Very Like A Whale

Yes, I’ve been a lame and bad blogger lately, busy trekking back and forth across southern England touching brief base with various family members and old school/university friends, mainly in Kent and Hampshire. Incredibly, first time ever in Canterbury Cathedral, what was I thinking, what was I waiting for. Everyone needs to go there. And stand on the very spot upon which Thomas a Becket was murdered. Creepy and somehow insane to stand on those very flagstones and think about Henry’s very knights bursting through the door and Becket kneeling there verily praying. I headline here with the Eliot but actually the Jean Anouilh treatment is what I know best and like most.

After that, lots of lovely things in Hampshire, but especially the New Forest and especially the heathland in of the New Forest, made me all homesick for Dartmoor again.

And trees. I’ve developed this thing about trees over the last few years. Trees of Asia. Of Colorado and Arizona. Of Virginia. Of East and West Africa. Of England.

And so I’m noticing oaks, and beeches and silver birches and alders and ash trees and willows and laburnums and Scotch pines. Trees are so bones-of-the-earth and they all speak Tree, wherever they are.