Everything Must Change

Radio voices infiltrate
Birdsong, and the low murmur of bees.
They demand our patience,
Promise clever plans, speak wistfully of
Getting back to normal.

Cold winds
Have blown the smog from the skies,
Hushed the traffic, sombrely
Slowed the world down.
With neighbours and friends afar,
We swap and share: seeds, favours, produce,
Recipes, ideas and goodwill.

Oh, but, the radio voices cry,
That won’t be forever. The economy
Will erupt again amid chattering smokescreens,
Rise and fill the air with busy-ness,
Drown out birds and kindness.
Don’t despair. The economy
Will get back on its rotten track.

We’re not to worry. There’s no need
For co-operation, self reliance or hope.
They’ll feed us bread and circuses again. Meanwhile,
Have some crumbs
From the great loaf of capitalism.

No need for questions,
but they’ll give us answers, anyway;
Answers we don’t need to understand,
Data to depress, figures to make us fear
Those cold winds of change.

Let’s not go back to that normal
Of duped dependency, petrified inequality
And the averted gaze.
Swallows have returned. With eyes wide open
We can see the season changing.

I wrote this in response to the Common Weal #everythingmustchange campaign (https://commonweal.scot/rebuild).

The Morning After

unicorn mushrooms

The morning after the march I went mushrooming again. There were no mushrooms of any kind left in the fridge. I nearly didn’t bother, because I was dog tired, and, after all, I would pass at least three supermarkets in the afternoon.

But something about the air that morning was irresistible. Cool, zinging with the promise of sunshine; light, ethereal and just a little autumnal; dust motes and electrons dancing a jig. The dam and the woods and clearings energised and soothed simultaneously – an antidote to the adrenaline that had kept me up and awake till gone 2am, head birling with ideas and reflections and hope no anxiety could dampen.

Every secret hollow, bank and bog in my regular itinerary yielded something edible. Shaggy Inkcaps standing like soldiers, Hedgehog Mushrooms like tiny undercooked loaves, spiny as urchins beneath, chunky Orange Birch Boletes that go alarmingly black when you cut the flesh but taste divine. And a few late Saffron Milk Caps, only slightly infested.

jed Rohallion

The sunny gold of Chanterelles glistened like the yolk of a happy hen’s egg. Deer came skipping coquettishly out from the wood and crossed in front of me, one of them practically pirouetting in her glee – anticipating perhaps, the rutting season nearly upon us.

From my dog gazing lovingly at his stick floating away on the loch to the shafts of sudden sun on the ripples he makes, from the happy brown collie and his owner to the mute swans and their big grey babies – the morning after, all of Scotland seems to be smiling at me.

The Beach, Summer Weekend

beach 1 First seen in early spring, nearly twenty years ago, the beach stretched endlessly around the curve of the bay, a shimmering cream expanse of sand uninterrupted by not much more than a man and a dog, idly kicking at the silvery waves. No sound but those waves, breaking, gathering energy, re-forming, breaking again – and the gulls, plovers and oystercatchers worrying at the interface between water and land. The red stones of a ruined castle tottered in the dunes, crumbling, threatening to fall. Where the river splayed lazily, yet with energy, into the sea, flat, smooth stones in many colours could be harvested for an optical feast, to be drawn and painted, rearranged, and consigned to garden corners.

Today the summer sun is hot, but the breeze is cool from the sea. The car park has been extended, a café predictably offers burgers, ice cream, soothing teas and toilets. The waves still break, but the birds have gone elsewhere, or fly over the sea waiting for humans to depart and their time to come. Chattering voices, laughter, cries of anger or delight dominate the soundscape. Dogs bark and race from one human party to another in confused joy. The tide of visitors troops through the dunes on the new boardwalks, and dissipates like the outflow of the river onto the sand. Small parcels of beach are claimed by towels, windbreaks and throw-away barbecues. As more people arrive, the parcels become smaller and smaller, and new claims are struck in between those established an hour earlier.

Hardy men and women swim and lay gasping in the cold, but glorious, water. Someone turns on a small music centre. The breaking waves are silenced by it. Children, many cossetted in protective wetsuits, others bare-skinned and incautious, run in and out of the sea. Their enjoyment – or fear – is lovingly recorded on a dozen mobile phones and instantly broadcast and archived on Facebook. They do little harm, these day-tripping hordes, few leave litter, they pick up their dogs’ excrement. They are out of doors and they are enjoying it. Most look up from their phones from time to time, and see the beach, the waves, the dazzling horizon. Some don’t. Their loss.

Follow the river up from the beach and behind the dunes, and human sounds recede. The wind still lives in the reedbed; the water warbles with life. Crickets grate away in the dry grass, birds can once more be heard calling and chattering in the scrubby pines. All along the riverbank, great sweeps of purple thistle, white yarrow, pink campion and yellow sowthistle dance and shout their presence to the quiet hoverflies and bumblebees. Harebells – the Scottish bluebell – sprawl untidily over sandy banks, lifting their china-blue trumpets to a sun that suddenly feels gentle and kind.

Clouds fly and form and merge and stream away in an endless sky.

One human walks alone.

Other Tree Species are Available

In Devon, they say they have hearts of oak. Here, in the sun-baked, heat-islanded south of the County, where the thick-hedged meadows run up and down hills like a lumpy quilt on a badly-made bed, you can see why. Oaks are everywhere, dominating the treescape. They surge out of the deep, dark lanes, they march along tangled, towering verges, and straddle the corners of the fertile fields.

oak1 Broad-crowned and rooted like mountains, they are the very epitome of strength. In the minds of humans, they are usually labelled “he” and associated with male-ness. Strong, protective, enduring, courageous …. dominant, powerful, overbearing, masterful? Strange to note (if not surprising) that trees thought of as “she” (such as the Silver Birch, Devon’s “Lady of the Woods”) are graceful, delicate, drooping and indecisive in form. And is it only Devon Men who have “hearts of oak”?

Oak trees, Birch trees, most trees in the British Isles, are hermaphrodite anyway, both male and female. Oak trees are much more than a gender stereotype. They form worlds in themselves: roots, bark, branches, leaves, roots and fruits all playing host to a myriad of organisms, fulfilling many functions. They are home, food source, shelter, entertainment, nursery, recreation ground. Allegedly, but probably only mythically, oaks have even housed the occasional human wearing a silly crown. In their own right and as part of the natural world, they are extraordinary, important and awe-inspiring.

Even when they die, they will take centuries about it, growing steadily more stag-headed and gaunt, silver against the blue summer skies. From a distance, no sign of life is discernible. Get closer, and leaves spurt from odd branches below the hollow, woodpecker-mined, bark-less upper limbs where a solitary crow keeps an avid watch on the meadow. Dismissed as dead, and yet they survive. oak2

People pin not only their assumptions of gender onto indifferent trees, but also sometimes their anxieties and aspirations. They look for reflections of what they’d like to be, and how they’d like to portray others. In Scotland, we pin some of our national psyche on the Scots Pine – another giant of the landscape given to vast and spreading majesty when rooted in Caledonian soil. But also, beneath the surface of the obvious, on the subtle, fey Rowan, reverenced if not revered, the magic totem of croft and byre. What characteristics do we borrow from our trees?

Hearts of Oak– that Kiplingesque phrase so redolent of Drake in his hammock, Queen and Country, the ships that saw off the Armada. Do the men of Devon – and others – who identify with the oak tree incline, as a result, to certainty, strength of purpose and an assumption of their own inevitable survival? Are they made sure of their ability to go it alone, to forge their own paths, to take back control? Are they programmed never to doubt that to succeed against all odds without need for cooperation or compromise, is admirable and right?

What if the oak trees were to fall? What does it take to make people change, to reach out?

Just as assignments of gender onto trees only mean something to humans, so too is attributing nation status to any species. Oak, Pine, Birch or Rowan – none are English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and neither do they “belong” to any other race. They are not the property of local government. None are even endemics; they are uncaring of borders and boundaries. They follow no human creed, political standpoint or philosophy. They are trees.

Oaks have wonderful heart-wood, but no hearts. Heart are muscles found in a wide range of animal species, including humans. Change of heart is a condition humans sometimes get, too.

There are Trees in Sutherland

The last time I was in Assynt I was nine or ten, on my first visit to Scotland. My big sister and her boyfriend took me camping on a road trip that began in Glasgow and ended at Cape Wrath. For a child from the suburbs of East London, it was nothing short of life-changing. As we returned to their flat in Glasgow, my sister asked me which places I liked best.

“Wester Ross,” I said.

“Not Sutherland?”

I thought for a bit. “I liked it. But I liked Wester Ross more.”

“Was Sutherland too harsh and wild for you?”

I sensed a trick question. My sister always wanted to toughen me up. She reveled in wild and empty open spaces, the complete absence of people. I wanted her approval. But something in her question rang true. It wasn’t that Wester Ross was softer, meeker, but somehow – I couldn’t explain – somehow there were more….

“Trees,” I announced. “I like trees. There were no trees in Sutherland.”

I’ve had decades since to reflect on my response. At that time, the North-west Highlands were remote, empty of people. Settlements were sparse, inhabitants few, and tourists virtually non-existent. But I could see where people had been. The ruins of dry-stonewalled houses and whole villages stood everywhere, a testimony to clearance, plague, poverty and emigration. Crumbled walls, sometimes just foundations, a gable or a chimney pointing here and there to the sky. You couldn’t miss them. Our wild campsites were up the remains of old tracks that led to derelict hamlets. I remember one that I would walk around every morning. A little way from the ruined houses I saw a weird cairn-like structure of four or five strategically placed, flattish stones. I lifted them. Below a deep, dark hole blinked at me. There was a melancholy, metallic splash when I dropped in a stone. I’d discovered the well, and it stared back at me, naked and accusing. The cover stones might have been placed just yesterday. Feeling a sickness and strange fear in my stomach, I tried to replace them exactly as I’d found them – in case someone came back.

I don’t think I’m just speaking with informed hindsight when I say that I sensed there was something wrong about the bleak emptiness and the ruins. The further north we got, the more pronounced it became, perhaps because of the lack of tree cover. Maybe there were trees in Sutherland back then, but I didn’t see them. My guardians preferred walks on bare hills, peat-bogs and wind-blasted coasts.

trees in sutherland But last week I was in Assynt again, and if there were many changes, it was the trees I noticed first. It’s nearly 26 years since the first ever community buy-out of land in the area by the Assynt Crofters Trust, and there have been others in the area since. The first trees I found myself looking at were less than 25 years old. I walked in vibrant young woodland at Little Assynt, above the shores of the great loch. Deer fencing surrounded large tracts of land. Birch, rowan, hazel, Scots pine…… willows, elders, hollies and even aspen…… planted by Culag Community Woodland Trust or regenerated naturally within the fences. Outwith the fences, though, trees were also regenerating, especially birch and willow. Sheep, ironically, seem to have been cleared to the coasts. Deer pose for tourists around townships, but their numbers are controlled. Bluebells and primroses are appearing under the bracken.

So, there were woods here before, then.

The Assynt downy birches are wonderful stunted specimens, all arms and legs as they branch and branch again and gesticulate over a landscape of ferns and mosses and blueberries. I saw very old birches in woods up a river valley – huge, shaggy trunks breaking into wiry, angular limbs about three feet from the base, and still sending up new wood. It seemed pretty clear they’d been pollarded for their timber a long, long time ago.

There were woods here before, and they were valued and sustainably harvested.

There’s a native tree nursery at Little Assynt, whose owners work tirelessly among the midgies to produce more trees, all from seed they’ve gathered locally. They’re pretty excited that after last summer, the aspens have flowered – a rare event in a species that prefers to clone itself vegetatively – bringing welcome genetic diversity into the local tree stock. At the Falls of Kirkaig, we bumped into a naturalist friend from near home in Perthshire (Scotland being such a gloriously small country), who had observed the same phenomenon. So, there we were, all getting excited about the future of a tree species in a place I’d remembered as treeless.

Of course, there are other changes. You have to look hard to find any old townships from pre-clearance times. The earth has swallowed them up. The roads are more solid, with no grass through the middle, so there are more motor vehicles and far more people. Mostly (but not all) tourists. A few whizz about, thinking it some kind of achievement to “do” the North Coast 500 in a day, or delude themselves that they can capture the essence of Sutherland from the inside of some huge, self-contained box-on-wheels that couldn’t fit into a passing place even if the driver recognised one. Sutherland could perhaps use fewer of these. But many linger, fall in love with the mountains and the deep valleys, accept the weather, and engage with the landscape – and come back. Sutherland has become accessible to tourists. It has learned to cater for them, and yes, it is busier, less remote, less empty.

But there are trees in Sutherland.