Last night I dreamt that I was tree roots, or fungus, pushing up through the earth to crack tarmac.

I enjoyed undulating across through the boundary between darkness and light. My movement had something in common with that of a pod of dolphins swimming across the tops of waves.

“I’m passionately in favour of legalising heroin and cocaine. But I despise people who depend on these things. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.”

Today I had a day of trees.

Walking to the park with Felix, my heart juddered as I saw that one of the huge elms on Hartington Road had been felled. I assumed that it was because its enormous crazy roots had messed up the pavement, but when we reached it I could see that the entire inside of the tree was hollowed out and rotten, killed by Dutch Elm disease I think. You could see right down deep into the bottom of the tree, like a cavern. It was full of huge white fungi. Felix hugged it and kissed  it goodbye.

Then I went for a session with Paula the artist who is making me a huge tattoo of a tree on my back. It was good. In the breaks between bursts of tattooing I looked at a graphic novel about tree protest that I have just re-discovered. I am thinking intently about the Newbury protests, and the ten thousand trees which were killed there. I feel like I am obsessed, haunted. Ten thousand trees, ten million trees, ecocide. I am desperate to create my show and feel lost in the process of making it. I want to build a treehouse.

After the tattoo appointment I swept home on the bike and picked Felix up to take him up to the Whitehawk Community Food Project before dark. It is the most beautiful place in my world, up there.  We went and hung out with the chickens and dug in the earth. John Allotment came with a barrowful of fine soft topsoil he had gathered and carefully sieved, and he let me help him me plant a peach tree in one of the big holes. He touched its roots like he was stroking the fingers or hair of a loved one. He separated them out and gently immersed them in the soft soil, slow, meticulous and tender. He spoke to me in a low voice as he worked, explaining every step in the process.  He is my age but he has the earth wisdom of a true elder. I feel humble and childlike around him. We planted the peach tree as the light petered out and the site grew dark and Felix ran after a giant black dog. A blessing.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

-Walden, 1854

Going through old photos this weekend, I found three pictures from my time at Newbury.

One is taken from a tree top at sunset. An ocean of winter branches extends to the horizon beneath a reddening sky.

Another picture shows some polypropylene knotwork, the blue cord walkways high above the leaf litter.

The third photograph is crumpled and spattered with pen marks. It shows an area of denuded ridge surrounded by men in helmets and yellow coats. Inside this cordon, three trees remain standing in a line amongst the debris and carnage of a felled wood. Each tree has had all its branches removed except for the one at the very top. Right up there at the top of each of these limbless birch spikes, right up in the grey sky, there is the tiny bleak silhouette of a person clipped on.

Trees are beautiful in winter.

The January sun is brilliant. We find a wood and step into its shade and silence. The trees here are not big, but they are not easy to climb: like thick poles, with no branches. Max scrambles nimbly up one and I feel embarrassed that I can’t do the same. Eventually I find a tree with an accommodating crook and wedge myself into it. Just a few feet off the ground and I feel like an animal.

There is a pheasant. I think I could catch it.

A chill descends. We return to the sun, and find a different sort of tree perched on a slope. It is bigger with plenty of branches. Up, pulling up with the arms, muddy boots slipping trying to find a hold on smooth bark.

Max lies along a branch; I straddle and cling to another. The valley drops away below us like a bowl, and we can hear walkers discussing their dogs’ personalities. Frost on the grass shines in the sun.

I look at Max and want to jump on him.  I jump out of the tree and run down the hill.

Black lines on white paper. It’s a picture of a copse, delicate trees, young and spindly in winter. Somehow they emit a glow. Bare winter landscape around. Perhaps the sun is setting behind the trees. It seems like something is caught amongst them. Is it the sun? Or is it a creature? Or a god? It is mesmerising.

In the drawing, the trees are bound around with a beautiful ribbon or cord. The cord goes right the way around the perimeter of the copse. It gives the place an atmosphere of sanctity.

I dream a house. It’s a hull. Sodden, rotten, windows and doors are just holes. I’m re-visiting: there was a time when I lived here. It’s changed utterly.
To leave, I walk down a slope. It is covered in black slippery leaves. At the bottom of the slope there is a gate, and trees, which are dead. Two saplings have fallen across the gateway. In death they have metamorphosed. Now they are dead babies wearing wedding gowns and lace veils. My companions cannot see this – I am the only one who sees the trees’ alternative form – to the others, they are just fallen saplings.

January 1996. It is my first full day at Newbury. I am running through archetypal English countryside, trying to get to a stand of oaks that has been left unguarded. I am late. Breath catching in throat. Distantly, chainsaws. Then silence.

I find the three huge oaks lying in brilliant sunlight. Centuries-old trees. They are torsos now, limbs amputated and removed.

I touch the uncountable rings in the flesh of the trees. The soft wood is powdery and still warm from the friction of the chainsaw blades.

Ivy and moss sawn through. Twigs and undergrowth sighing, cracking, settling into new, horizontal configurations. Spiders and beetles adjust their bearings and scrabble through sawdust on the ground.

Tears come. I press my cheek against the flesh of one of the trees, and stroke the bark.

I feel as though I am in the presence of a person who has just been killed. Not actually even dead yet. It happens more slowly than that. Like the life is still there, still around the tree, haemorrhaging, almost pulsing, then ebbing or fading like a mist, like an exhaled breath. Gradually.

I sit silently holding the tree in the warm sunshine for a long time. It is a blissfully beautiful morning, prematurely spring-like. Very quiet. The whole place is in shock, it seems to me.