The Magnificence of a Tree in the Rain

I love trees.

Have you noticed how, in many ways, they’re just like seas and oceans?

No, pay attention, they are. Let me explain...

For a start, both are pretty damn awesome.

(In the true meaning of the word – not the way it’s become common parlance to describe an extra chicken nugget at the bottom of the bag as ‘awesome’ - when in fact it’s just an accidental inclusion by an underpaid kid on a zero-hours contract, dreaming of bigger and better things.)

Seas and trees are not only astonishing to look at, but they’re both also immensely powerful - and in a storm, you could find yourself in big, big trouble from both of them.

I mean, yes, you'd probably need to be in the sea in a storm, for the sea to be a problem. So, fair enough, here in Hyde, the sea isn’t at the top of our list of concerns. But give it a few more decades of unchecked global warming and it might rise (literally) above post office opening hours and the colour of our bins. (Why is our rubbish bin green?!)

That said, when I was living in a seafront hall during my first year at university (in Aberystwyth) and a storm came in, it wasn’t unheard of for the spray from enraged waves to chuck a handful of small pebbles at my window – on the third floor! The Irish sea was like an errant teenager embarking on its first romantic greeting to a suiter up in their bedroom.

The sea, or ocean, is never going to work out as anyone’s actual partner though, is it? Imagine if I'd been impressed by the pebble messages of the Salty One at Uni and invited it in to get to know me a bit better… certain death.

I mean, it wouldn't be the only past relationship of mine that felt like a road to an early grave, but Ms Sea would definately have taken me there faster.

But that’s what happens when you invite almost eighteen thousand square miles of briny water up for a night cap. So don’t, that’s my advice. Romantically, no one needs that.

It's worth bearing in mind, for all their similarities, if you’re thinking of planting an ocean in your back garden – maybe in the sunny corner the cats have started to use as their toilet – you’ll find the two things, trees and huge expanses of water, need very different care, so it’s really worth doing your research before offering a home to either.

I suppose, laid out like that, immense bodies of water and tall woody plants, as well as being 'very similar', are also 'nothing like each other whatsoever' too, aren’t they? The peculiarities of the world, eh?

You see, although there’s often a leaf or two floating on the sea, it’s rare to find the Pacific Ocean floating in a majestic Cedar. And although you can float on water, perhaps clinging to driftwood (from a tree), and you can use the same piece of driftwood as a seat for a rope swing (on a tree), you’ll have real trouble trying to tie the other end of that rope round the English Channel - before letting a line of grubby children from the 1970s swing on it.

There are other differences, obviously, between trees and seas, but these are the main ones. If you’re interested in those other, more subtle contrasts, I suggest night school – because as easy as it is to believe I’m a fully qualified teacher, Professor probably – I’m literally not.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I love trees.

When I was a kid in Manchester, a massive tree in the playing fields in front of my house shed an enormous chunk of itself, blocked the road, smashed a wall and very nearly hit our house. I’m not saying this event was the turning point for my love of trees, or that I have a penchant for near death experiences from our leaf-ed friends, not at all. But the day a tree didn’t come through our roof, made me suddenly more capable of picturing what it might look and feel like, if it did. It made me notice trees more than I ever had before.

Noticing a tree. (Photograph: Jim Kay and Walker Books)

Here in Tameside, when the wind gets up, I often look at the magnificently large trees at the edge of the TransPennine trail and try and work out the ‘falling trajectory’ should they plummet in a direct line with our house. Unlike in my childhood home, our bedroom is right at the front of this property, right in the ‘crushed beyond all recognition’ line of fire. Therefore, all these years later, I feel I have a lot more skin in the game. Back then the front bedroom was my brother's – and everyone knows a big brother’s job is to take one for the team, so there we are.

Some days, usually sunny days, I think that if the nearest tree, a gigantic Sycamore, were to get tired of it all and lie down, the smallest twigs at the end of her smallest branches would manage little more than to vainly run their woody fingers down the bedroom window, in a sort of 'I'm off now' gesture during their death throes. Other days, usually rainy and windy ones, I imagine the arc of the fall could bring timber, the size of pianos crashing through our roof like grizzly bears through a spider’s web.

(There are ways to work out the height of a tree, but they mostly involve chicken blood and midnight naked dancing, which, heaven forfend, is not the reason we, or anyone, moves North.)

But more often than not, I just marvel at it.

I always have my first morning coffee sitting in the same chair in the lounge. The seat allows me and the tree to keep an eye on each other. And I’ve watched, day by day, the change in her.

During spring, a gazillion (I counted them) large leaves just appeared out of her. It would seem, from nowhere.

Did you know that the main job of a leaf is to make food for the tree? And they make that food from sunlight. Like a bazillion little McDonalds staff flipping burgers and getting your order wrong. Awesome!

Basically how trees work...

It’s like the tree sells a jillion fast food franchises in the spring and they do really well, until the tree gets sick of ‘fries’ that taste nothing like actual potato and ‘food’ that is only named that way ironically. Then the tree closes all the franchises down during Autumn and uses the demolished structures of their browning shops to replenish the ground for its roots. 

Clever.

Although, the idea of a tree as a massive Ronald McDonald is the stuff of nightmares. Even more so if you imagine it slamming through your bedroom ceiling in the middle of the night!

Dear Lord...

At a rough estimate (and by rough, I mean I’ve pruned the figures for mathematical ease) the number of trees in the world is three trillion. For those of you who don’t know how big a number that is, let me tell you there are roughly (pruned) 8 billion people on earth and if we shared out the trees equally, every single one of us would get 375!

I would love to be given 375 trees, wouldn't you? Although, even with a shed and a newly boarded loft, I'm not sure where I'd keep them all - especially as we now have that spare duvet in the drawer under the bed.

I’d be less happy to be given three million spiders. Which is approximately the ratio of those eight legged freaks to us two legged freaks.

Interestingly, having just offered bed and board and two litter trays to a couple of kittens, I was very interested to learn there are 600 million (pruned) cats on earth.

(Can I immediately jump in there and say that pruning a cat is not to be encouraged, no matter how much of your work they’ve deleted by dancing the Cha Cha on your keyboard.)

Sadly, that means out of every 13 people, a dozen will be catless. And more miserable for that fact, I have no doubt. But that’s only if the cat community gifted themselves to the human population (mathematically speaking). However, and it’s a big however, apparently only 220 million of those cats are ‘house cats’ by which I mean cats that let us think we’re in charge of them in our own homes.

Good lord, this new information means, of every 36 people, 35 don’t have a cat.

What’s wrong with you lot? Get cats. For heaven’s sake!

Hang on. Where the hell are the other 380 million cats if they’re not curled up in that fruit bowl by the front door? They can’t all be under the sofa.

And wherever they are, what are they up to?

It wouldn’t surprise me if, at night, they all get together and lean against the big trees on the edge of the TransPennine trail and push them towards my house.

Feral cats, what a nightmare. I mean, what’s a tree ever done to a cat?

I remember walking back from town a few days ago, it was warmish but raining. It was that lovely rain – drops not really big enough to pick out individually, but not so small they waft around like fruit flies. A proper, good old fashioned summer shower. If I’d been bothered about getting a little damp, I could have stood under any tree and not felt a drop.

It reminded me of a trip to Evesham I went on as a 17 or 18 year old. I went with my oldest chum, Martin. We shared a tent in the grounds of a pub, three miles walk from civilisation. Every day we walked along almost permanently deserted country roads. At night it was pitch black. I don’t recall us being organised enough to have torches, and mobile phones were still a twinkle in a soon-to-be-gazillionaire’s eye. We must have relied on the light of the moon as we walked down the middle of the road, seeing werewolves and serial killers in every deep shadow.

We had a fabulous time. We did it a couple of times, I think. We never learned. We survived on pickled onion monster munch sandwiches for breakfast, and God knows what for the rest of our meals.

(I do remember, however, we invented Vermouth & Cider as a go-to drink for those whose interest in both taste, and 'not killing brain cells', is non-existent. Good times.)

The other requirement of course was that we needed to eat, drink and be merry entirely outside. We had almost no money and there was no way we were walking back to the tent, even if the heavens opened. So we spent quite a lot of time under trees.

One day, no doubt in drizzle, we were observing the war memorial (in the middle of the park we called home until nightfall) when we spotted there was only a single female name on there…

Lizzie M. Swift.

As it turned out, back then she’d lived to be almost twice our age, and now I am not too far off having survived almost twice as long as she did.

That gives me pause.

As the young men we were, this lone female seemed terribly poignant to us and we took to toasting her name as we passed the bottles of our newly invented cocktail between us. I’m not sure how Lizzie would have felt - being toasted with a substance that might just as easily have been used to clean the bird crap off the concrete monument that displayed her name, but there we were.

I, literally (and logically) have no idea how many people I have forgotten over the years, but I’ve always remembered Lizzie M. Swift.

A therapist might be able to tell me why…

Being stuck under a tree in a park in the rain was never a bore of any sort. Martin and I, if we were nothing else, were capable of talking for as long as we could draw breath. We could, and still do, discuss everything from God to cider to philosophy. Oh, and, back then, girls. (Other romantic genders and combinations are available, obviously.) It’s almost a pre-requisite at 17. And 18. And during your 20s. And 30s…

Anyhoo…

On our last day we had arranged, with the stupidity of teenagers, to catch a really early coach. As I recall, we didn’t have coach tickets – what we had was an offer of cash to a driver who couldn’t care less, but who understood a nod and a wink.

Is that a bribe? If so, it was, I must confess, not our first crime of the trip…

You see, because of the early leave time, we couldn’t risk sleeping in. As I mentioned, this was pre-mobile phones, and also before the invention of alarm clocks. So the day before we left, we brought the tent et al into the park, that had served us as café, bar and play area for the last few days.

During the hours of light, our stuff remained ‘over there’, and because crime, like phones and alarm clocks, hadn’t yet been invented, in the sunlit uplands of youth, it was still there when we remembered it many hours later. But at night, when whatever people we’d befriended for nonsense and vermouth & cider, had taken themselves off to beds, teeth-brushing and paracetamols, we huddled under a large tree and spent the night there.

I think that's what they call vagrancy.

But, oh, it was magnificent. Sitting watching the rain in dry safety, backs against the bark. Mostly staying awake all night – just in case a policeman should wander by. Talking, drinking, talking, smoking, talking and wondering if life could get any better.

A hundred years on, it’s easy to think we just had a very low bar of expectation. That may be true. But also, I think, back then we had not yet lost sight of the things that are truely important.

Friendship.

Communication.

Freedom.

Very cheap cider mixed 50/50 with very cheap vermouth.

(The whole recipe requires that if the cider is sweet, the vermouth must be dry. If the cider’s dry, the vermouth, sweet. This was a world where there, cider-wise, there was Woodpecker and there was Strongbow. None of this 'eucalyptus and disappointment' flavoured gubbins you can get now. I think Jamie Oliver’s going to include our recipe in his next Christmas hardback: Drinks To Get You Pissed In A Park.)

That was the '80s. Blimey. Where did it all go? When did life get so serious? So ‘important’? So responsible? So anxiety filled?

Life, at least in regard to each of our individual longevities, isn't fair. Some of us get killed in world wars when enemies drop bombs on us. Some of us make the wrong choice at the wrong time, crossing the road or eating a peanut, and life scrubs our bingo card and that’s that. Some of us work hard, do all the right things we’re supposed to, and before we even begin to understand what we’re doing on the boating lake of life, get told to 'come in' because our number’s up.

Fearing the end should never, ever, take up as much of our time as we spend marvelling at the fact we’re not there yet. And yet, as I age, I find myself, more and more often, glancing over my shoulder at how much time has past. Sometimes, like a splendid barometer, I need to flick myself in the face to remind myself that, whether rain or shine, there is so very, very much that's fabulous.

If ever doubt of that creeps in, and you have the opportunity, go and look at a tree, especially a colossal one, and I think you'll find you've just made your day a little bit better.

When I first jotted notes for this blog, a billionaire moron had just called a general election and I got very, very excited. My team won the league but got beaten in the cup final and I felt it all mattered. People are cross about a hundred different things every day, as if there’s nothing on earth that matters more. And in the moment that may even be true. And sometimes, I must confess, that’s me. Sometimes it feels you can’t turn round without awfulness exploding all over you. In the news, on social media, during an overheard conversation at a bus stop.

But walking back from Asda that recent time, in the best rain I’ve seen for ages, I was reminded, amongst all the nonsense, there’s still friendship under trees in the rain.

If you look for it, there’s always friendship under trees in the rain.

And for that I am more eternally grateful than I can possibly put into words.