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Here's how the story starts. . .
You could say this story starts
more than a hundred years ago.
In the 19th century as the maps of the planet were being finalised,
the world's great forests passed on to the English their secrets
kindly and discreetly like grandparents pass on sweets. Explorers
boomeranged home from being flung far with cuttings and seeds,
leaves and nuts, and welcomed them to our strange and magical
island. For tree-growing and the appreciation of trees has always
been a silent passion of ours. From these experiments, hybrids
of Redwood and Oak, of Baobab and Yew, of Cypress and Sycamore
were designed, planted and encouraged to grow to wonderful heights
and girths. Hundreds of feet high, dozens around. Designed to
be used for a sport only to be played long into the future. Designed
to be climbed.
Picture then, Eight Great Trees
of England planted during the main course of the Victorian
feast, only to reach their mighty heights towards the end of the
20th century long after the deaths of their planters.
There are more than eight of course every county has its
revered tree, and how proud we all are of them. But there are
eight truly important ones, dotted around the island like treats
during a Summer.
Now picture a young woman as she ascends one such great tree.
She climbs to music and enthrals a stadium audience of hunndreds
with her graceful leaps and acrobatic pulls. If you had to describe
it you might say it is a mixture of figure skating and mountaineering,
a vertical ballet, an arboreal gymnastic. It is the expression
of our national soul. It is the writing on the sand that tells
a passing world we are here.
But you don't have to describe it, you just have to see it.
Can you see the tree? Can you picture the girl?
And here's how I meet one of those girls. . .
The way we fell in love wasn't
extraordinary or hugely romantic. It was as light and surprising
as leaving a house on a summer night and breaking a spider's thread
with your nose.
Runnymede is the greatest of the great trees of England. Hybridised
from Wellingtonia and Beech it provides the roots of the tree
climbing world. Each great beam is adored, each fathom of the
trunk venerated, and while other trees have more challenging features
I'm thinking of course of the Bridgwater Cavities and the
Ivy on the Elm at Bishop Auckland Runnymede was the first
to be declared ready for competitive climbing, and remains the
most prestigious.
On 29th May 1992 my father and I enter the Magna Carta Pavilion,
walk past the row of wooden busts of the champions made from fallen
branches of the great trees, and head to the small supporting
climbers dressing room. The annual ball had been the night before
but we hadn't been invited.
We were doing the traditional Fireman and Cat routine, warming
the crowd up for the big climbs. Kind of like the opening act
of clowns at the circus only upwards. This funny cat, played by
me in a rather itchy outfit, gets himself stuck in the tree and
after last year's victorious climber pretends to be my owner and
uses a broom to get me down one time at the Gretna Lime
she got me right on the ankle - Fireman does his silly best to
rescue him. The kids shout to tell Fireman where Cat is, I keep
escaping, buckets of confetti, hoses, bungee ropes, you know the
rest.
The crowd loved it that day.
I knew it was the best we'd done the routine. I'd always been
one who believed in getting through life by always giving a full
10%, in stopping well before the extra yard, in burning the candle
at one end, but something about that day, I don't know quite what
it was, made me give that little bit more. I even added a couple
of extra scampers and somersaults, it was going that well.
My Dad thought that was showing off a bit, but was pleased we
hadn't made any mistakes. We came back to Earth, I took off my
whiskers and ears, and now the real tournament was about to start.
And then something else started. She looked at me.
Well, things progress and we get together. . .
You know all it takes for love to succeed is that cynical men stand by and do nothing. And all the other guys on the climbing tour said and did nothing loudly and constantly. They I think probably just weren't aware of us. My father approved of her because at Sudbury she once laughed at one of his jokes I asked her about this later and she said it was more a cough and she hadn't realised that what he had said could fairly be described as a joke. I didn't tell him that.
What did I love about her? That she was a hug just waiting to happen? That she had more sense than money? That her favourite charity was the International Red Rose, an organisation devoted to promote the ideas of romance among the world's coldest and most distant people. Just a pound a month could help buy a candle lit dinner for two in Suburban Toronto, 50p would provide a bunch of flowers in Denmark.
We decided we wanted to move
in together at the end of that 1992 tree climbing year.
When the next season rolled around I kept on with my Fireman and
Cat act with my Dad, now the second most important person in my
life in a list of two, and she kept on getting close to winning
Trees, but never quite making the breakthrough. Her numerous fans
would tell her she had been robbed, but she didn't mind. She always
told them she was glad she had more trees to climb. That was another
of the things I loved about her. She had come here to compete
but the winning was something that she well she didn't deliberately
avoid it per se, but I think something of her self would go if
she actually succeeded.
Events continue. There is a death in the family and my girlfriend leaves me. Things fall apart for me and in this extract I hit rock bottom . . .
So here's the bad news. I feel
bad. Really bad. For my father's death, for my girlfriend's accident,
I feel bad for feeling bad which led to her leaving me which made
me feel bad. I would now tap a deep vein of guilt and keep mining,
bringing it to the surface and refining it for the rest of the
1990s. For five years I don't go to another climb. I become a
regretter of passing moments, a grievance nurse, a badside onlooker.
Anything about me that was shevelled I try to dishevel.
I start by leaving our flat for her to return to the next Spring
and I went off to live alone, a one-eyed man in a tired, misshaped
part of the city. I had found a place through Solitary Confinement,
London's third best letting agency for bed-sits and studio flats.
The street I lived on, named after a king or a port or a battle
or a landmark, had the torpor of a drunk in August about it. Four
or five shops sold used office furniture from doomed businesses
made more of rust than metal.
I drifted through my days like a whisper in a cathedral, small,
irrelevant, lost inside the overwhelming silence the world presented
me with. Typically, I joined the provisionally renamed National
Indecisiveness Society, Association, Federation or Maybe Institute.
Things hadn't moved on a lot since my parents' day; the main debate
was still over whether to take minutes in blue biro or pencil.
Lonely, I spent six months with
an imaginary flat mate. I'd buy milk and pour half of it away
so I could tut when there was never enough for my morning tea
because of someone. Bills I'd pin up and highlight, and leave
them unpaid until the last minute. Hide messages to myself. Turn
music up and then try to work. I couldn't imagine a good flatmate?
I did my best to avoid loving anyone else. Having fallen in love
once and wiped it off, I wanted it no more. The trouble was, when
I met women, they found me irresistible. My mysterious orphan's
air, my sullenness, my patch and the romance of tragedy attracted
them like hankies to running mascara. I was more crushed on than
the London Underground in rush hour. I was lucky I had a blind
eye I could turn to them.
While fighting to impose a miserable occupation upon my life the
insurgency of pleasure fought back. Another example: I'd insist
on wasting what money I had gambling on fruit machine, the horses,
scratchcards, but time after time I'd hit the jackpot. My wealth
flew. I wanted for nothing, which was lucky as nothing was what
I wanted.
I tried. I really want you to
know how much I tried to stay depressed. Wealthy and adored, I
tried desperately to be sad. I nurtured my glumness, worked daily
on my dolour, my self-loathing. And learning to loathe yourself
is the greatest loathe of all.
I've made it all sound very frustrating for me. And it was
how could I stay lying in the gutter when the world was continually
turning my head and forcing me to look at the stars? But I always
retained my inner sense of bitterness and for this I am proud.
So long as somewhere inside of you you still have that tiny kernel
of resentment and anger, you can find a way to keep going through
the good times. And I did have that kernel. It was my resentment
of my girlfriend, who by leaving me after taking my eye sent me
out here into the deep realities. During this time I'd think of
her with a largely unjustified sense of malice and although I'm
not proud of it, you have to understand that this was how I felt.
It makes what happened later so interesting.
If you want more of the story, please contact me. . .
