Category: Blog posts

the ghost of the southwest corner

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Książ is as quintessentially Mitteleuropan a castle as Dover or the White Tower are quintessentially English. There are structures underneath it all from the Iron Age, and a proper fighting castle was built and rebuilt in the early middle ages for the constant Bohemian-Silesian border wars, including one episode where it was overrun by the war-wagon-riding nonconformist Hussite insurgency. In the late fifteenth century it ended up in the hands of the Hochberg family, who hung on to it and steadily increased both their own wealth and grandeur and the castle’s, masterminding various extremely high budget expansions including an entire fake ruined castle on a nearby crag (oh, those Romantics). Despite shapeshifting from German to Polish nobility (most of their holdings being in the Polish state that was resurrected after the Great War), the family eventually imploded spectacularly between the World Wars. In the mid 1940s the castle, then in German Silesia, was identified as the keystone of a huge, pointless late-war Nazi building project (possibly as a personal HQ of Hitler himself, as they won’t stop telling you). Concentration camp slave labour was worked pointlessly to death in the final days of the second world war overengineering various tunnels to nowhere. Vandalised by Nazi architects and shelled by the Red Army, the castle has undergone a clumsy socialist-era reconstruction and an ongoing, more considered modern one, and it is now trying to style itself as a luxury hotel for a certain type of modern traveller. You could, in short, make any statement about it or set any sort of story in it and be comfortable that it would, in some way, be true.

Breakfast was at the bar mlecny “Mis”, which while closer to the Poznan experience wasn’t actually offensive. I had a cutlet with buckwheat and cabbage, followed by a lavender matcha latte from a hipstery place nearby which cost as much as the entire breakfast (still, for the record, not very much.) After a slight panic with ticket times we got onto the upper deck of a busy and somewhat smelly commuter train south. To the east, a lonely mountain broke the monotony of the landscape, and every town boasted a lovely old Victorian water-tower and, more often than not, a turntable engine-shed. An actual working rail-freight yard went by to one side. Arriving at Wałbrzych, we bought snacks (cactus juice!) and found a bus to the castle itself.

The customer service experience of getting in was what Gosia delicately called “classic Eastern Europe”. In the tunnels (deliciously cool after a warm bus journey and warmer walk), a well-made but slightly repetitive presentation hyped us up through lurid legends of golden trains and wonder-weapon labs, then supplied much more boring and historically rigorous explanations of what actually (probably) happened. The boring version is that in the exceptionally insane Gotterdammerung atmosphere of the late war people did all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, most of the records have been destroyed and we don’t really know for certain what the tunnels were for, although as a junior officer noted they sucked up large quantities of steel and concrete that could have gone to more useful things.

Back above ground, the castle itself is just ridiculously big and mostly quite empty, populated with historical furniture but with most of the interiors refurnished fairly cheaply, consistently and incompletely. The pastel-painted rooms and endless parquet floor gave the odd impression of a communist school refurnished entirely from some rather good antique shops. I started off sneering at this, but after a while I warmed to it: just as the hacked-about wall décor and photographs of the once-magnificent Curved Room have a wan, badly-taxidermied-corpse feel to them, the obscene ostentation of the Maximilian Hall shines all the more by contrast with the haggard lemon-yellow main staircase and the obvious empty stair-rod holders its carpets were stolen from under.

The later Hochbergs’ closeness to the imperial family (the Hohenzollerns, not the Habsburgs) and ownership of lands which turned out to be full of coal mines brought them an astonishing wealth and apparently a Victorian town-building social conscience (claiming that a Hochberg inspired Bismarck’s social reforms is probably a bit much though); they indulged the usual hobbies of political intriguing, dressing up their servants in ridiculous uniforms, and the mass-murder of animals with modern express rifles. There’s a lot of stuff about “Princess Daisy”, a minor British noble who married into the Hochbergs in the 1890s. Despite the tourist-friendly Sissi-lite bootlicking towards her, Daisy comes through as quite a nasty figure, a parodically un-self-aware exemplar of chinless privilege and snobbery who spent her earlier years bullying interior decorators and sneering at gardeners, and her later ones periodically re-releasing increasingly gossipy autobiographies to a huge American readership. She gradually lost her money, friends and health, dying in 1943 against the background of a front moving westward again and the second war mopping up the few fragments of her Europe that had survived the first. There is a legend about a seven-metre string of pearls she owned, and a statue of her survives in a town her husband owned.

Easily the best part of the castle was the album of Louis Hardouin, a French chef who served the family through the early 20th century and moonlighted as a photographer: a mixture of posed and candid photographs of the three hundred staff employed night and day at the castle, dogs in hats, and the absolute splendour of the place in its heyday. We poked listlessly at a MAGIC ROCK which claims to bring luck and draw you back to Książ with your true love, and passed through the gift shop (standard issue mass-stamped-in-China “medieval aesthetic”, plus a fun coin-funnel soliciting donations to look after the castle’s many cats). We wandered out, circling the castle through the terraces of splendid, sun-soaked gardens (including a friendly cat that allowed us to pet it; instant return on investment) and had a drink and an enormous Polish dinner as a drone whined around overhead insufferably.

Twenty minutes’ walk away is the Palmarium: the Hochbergs’ wealth was such that Daisy essentially had her own Kew Gardens built for her, which nowadays has peacocks, lemurs and bonsai trees along with some very good succulents. A taxi back to the station later, the train was parping across the flat Silesian plain, for us to quest for a bottle shop, drink congenially on the balcony of our airbnb and invent stories about the strip club touts interrupting a nice Tuesday evening for the punters in the square down below.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski, Museums of Wrocław – Książ Castle – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork

and keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again

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Last weekend, I went to the new Second World War gallery in the Imperial War Museum for the second time. The more I see it, the more I like it. It’s actually quite hard to find, tucked away at the far end of the (godawful – but more on that later) main hall, past a threadbare collection of heavy equipment with minimal explanation, and impossible to reach without passing at least one gift shop. You can always nitpick (my own nitpicks are that the fall of France and the Pacific naval war needed far more attention), but overall it’s clearly a really good, really modern history – by which I don’t mean it’s the worthless interpretive “bombs were dropped on houses. How do you think it would feel to be bombed?” wank currently in vogue in museum design, but that it wonderfully articulates the most up-to-date historical understanding of the war, with an appropriate, effective balance of objects and non-dumbed-down explanations.

People who don’t spend too much of their spare time thinking about this might be surprised that there is much new to say about the war, but a great deal of our improvements in understanding stem from deconstructing popular myths that sprung up after the war. Britain tried to cope with its loss of empire and general national decline by developing a strange narrative where it started the war as a weak, unwilling but plucky participant, sacrificing everything out of decency – ignoring that in 1940 the largest, richest empire in history chose with confidence, if not exactly enthusiasm, to start a war it knew it could win against a bottled-up regional power that it had already recently beaten.* America, with almost nothing to prove, developed a fascination with supposed Nazi “superiority” in equipment, tactics, strategy and super science verging on a weird inferiority complex, never mind that Nazi Germany’s tanks were moderate to bad, its strategy demented and its superweapons meaningless.** Russia, unable to ever really escape the cult of Stalin and desperate to distract from Brezhnev-era stagnation, invented a psychotic, chauvinistic cult of victory which is getting people killed in Ukraine right now. The process of unpicking all this (and, let’s be honest, weaving new myths to suit the current political-academic zeitgeist) is ongoing.

I think the museum works very well because it presents its truth without even acknowledging those myths – you need a knowledge of WW2 historiography to notice when they are being attacked. But I have that knowledge and I can see the sacred cows being slaughtered and the propaganda being peeled carefully away from the (current best understanding of the) truth. So that absurd “very well, alone!” narrative, belonging more to one David Low cartoon than any reality, is thoroughly stamped on.*** Looting and class distinctions show we were not “all in it together” during the Blitz. Uncomfortable truths, like British tabloids screeching about floods of Jews and enemy aliens, anti-war propaganda from America First (“THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING”) and articles about “how to tell a Chinaman from a Jap”, are displayed, rather than hidden: there was no mass, righteous unified opposition to Nazism from the beginning, disgusting “scientific racism” was not confined solely to The Baddies. Gone, too, is the idea that strategic bombing achieved much, or that the Nazis gave more than they got (accompanied by a perfect, truly terrifying timelapse video clip mapping every air raid in Europe all war, with pulses of Blitz and V-1 strikes on Britain bookending vast waves of Allied raids sweeping across the continent, Malta down in the Med as a continually pulsing dot).

Talking about the largest conflict ever with limited floorspace, it is reduced to the broader brush-strokes, but there aren’t many big gaps. The museum gives appropriate attention to less-known but very significant areas of the war (the Katyn massacre, the Burma campaign, Japan mostly being beaten by American submarines, the grotesque divvying up of Europe into Stalin’s empire by Allies too exhausted for another war). The usual pop-culture-friendly Dunkirk-Battle of Britain-Alamein-D-Day bits are there, but in their proper place: mid-sized elements of a vast whole. Africa was a sideshow, Norway was a shitshow. The Battle of the Atlantic is represented in an outstanding display of month-by-month ship losses.  Choices large and small (it’s a model Hurricane, not a Spitfire, in the Battle of Britain case) have been carefully, and correctly, made.

And, while not making more of an overt point of it than necessary, it also very firmly rams home the diversity of stories and individuals involved, with faces of every colour and culture involved given their space. I resent that culture wars bollocks and reflexive tabloid outrage even makes this a point that can be argued over in TYOOL 2022, but I am very pleased to see people who aren’t white men in uniform given their screen time. They were real, they existed, and the biggest, nastiest myth – of omission rather than invention, but no less pernicious – is that they didn’t matter.****

I despaired of the IWM with its disastrous, self-mutilating mid-2010s refurbishment (my rage at how badly they fucked up the main hall from a vast, airy exhibition space to a pointlessly ugly, inaccessible and claustrophobic mess is an entire post in itself, and moving all the heavy equipment to Duxford, which is absolutely inaccessible without using a car, and charging £25 a ticket for it is basically criminal). But this, on top of the outstanding Great War gallery, is a really, really good exhibition and thoroughly worth your time.

 

* Not to mention hand in hand with the second largest, richest etc etc etc
** As a tool for winning wars, not Top Trumps, the Sherman was the best tank of WW2 followed by the T-34. Don’t @ me.
*** Or as I once saw someone on 4chan say, (“Hitler had the British surrounded? Which fuckin war were you watching?”)
**** Weirdly, a museum laser-focused on war contains probably the best acknowledgement of how extractive Imperial relations actually worked I’ve seen in a mainstream British museum, a brilliant bonus. They could do more – I think Willem Arondeus and the Navajo code-talkers deserve at least a corner of a cabinet – but I understand the limits of space.

the many faces of 2021

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Last year I resolved to do more CREATIVE THINGS (construed quite broadly), and part of that was producing a little self-portrait every month. I’ve been doing these every few months for years and years now (the original template was from 4chan back in the late 2000s),  but this was the first time I did them regularly. As with most things about me, it’s partly narcissism but mostly laying the foundations of future nostalgia, so another me one day can look back at what I wore and and cared about in the pandemic years, without having to struggle with the useless memory we share.

I do these in Paint Tool SAI and add the text in MS Paint. I’m not sure yet if it’s worth doing the same for 2022 (or if I want to share this sort of thing on the regular), but it was a fun little thing.

The Hundred of Hoo

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This is the second part of a trip around the Medway estuary in the summer of 2019. The first half is here. As ever, click the pictures for full-size versions. We fortified ourselves with sweets and Irn Bru and set out north and east to Hoo: a low-lying tongue of land between the Thames and the Medway, fringed by tidal marsh. It’s a weird, windswept, empty landscape – there are very few trees, so only low scrubby bushes obscure the cyclopean structures that loom on the horizon, made more intimidatingly huge by their distance: a rank of cranes, a clutch of gigantic storage tanks, a petrogas* power station, an Amazon fulfillment centre. A place of low land and low land values, populated by big, cheap things which London needs but doesn’t need to see. We parked the car on a stub of unfinished roundabout and found the Bee Ness jetty.
The jetty is an oil pier, the last surviving piece of a 1930s refinery ruined by the 70s oil crisis and now no longer extant. (There were once quite a few more of these on Hoo, and you can still see the ghosts of their storage tanks from aerial photography.) It’s a huge spur of steel pipes overlaid by wooden planks, sticking out into the Medway via two and a half kilometres of dense mud flats so deeper-draught oil tankers could unload directly. The gate at the base of the pier rusted off its hinges long ago, but a formidable patch of brambles has replaced it as the pier’s protection; getting around it required a funambulesque encounter with an 8″ wide sea wall, enough of an obstacle to keep things interesting but not enough that I wasn’t on the pier in two minutes, investigating the contents of the shed at the pier’s base – an antique bit of wiring and the wreckage of an old cork life ring.
I strolled along the pier itself, but quicky encountered a section of missing planks,  which turned the experience from “excitingly rickety” to “unacceptably dangerous” (and, not much further along, “awkwardly underwater”), so I didn’t proceed further. There’s a wrecked U-boat somewhere out in the marshes, but we didn’t have a hovercraft to get us there. We continued east to the coast and the village of Grain. Grain Tower, like a pocket-sized knockoff of Mont St Michel, is reached by a causeway across a tidal mud flat: the causeway is made of wide, rough-grained bricks secured into their mortar by diamond-shaped undersides, except where it isn’t and is just mud. The Tower itself is a small but solid example of the “Palmerston forts”, whose frowning granite gunports and cast-iron shutters are scattered all over the Channel coast. Like many of its siblings, it has some extensions slapped together in a hurry during the World Wars; a brick barracks on stilts and rickety-looking concrete observation post leave the tower looking like it’s wearing a backpack and a stupid hat. There’s no ground-level access (it would be sea-level at high tide), but some kind soul had secured an aluminium ladder with a loop of plastic rope, next to an enormous barnacled chain wrapped around the tower’s base, which was once a boom chain running to the Garrison Point fort at Sheerness, cutting off the mouth of the Medway.
The Tower is clearly regularly visited by local kids, with its fair share of graffiti and litter; the Victorian gunports are blocked up, and there are more modern shell hoists to feed the familiar QF gun emplacements on top. The main emplacements are brick and fine Edwardian concrete; later embellishments, including the highest tower, are the usual crummy just-good-enough WW2 invasion panic stuff, and look like they’ll fall apart within the next few years. The safety railings have rusted away to the point of being safety hazards all by themselves. From the top of the tower, the sunlight make the mud flats shine a filthy silver, the causeway cutting clear through them the half-kilometre back to land.
Back at the sea wall, we headed north looking for the remains of Grain Fort, and were largely disappointed. There are a few more WW2 observation posts and some concrete semicircles that were once gun positions. There’s a huge tunnel network in quite good nick still under there somewhere, but we didn’t feel like going for the beer-can-strewn possible-entrance we found, and the defensive ditches are so overgrown as to be abstractions. On the horizon, way out to sea, we could see a cluster of vague dots: the Red Sands sea forts.
Heading back inland, we passed the obnoxiously medieval gatehouse of Cooling Castle, which was structurally curious enough back in the 14th century when it was next to the river, rather than being separated from it by kilometres of marshland. We couldn’t read the copper inscription which made us think that the the tower at least was original rather than Victorian reimagining.** Apparently Jools Holland lives there now; the barn advertised itself as a wedding venue. Imagine.
I really hadn’t appreciated quite how many ruined, forgotten forts there are guarding the approaches to London. Cliffe, paired with Coalhouse (another post on that later), is another of the Palmerston-era ones, mucked around with during the World Wars: large, ambitious, and sinking gradually into the marsh, a slightly updated version of the old cautionary line about building a castle on sand. There’s a gravel quarry built around it now, and we took a long walk alongside a huge, still conveyor belt, watching the interplay of hawks and bunnies in the flatlands around and enjoying a series of bloodcurdling signs about the dangers of gravel pits. Another rickety WW2 addition reared above the fort’s huge stone shoulders. The fort is fenced off and meant to be inaccessible. In the matter of Victorian gun forts that normally means “challenge accepted” to me, but we were quite tired from a full day of Exploring, and the barking dog of a quarry security contractor who shouted at us to stick to the path in broken English and the half-sunken fort looked genuinely difficult. Fortunately, there were some very interesting accessible curios: the wooden guts of a derelict ship and the launch rail of a Brennan torpedo, a curious Victorian guided weapon powered, counter-intuitively, by pulling two wires out of its rear end at high speed.
  (The odd jumbled concrete structures in the background of the last photo are actually the footings of the old Nore sea forts, dragged back up the Thames and demolished in the late 50s.) Our exploration was helped by the excellent “Beyond the Point” site, maintained by some local lads, which I’d recommend to anyone interested in exploring these parts, and for further reading on the historic sites of the Thames estuary.   * “Natural gas” is a marketing term and I will not allow it on my blog. ** It’s explained at the wiki article. I blame the degradation of gorgeous Carolingian minuscule into crummy illegible blackletter, myself.

in a gadda da vingland

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Being the first part of an account of a lovely day trip in August of 2019, now written and illustrated properly in… 2021.

The day out started for me with a train to Redhill and a huge full English at a place called Poppins near the station; it almost continued, having met Charlie, at Ightham Mote, but a rammed car park early in the morning and a knowledge of many highlights yet to come kept us on the road. So the first real sight of the day was the Barad-dûr like spire of Hadlow Tower which, since the fall of Fonthill Abbey, is the premier example of the Gothick Ludicrous architectural style in the British Isles.

The tower is best viewed from the nearby parish church (a very nice example, and one which felt well loved and relevant to its community.) A churchgoer told us how the current owners did the tower up with lots of Heritage money (we looked up the interiors; they’re hideous) and then stopped letting people in. It’s now on sale again for three times the asking price. Yuck.

A really mediocre picture of the arch.

magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name

The next stop was St Leonard’s Tower, one of the many bits of fun 11th century oppressive architecture constructed across England as William of Normandy consolidated his invasion (although, as a helpful English Heritage board pointed out, the building’s lack of serious defensive features indicated it was probably more of a symbolic and administrative fort than average). There was nothing inside to see, but we agreed it was a very fine tower.

Then, we came to Rochester. Half the reason for this Expedition had been hearing that there was mini golf going on in the cathedral there, so we came for the memes, but we stayed for the really beautifully distinguished interiors.

Cryptic.
DISDAIN FOR THOSE NOT MADE OF STONE.
Yes, it’s made of feathers!

I have had the good fortune to see a great many cathedrals, and this was an excellent example of the genre. There was a great mural with a very Eastern Orthodox feeling to the art (which made perfect sense when we saw in an info board that named the artist as Sergei Fyodorov – who had hidden a little picture of himself peeking from the side of the corbel, in true medieval style); memorials to men of Rochester fighting and dying in every corner of the world; an atmospheric crypt, glorious ceramic tiles. (We didn’t actually fancy the mini golf, so skipped it.)

The High Street was very cheerful and active on a bright sunny day; we had fish and chips, and Charlie bought a mosasaur tooth. We took a turn around the excellent Guildhall museum – a perfect little town museum, made with absolute love and interest in the town’s considerable historical pedigree, with just enough budget to make it really work (a replica deck of a prison hulk padded out with mirrors was a high point.)

The High Street also boasted one of those huge, wonderful Hay-on-Wye-esque bookshops, which I escaped having spent only 10 with a book of architecture and an Ian Hogg illustrated history of artillery. Then, to the castle; I actually bumped into a work colleague on the way there – my CSSC membership doubles as English Heritage, so that’s me and a plus-1 in for free.

The castle is of the same basic design language as the Tower of London (although built a fair bit later): a huge solid militaristic cube with towers at each corner, within later rings of concentric defences. It’s in considerably poorer nick than the White Tower,  having had fewer prison/mint/arsenal side gigs in the intervening centuries and being completely obsolescent in its main role a fort by the 17th (which may have spared it from Cromwell’s general castle-vandalising after the Civil War). But this means that the interior hasn’t been mucked about with much, and, thanks to the lack of floorboards, you can see five storeys of gorgeously carved Norman arches and immensely impressive columns in the middle all at once. From the platform at the top, we can see the Garden of England in all directions, much of the visual interest coming from the Medway estuary with its rather lost-looking Soviet submarine.

Castled out, we returned to Charlie’s car for the second part of our adventure: north and west to the low, windswept Hoo Peninsula and its many fortresses.

hail the æolian orchestrelle

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I had known about the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, with its gigantic beam engines, ever since I was big enough to want to ride on a steam train, but had never heard of the Musical Museum just a little way west of it until, after our jaunt around Richmond Park, Tom and Bex took me there. It’s quite easy to miss, tucked away in a plasticky new West London housing development, and incredibly good. For this is a museum of musical machines: a collection, spanning the last century and a half, of dozens of different devices for recording and replaying noises which, magnificently, keeps them all in working order. 

I hope you’re hailing it.

With a small group of mixed ages, we were shown around the collection by a wonderful old gent called Roy, who explained and briefly played each one. I’d grown up with Leonard de Vries’ incredible Victorian Inventions book on one shelf and The Best of Que Sera on the next, so was already vaguely familiar with wax phonograph cylinders and the like, but some of these were brand new to me: a very early metal disc (adjusting quite how old the gramophone record-laserdisc-CD-DVD-hard drive concept), various bonkers machines with actual chopped-off bits of violin and trumpet inside them, and increasingly sophisticated ways of getting music out of a piano without a pianist.

“Polyphon” metal disc, invented in 1870.
Now you can have a string quartet without needing any friends!
The excellent Roy.

An early pianola: it’s a big set of mechanical fingers which play a piano for you, which was quickly superseded by teaching pianos to play themselves. But this can be applied to a modern keyboard to play ridiculous electronic parps.

 

Why you should hail it.

Piano-player was superseded by self-playing piano, and rolls which mechanistically struck notes on cue replaced by ways of actually recording a specific pianist, demonstrated by this utterly ghostly recording of Shostakovich (I… think?)

 

 

 

 

 

A side room had a number of slightly more modern devices – things I don’t recognise with MOOG written on them, a rotary speaker I more or less understand, a gloriously tacky early theremin, ancient batteries and a home hydro-generator for when houses had water but not electricity plumbed. Fancy! It also had this incredibly louche looking saxophonist.

And finally, after we had an evening coffee and parted, I found this hidden on my coat. I have no idea how on earth Tom made it.

The Musical Museum is obviously closed at the moment cos of the whole Pandemic Thing, but I look forward to taking certain family members back there, and highly recommend it.

 

 

 

PS: All this reminds me strangely of another machine that makes noise: Jolly Jack at the Hull museum. Enjoy!

a walk in the woods

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This trip actually took place on 23 Feb 2020, but I’m posting it in 2021.

Richmond Park, designated as a hunting preserve by Charles I but far, far older, is the largest and easternmost of London’s royal parks. It’s big enough and wild enough that you can imagine yourself in the open country, rather than with London bustling all around – until you glimpse the glint of a skyscrapers on the horizon, or the jets coming into Heathrow break the silence. The trains of southwest London are abominable on a Sunday, with any number of lines just not working like they ought to, but I managed to get to Richmond station and, a happy surprise, was almost immediately hailed from a coffee shop by an old boss. London sometimes feels like a very small place.

I met Tom and Bex and we proceeded to the north side of the park, finding a map covered in wonderfully macabre old names – Gibbet Hill, Killcat Corner, any number of Copses better read with an extra R. It was a dark, windy day, with a stiff westerly swishing in the long yellow grass and the knobby grey trees, and hurrying dark clouds off towards the city centre. We came to a bunker-esque structure, plausibly an air raid shelter but small, overengineered and a bit in the middle of nowhere. A mystery.

Cars are allowed to use a couple of roads through the park , but limited to a comical 20mph, which sadly hasn’t reduced their numbers. On either side of the slowly rumbling SUVs, grazing with supreme unconcern, were herds of the park’s two deer species: red to the north, fallow to the south. For photos, we improvised an optical zoom by holding phone cameras to binoculars, although they didn’t seem at all frightened of us. Both sets had grown antlers: short, reserved-looking horns on the red deer, much bigger, more antlery-looking antlers on the dapplebacked fallow.

As we advanced into the ancient (and less-ancient, some trees tagged with Victorian plaques) forest, Tom discussed some theories in a book he’d read recently* about how trees communicate with one another (on most of which I’m not wholly convinced, but not wholly unconvinced either.) And, almost as a side note, how almost everything seems to hurt or kill trees, seen on a long enough timescale, and that they show symptoms which can be reasonably interpreted as suffering. This, in combination with a late-winter deadness, gave a strong, unexpected sense of being surrounded by death, an uncomfortable graveyard air that had never occurred to me before (and I didn’t help by bringing up the lignin theory I’d recently learned about, with its strange imagery of immense piles of dead trees, unable to decay.**) But then again, death is interesting: here, a bark-stripped body striated with wood grain, streamlining around knots and branches like a diagram depicting laminar flow; there a huge, half-decayed shipwreck of dead wood, riddled with beetle-holes. A few green shoots were coming in around the spiky chestnut litter; noisy green parakeets and small, glossy jackdaws were everywhere, and we talked about colonies of ants who formed in acorns, or twigs.

We mused on different theories of the “natural” state of the forest, the immensely old and wide anthropogenic geography; on the effects of clearnces and brushwood collection, and the more recent Victorian habits of cutting off low branches and removing dead trees out of a sense of tidiness. Looking at one grove of oaks, maybe a century old, I noticed that only those at the edge of the group had grown peripheral branches.

At a cold, grey, two-stage lake, strong winds blew little zephyrs of ripples away from us and a pair of swans held their heads low to look menacing. Someone, or several someones over some time, had been building shelters by stacking branches against hollow trees. We found one very nearly big enough for the three of us, and hid in it the rain suddenly swept in, drinking tea from a thermos and eating some excellent homemade banana cake.

And it was a grand day out.

* The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. From summaries it seems like some genuinely interesting concepts with some big side orders of anthropomorphisation and pseudoscience, but I really want to read it now.