Do you remember when you climbed your first tree? I was thirteen years old and scaled a mighty Oak tree which was my favourite; isolated atop a tiny moat in Cheshunt Hertfordshire, where I used to live backing onto St Mary’s school, which I used to attend and dislike enormously. I had many friends and was popular, but I detested school because none of my classes were particularly interesting, and none of my teachers really spared their love of each subject enough for any of us to revel in any particular curriculum. I used to sit beside a window in maths class and stare longingly at the moat for hours, all the while our maths teacher, who now looking back on him with childhood retrospection, was much like Hitler; short , small moustache and with a reedy hollow voice used by small men with big plans, which ultimately end in tragedy. I failed maths every year, all because I longed to be outside.
Anyway, back to the tree. From the top, I could see a few nests storing speckled pale blue eggs, beyond which, the rooftops of the council estate where I grew up and lived with my family, glistened in the thin sunlight; it was a nice household, I kept mostly to myself and lived in my bedroom which was tidy and orderly, I disliked mess and wanted my room to be a haven to my books and my music, which at the time was an eclectic mix of 1920’s songs, pop, rock and Bob Dylan. I didn’t really know what I liked, but that’s half the fun of listening to everything, as a consequence of my youth I grew into an adult that has an appreciation of almost all music but still have my favourites, birdsong being one of them. The tree branch I sat upon faced West, in the evening I could stay up in the tallest branches and watch the sun set. I loved watching the sky change with it's’ subtle amber hues until it was peach coloured and ablaze with the evenings last remaining shafts of sunlight. I knew then sitting up in the heavens that I would always love England. It was beautiful, even now very few things can move me as much as a sunset on a warm summers night with the heavy scent of cut grass and the sound of church bells in the distance.
A lot of English people I have spoken to have told me that their first real understanding and identity of what it is to be British took place up a tree. I find that quite amusing, maybe this stems from being able to observe the people, while feeling that you are the only person in the world at that particular time, who can truly appreciate what it is that is going on around you. I once got shouted at for sitting up that tree, a man came over to the moat to poach, who proceeded to shouted at me for disturbing the fish. I argued back from about forty feet above him, telling him that surely he was disturbing the fish by shouting at a girl up a tree minding her own business. He waited an hour for me to come down so he could tell me off properly. In the end he got bored of shouting and scaring all the fish away that he packed his fishing kit up and walked home. Those were much simpler times when you could speak your mind and not be reprimanded for anything too severely, because you just didn’t fully understand anything.
I still don’t understand anything, but purely because I feel like everything is in such a bloody muddle that it’s impossible to know what you really think and feel. It’s only when you look at your life and what ticks you off and you compare it to that day you were thirteen years old and watched the sun set, that you realise life could be better, if only you could climb a tree and watch the people down below for a while. But I can’t climb a tree I’m thirty one years old and have a respectable job and pay my bills. That’s also pisses me off but that’s just a personal grievance and is no-one else’s’ fault. I should never have grown up, and instead stayed thirteen years old all of my life. Although there is only one person who springs to mind when I think of an adult living like a child, but we can’t all be pop stars and live in a giant ranch called Neverland, besides I dislike children and wouldn’t want to hang around with them all day. There is of course more to that story but that’s called slander. Being told off for climbing a tree was understandable, the man who scolded me probably thought I was playing with matches or sniffing glue, all I was doing was observing. I disturbed nothing up that tree, I didn’t break a single branch or as much as disturb one egg, in fact during one summer I watched an entire brood of chicks grow up and was privileged enough to see them take their first flight. I surveyed everything up there, the changes of the seasons, the migration of birds, and the changes of the landscape by industry and traffic. The man who poached for fish on the other hand had different motives for being there, which became evident when the police found a sawn-off shotgun and some bags of £50 notes buried in cellophane bags. I never saw him again, but from the moment it was in the newspapers, my moat and tree were crawling with kids looking for buried treasure. I saw two boys one day playing catch with a dead fox. I was too upset to ever go back there again.
There is a tree in the park behind my house, which has initials carved into it. It says:
‘DH luvs MD for eva’
I personally would like to grab DH by the ear and drag him back to that bloody tree and make him eat that part of the bark off of it. The spelling is just atrocious. There has been a spate of books of recent years which points to the dyslexia of Britain’s youth; I doth my cap to many writers who have justifiably shone the spotlight on this lowest form of ignorance. I personally can’t stand bad spelling, from the days when it was ‘trendy’ to spell badly, here I would like to name and shame Kwik Save and Kost Kut hairdressers. Being in advertising and spelling something wrong for the sake of coolness is just ludicrous. The very act smacks of stupidity, in fact by that rationale, it means that all cleverly mispelt words are written by total idiots. What I found especially funny is that Kost Kut had a branch in West Sussex, which some genius also decided to spell with a K. I think their sign announcing Kost Kut at Kroydon lasted about a week.
But what really irks me the most is the following:
1. The spelling (as explained) 2. The complete misconception that two pimply fifteen year olds saturated in Lynx deodorant and hairspray can be compelled into think that their virginal (hmm dubious) love affair will last forever. 3. Their medium for spreading their love for all to see.
That poor bloody tree. It was just standing there minding it’s own business and 45 years after being tenderly planted into what is now a public park but was once a private grounds of a luxurious manor house, has had some prick called Daz, Daryll or Danno, carve its guts out to make a lasting testimony to a girl who possibly dropped her knickers quicker than a Spanish sewing machine. I have a brother who is dyslexic and now in his forties, it has taken him practically all of his life to be able to read well and write better than these two nincompoops ever could. All right, I climbed a tree, but I’ve never turned one into a decorative valentines card for a girl who’s probably just squeezed out her fourth child in as many years without having finished high school. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, it could just be that her maths teacher is psychopathic Hitler-esqe wannabe, and she’s too interested in looking out of the window. That’s probably it.
I do wonder if things like this annoy other people as much as they do me. I sometimes wonder if I am just being a crotchety and interfering old wingebag, but I have to also wonder whether I am turning into a grumpy old person who spikes young boys footballs if they sail over my garden fence at the age of thirty one. I will just point out that at this stage in my life I am reluctant to visit a dentist, this is because I sincerely believe that I will be happier with one tooth, it making my cantankerous grumbling far more in tune with my appearance. But as I feel I continually have to point out, this isn’t a moan in general, or a moan for moans sake, I just feel that everyone in the world and not just me, is fed up with letting things slide and not standing up for what you believe to be right. Someone needs to stand up for trees, for bad spelling and self made stupidity. It affects all of us. I have plenty of small gripes which I could include in this book, but they are personal and don’t affect anyone else, so those are no-one else’s problems, just mine which I have to add to my list of annoyances and just get on and deal with.
Carving initials into a tree is a crime against trees, a crime against the environment, and a crime to other people who have to ready their inane wallowing into the realm of teenage angst on a daily basis. We’ve been there, we’ve done that, we don’t want to go over it again, thank you.
