemed to reach in and pull out that ragged lonesomeness for me, one that struck a chord with the times.

Given the turmoil at home and abroad, I should perhaps be paying more attention to current affairs than gawping at trees. But these days trees make more sense. To an old left-libertarian like me there’s much about our direction of travel that pains me. As a pragmatist though, I’m persuaded there’s not much we can do about it while the Zeitgeist is pointing so firmly in the other direction – meaning right-authoritarian. But since I’ve drifted onto the subject, are we English really expected to wrap ourselves in the Union Jack at a time when the Union has never been more precarious? Are we really to play the patriotic card at a time of spiralling food-bank use, a time when even cripplingly long hours of work are no guarantee of avoiding poverty? Are we to pretend that’s okay, a good example to trumpet on the world’s stage? And all that was before Covid, of course, and a response that has left so many dead, yet so many well-connected types in serious profit. I think my nameless wind-blasted tree, reflected in a muddy puddle, has more to say about where we are right now. Anyone wrapping themselves in the flag at a time like this is using a strange kind of reality-bending optic, and certainly one that stretches this photographer’s credulity way beyond reason.

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The oak and the stone

Below the hill there stood an oak tree.
Beneath the oak there was a stone,
And the stone, it was an anchor
To hold the heavens down.

But then came the generations,
For whom the heavens grew dim.
Then came the man who built a house
And sealed himself within.

The house stood in a garden,
But the garden was too small,
So he burned the tree and broke the stone,
To extend his garden wall.

Then his pastures grew infertile,
As the sun-king lost his mind,
And the moon, she raised the wind and rain
And turned his lands to slime.

The heavens, they waited patiently,
Above the man’s bowed head,
But the stone was gone, the tree was burned
And the heavens? No, they could not return,
Until both man and house were gone,
And from the rested ground there grew,
From sleeping acorns, trees anew.

Then the sun king smiled,
And the moon his queen,
And blessed those men who quietly,
Raised back the stones from memories
Of when in former times we’d heard
The heavens whispering in our dreams.

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The shapes of trees

I’ve been thinking about the Muse and how indiscriminate she is. The Muse is where the desire to create comes from. It’s a mysterious thing, a surge of something from deep in the imagination that we can overlay upon reality. It makes the mundane magical, blissful, sometimes even shocking. It’s partly of us, but mostly, I think, it’s something “other”. Men personify it as a woman, an angel, a goddess, because its nature is akin to love. You hear her singing a song that can lift you to heaven, while being perfectly aware, as in the siren song, it might also lure you to your doom. The choice is yours, the risk is yours, because she doesn’t care, and your biggest mistake is thinking she does.

It’s like now, heading out across Lancashire’s Harrock Hill in this beautiful, late afternoon winter’s sun. Winter is a time for trees, for the bare shapes of them against the sky. There are some good, ancient specimens here, lone trees in a gentle landscape, something expressive about them, like the header picture, in this case a pair of pollarded oaks, grown together like lovers to form between them, a single perfect hemispherical dome. They are expressive, though of what, I cannot say, only that the Muse has lured me out here, teasing me with the notion I might catch a glimpse of her, if I tread carefully.

So much rain these past weeks, the paths are deep in mud now, more Wellingtons than walking boots kind of terrain, more waxed thornproof than Goretex kind of walking. Last time I came this way, I saw a buzzard, close enough to get a picture of him. He’s out again today, but keeps a wary, camera-shy distance, circles the blue in lazy sweeps, pivoting the world about his wing-tip. No muse for him though, I’m thinking, poor creature, just the will to live, and to live he must eat, and to eat he must kill. Only we humans see the poetry in him, and then only some of us. Only we sense the magic behind his manifestation, and have the strange psychological disposition to romanticize it.

It’s quiet for a Covid afternoon. I encounter just the one family with an army of small, ferocious children and big, wet, bouncy dogs, wife with a voice like a foghorn and a friendly “hello”, husband with a face like slapped arse, sullen, trailing, and wishing he was somewhere else. I hear the children squealing from a mile away. If they’re not careful they’ll disturb the faery, and they really don’t want to do that. Mud and air, a low slanting sun and the noise of children. They’re loving it, as are the dogs, crazy, unconscious, delightful creatures. My own children are in their twenties now, and forever precious, but I miss them at that carefree, squealing age, the age before mud became irksome, and the world of men got hold of them.

Anyone can cop for this burning desire to create stuff. You don’t have to have gone to a posh school and talk like Hugh Grant. Fair enough, a good education helps you to think and express yourself, so that’s a plus. Then the posh school will instil in you a pathological self belief, so if you’re a career creative, that all adds up. But if you make it big or not, or die in obscurity – again – the Muse doesn’t care. Nor does she care if your fame spreads her gifts far and wide, or if you keep them a guarded secret along with the fluff in your pocket, it’s all the same to her. I’m not sure, but I think her motive is simply to offer you the chance to let her into your life, in some ways even to be your life. Any misunderstandings as regards the nature of the relationship that henceforth develops are all yours.

The philosopher Schopenhauer held a view that the only visible manifestation of the power behind the universe was in the blind will to life. This manifests itself in nature, which appears cruel and self consuming and, like our friend the buzzard, void of any real meaning – the sort of meaning a man might hope for against the odds, and keep the glimmer of it safe in a corner of his heart. But beyond the will, reckoned Schopenhauer, there was something else, something blissful, and that’s what artists feel, and strive to give expression to. That’s where the muse lives. Such glimpses of bliss are fickle though and, as I said before, she’s indiscriminate with her favours. She can point her finger at anyone, prince or pauper, articulate Bard or poor illiterate serf.

Speaking of princes and paupers, I’ve been reading an old biography I once wrote of the Wigan poet John Critchley Prince (1808-1866). Humble beginnings, self-educated and all that, born into grinding poverty not that far from here, and died the same way. His life was interesting, heroic in an unsung sort of way. It was also terribly hard and tragic, and a story without a happy ending. I wrote about Prince because I was interested in obscurity, and what drives men to create, even when no one is listening. He did find a little recognition along the way, but judged it toxic and irksome, so he destroyed it. Prince left behind several large volumes of poetry, but isn’t considered to be one of the greats – just a minor poet, as they say – but those volumes speak of the power of the muse, and how she can drive a man all his life to create a prolific body of work, regardless of its worth to anyone else, or to posterity. She possessed him through thick and thin, and in the end she turned him to drink, and then she killed him.

Then there’s the novel I’m reading, Niall Williams’ “This is Happiness”, and his description of the musicians in the pubs of Ireland’s west, in the early ’60’s, before electricity, and maybe for centuries before that. They were unassuming men, men who came together, and all forgotten now, but who for a night, for even just an hour of spontaneous reels, became perfect channels for the Muse, and made a music that the listeners carried in their hearts to the end of their days.

Danger, beauty, bliss. You’d better be careful courting her, but so long as you can arrive at that delicate understanding, your life will be all the better for having her in it, be it in poetry, art, the writing, or even just in the shapes of trees.

Speaking of muses, men are also prone to projecting them onto mortal females, imagining them timeless, ageless. Here’s one from fifty years ago:

Keep well, and thanks for listening.

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