The Wintle Blog

What do we know? You walk past a tattered old tree. If you see it at all, you think, “there’s a tattered old tree.” Transpires you’re walking past 1500 years of birdsong, war, poetry, tobacco-smoke, exile, failure and hope. Could be any old tree, near any of us. Demolishable in less than hour to save a few quid for David Cuckoo-Clock and Nick Clogg. High above London grows a solitary fir tree – this one – the last of a stand that was planted in 1745 by William Turner, a retired tobacconist whose business was (where else?) in Fleet Street. Already, Turner’s pines were more than half a century old when John Keats saw them while rambling on Hampstead Heath as a medical student, looking for medicinal herbs with his tutor, William Salisbury. William Blake must have walked past them on his way to Sunday lunch with John Linnell (maybe the firs are visible in the background of this picture by Linnell of the ageing visionary, poet and painter on the Heath?). Byron and Shelley and Coleridge woul...

Round one, then, goes to our nationwide army of tree-huggers. But if you study the detail, you’ll see that rounds two, three and onwards are still to be fought. True, the Government has started to back away from the indiscriminate sale and enclosure of our woodlands. But this weekend’s concession applies to just 15 per cent of forestry. The remaining 75 per cent is still - unless our pressure is sustained and successful – heading for the auctioneer’s hammer and thence to the barbed wire and chainsaws of privatisation (Mary Creagh explores background and jeopardy in her Guardian piece from February 11). If you’ve been following the campaign websites of the Woodland Trust and 38-Degrees you’ll have observed that whenever a target was set on a particular day for a new total of petition signatories it was almost always exceeded. Thinking, in the couple of weeks since I last blogged on the subject, about this extraordinarily vigorous response, I remembered a book I’d read back in 1998. Ca...

I wish I could open, “on a mid-December afternoon, in a grey and grainy light...” But I can’t. It happened on one of this year’s bright May mornings. And I wish I could say I was feeling particularly whimsical, romantic, suggestible or dreamy. But, tell the truth, in a grim mood, I was trudging to meet an erstwhile colleague to talk about my difficult relationship with a third party in another organisation, a dim-witted brute with an over-partiality for red tape and tight trousers. So, heading towards Newgate Street, I go through the rose garden in the ruined nave of Christ Church. On the other side of the road, a man is sitting on a low wooden stool, painting. He is in early middle age, robust and square jawed. He wears wide leather boots, the colour of fresh-shelled chestnuts, with navy trousers tucked into them; a big blue canvas shirt, a tan leather waistcoat and a black leather pillbox hat. I cross the road. He looks up at me – piercing dark eyes – and I smile. He doesn’t. Passing...