shite patter 2020 by eleanor affleck
hello hello this is a zine of all the silly little tinyletter newsletters i’ve written since the start of 2020. it’s hard to see them outside the context of lockdown, and i suppose to an extent they’re an archive of that time. but they’re not really about covid. i’m not sure WHAT ties them together beyond stuff that i’m interested in exploring - maybe notions of place and placedness and my identity in the landscape? i always intended for them to be a kind of playground, so i’ve tried not to limit myself too hard in terms of form, or spelling, or cohesion lol. anyway i hope you enjoy reading them. i’m still writing the newsletters, you can subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/elaffleck and you can get in touch at @elaffleck on twitter or insta if you want to chat or if, god forbid, you want to pay me to have Opinions on chicken run slàinte x
i’ve started trying to write more in various different formats with varying levels of success so this is me trying again, this time in a newsletter, which i think might be enough of a balance of ephemerality and substance to allow me to commit to doing one regularly it’s not that i don’t write, but i’m still trying to find a situation which allows me to develop my voice whilst writing in a way that’s more playful and inconsequential. i’m usually writing in situations where i’m putting pressure on myself in one way or another and i think breaking out of that would be helpful for my creativity / lightness of prose i also wanted to say thanks to my friends mayanne and elise for doing their own newsletters, making me realise that this was a thing you could do (especially mayanne’s idea of using hers as a “writing playground”)
28/01/2020, 12.55 pm
#1: women and their functions in the dramatic universes of the great escape, the winter’s tale, and chicken run
i started off intending to write about chicken run, but if i’m going to write about why i love chicken run so much (it’s a lot) i also need to speak about the great escape because chicken run is essentially a vegan marxist feminist reboot of the 1963 sausagefest. but then i spent way more time on the great escape and no time on chicken run and this is where i ended up: i, on a very primal level, enjoy films about groups of men struggling with a physical obstacle, often accompanied by emotional obstacles, with the end of the film usually being the elaborate, mousetrap-like execution of The Plan To Overcome Said Obstacle(s). for example: the sting, shawshank, escape from alcatraz, micmacs, chariots of fire, hot fuzz, the lord of the rings, and possibly the revenant. if somebody did a film about robert falcon scott’s journey to antarctic i would devour it. i’m sure many of these films belong in the “Not Art” bin, but i do not care because like i say, watching them gives me the purest and most childlike sense of satisfaction. and the great escape is a god tier example of this type of film - they have to build a tunnel but they also have to build each other’s trust ! the great escape is also exceptional because i cannot, i simply cannot, find a single named woman who was involved in any aspect of the production. can you imagine. can any of us imagine. i ctrl+f’d “she” into the wikipedia page. nothing. i refuse to believe this is true, and have a theory that there were multiple women and non-binary people working on the film but they all passed as men so it was never flagged as an issue. the great escape is a huge ensemble piece and you cannot convince me that every single soldier and crew-member in the film was a cis man. it is possibly the biggest historical inaccuracy the film perpetuates and one which has been largely overlooked. i’m torn about these films. i like that they present examples of friendship and emotional frankness between men without these things being demonised by portraying them as gay or effeminate, and its nice for men to have friends. men may have a little friendship as a treat 2020. but these films are also wildly homoerotic and i find it hard to reconcile the two. my line of thinking always ends up being: fellas, it’s not gay to have friends but culturally is it gay to have friends? because we often read close male emotional bonds as men having a romantic or sexual relationship because thats the only context in which it is deemed acceptable but i dont know when that emerged because i think in the 50s “””the homosexual””” was generally perceived as someone who was isolated and found it difficult to form bonds with people because of ~~abnormal psychosexual development? so men having lots of sexy rough and tumble friends was very heterosexual but also was probably always quite homoerotic which is certainly how we can view it now fellas, it might look gay to have friends but it doesnt have to be, its really up to you but gay is not in fact bad. what a radical notion masculinity?? is wild UNFORTUNATELY the conditions the great escape sets up for these models of friendship to exist is this spooky pre-sexual, pre-female universe where women literally dont exist. it’s like the fantasy of innocence at the beginning of the winter’s tale:
Polixenes: We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun, And bleat the one at the other: what we changed Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did. Had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven Boldly 'not guilty;' the imposition clear'd Hereditary ours. Hermione: By this we gather You have tripp’d since. Polixenes: O my most sacred lady! Temptations have since then been born to’s; for In those unfledged days was my wife a girl; Your precious self had then not cross’d the eyes women and the sexuality they bear are responsible for these men’s fall from innocence and are a risk to the bonds that form between them. classic ! lol ! the concept of “girls” is mentioned once in the great escape: Ives: You had to fight off the birds. You know, birds. Girls, man. Girls. Do you not have them in the States? Hilts? Are you there, Hilts? Hilts: Ives. Ives: What? Hilts: You know the kind of clay and gravel we got here in the compound? it is quite possible to infer from this exchange that they do not, in fact, have girls in the states, as the subject is never brought up again. i want men to be able to express themselves emotionally but it would be great if they could also do it in a universe which allowed women to exist. of course, another reading of this scene is that hilts (played by steve mcqueen) is actually a woman in disguise and refuses to pursue ives’s line of questioning further for fear of blowing her cover which is, imo, much better.
chicken run is so closely based on the great escape, a film where the narrative excludes women completely, and chicken run places them at its heart. it’s almost impossible to find a space so (nar-
ratively) historically dominated by women as the war is by men that they had to set the film on a chicken farm, and i love how ridiculous it is whilst also gently drawing your attention to this complete lack of historical space. all of the mechanical functions - what part of The Plan happens when depend on the women (and mac, a nonbinary icon) in the film. the chickens all have personalities, and depth, and a rich emotional life that is not entirely dependent on men. and yes, it was nice of aardman to also let some men come in to demonstrate that men and women can work together, but i firmly believe that ginger would have got to where she needed to be without rocky, which i guess would be my one criticism of the film – i wish she had learned more emotional lessons from the other chickens as well as from him. but still its doing some good work, especially when you consider that it was released in 2000 weve seen a lot of all-female #girlboss reboots (ghostbusters, ocean’s 8, fuckign disney) which dont engage particularly with the problems of their source material in any meaningful way. whereas chicken run manages to begin a dialogue in a film about plasticine chickens? nice one, it is just great.
11/02/2020, 10.19 pm
#2: landscape, identity, and some tory bashing at the end
i was originally going to write this newsletter on how the forest functions in titus andronicus but i want to do it justice and it’s taking more time than i thought. also it’s really heavy. this came about because i’m writing an essay on pastoral space in the winter’s tale at the moment so i’ve been thinking a lot about our physical and ideological relationships with nature, and how our expectations of a genre can shape the way pastoral and wild landscapes function within it. in comedies “the natural world” (a term which should not go unquestioned) is usually conceived of a site of healing or refuge from the problems of the city/the court – like in twelfth night when there’s a shipwreck and Mild Threat but you know it’s all going to be ok because the sea spits out viola and sebastian. whereas in tragedies like king lear “humanity must perforce prey on itself / like monsters of the deep” and it doesn’t end so well for everyone. titus is particularly wild (in all senses of the word) because of the trauma that the characters experience in the forest space, and i think it's interesting to read this alongside the winter's tale, and i will write about it more at some point, but i can only really think about lavinia for short periods of time before it gets too much lol. but yeah, the winter's tale is a problem for everyone because the city-country binary doesn't exist in the same way, and the scenes that are ostensibly pastoral just complicate the problems of the play rather than provide refuges or solutions. which is how i feel when i go home for christmas. i thought writing about it all would be a good idea primarily because the landscape i grew up in continues to play a huge part in my identity and i want to understand it more. but reading so much about all of this makes me homesick. and i was reading raymond williams's the country and the city and there's a bit at the beginning where he talks about feeling a similar way, about how his academic interest in the meanings of country and city came from his own experiences of both of those places. especially growing up in the country, where you make meanings around the space you inhabit, and then moving to the city to go to university and being told there's a whole other set of Literary And Cultural Meanings attached to where you grew up, and then how you navigate those changes across space (and time too - because your landscape changes, memories bloom n wilt, the land becomes a palimpsest the more you come back to it and become aware of all the other people who have done the same, your relationship with your childhood home becomes complicated by idk, therapy? moving away?), and it gave me some solace. im not really sure where i am with all of this yet, but it's nice to get some of it out. if you’re interested in psychogeography, landscape and identity, ecocritisim, etc. here is a list of books and short stories i like:
the old ways, robert macfarlane the living mountain, nan shepherd the wee free men, terry pratchett sunset song, lewis grassic gibbon – “you hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and
learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the scottish land and skies.” ha ha gets me every time the scottish clearances, t m devine shakespeare’s nature, charlotte scott (i like that more criticism is emerging which links these ideas of nature to the rural economy and emerging capitalism and i think the bottom two are particularly good for that) in other news, no surprises but there’s an awful article by dominic cavendish in the telegraph about how the ““woke brigade”” are ruining shakespeare by not “traditionally casting” (i.e. not having an all-
white, non-disabled, cis cast) which is a thin, nay, transparent cover for some unfounded racist bigotry because the tradition he is invoking never existed in the first place AND the theatre world as a whole is disgustingly inaccessible to the vast majority of people. i’m not linking the article because i don’t care for it. all you need to know is that in it he charges the “woke brigade” with coming “to bury shakespeare, not to praise him” and i think that is the only part of the article he got right. i, like mark antony, COME TO BURY SHAKESPEARE, NOT TO PRAISE HIM. may my championing of diverse casting, in the fashion of antony, invoke a mob to overthrow the telegraph and then awake shakespeare’s unquiet ghost to haunt cavendish’s dreams for the rest of his days. i have found my calling.
me as marlon brando as mark antony on my way to deck the editors at the torygraph
05/03/2020, 12.23 pm
#3: tenderness in the wind that shakes the barley i watched the wind that shakes the barley last night, my first ken loach film, and i returned again to thinking about tenderness and how it is communicated in art. and i could write all day about this film, but i want to distill some thoughts specifically about tenderness and violence here. again, it’s more of a collection of thoughts than a cohesive argument, but that's kind of my intention with this newsletter. i don't think the wind that shakes the barley is a tender film. it is a violent, bruising, bleeding, gripping film, and tenderness is an unavoidable consequence of experiencing violence. bruises are tender. when i talk about the wind that shakes the barley i’m always describing it using primarily emotional laguage, which is not how i usually approach political films. the way it holds violence and tenderness. the way it grounds fierce love and fierce anger in the land, the way it handles trauma. and i don’t want these words to stay up in the air like i’m talking about abstract concepts bc they are so visceral, idk, embodied? felt. in the film. it’s no doubt a political film. and i think what i am getting at here is how much this film cries that emotion and politics are not separate. the politics of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War cannot be separated from the emotional and physical landscape of the film, and in the back of my head i already know this, but in the context of the current political climate it was cathartic to see this political, this you cannot take this away from me, it is mine, i have a duty, anger being given the weight and the depth and the complexity it bears on screen. you are not bad at politics if you are angry. there is one of the courtroom scenes that takes place near the end of the film – it’s a fraught space, and has different characters from the community arguing their positions on a pressing decision. n people stumble over their words n stutter n correct themselves, n deliver the most powerful speeches of the film. in dialects. without this being fetishised. and it’s not that the speakers aren’t articulate, it’s that the situations they have experienced and emotions they are navigating are so extreme they exist at the edge of or beyond articulation conceptually and physically. and i realised how you hardly ever see that on film, it’s not conventionally how we present big political setpieces. this visible emotion has come to be seen as a weakness or an inability to communicate rather than a marker of the urgency and importance of what needs to be said. and here the community allows for space, loach allows these voices space. it’s collective even if ultimately the result of the argument is catastrophically divisive. it’s a helpful model for how we should listen and be listened to. in the film, tenderness often comes after extreme acts of violence, embodied in an act of holding – the community embraces each other, dresses each other’s wounds, grasps for people. and i would have to watch this film over and over again to tell you how loach manages to focus so precisely on this particular impulse because its so subtle but it is a constant presence. idk, there’s tenderness figured as pain and anger, tenderness as compassion, and i think that’s very hard to explore this in a way that isn’t somehow exploitative or reductive, and loach manages it. but i want to stress that the solution of the film is not “everyone just needs to be nicer to each other.” i don’t think learning to exercise compassion and include it in your political framework is the same as pleading that we all be nice to each other, a statement which is often deployed in a self-serving manner that flattens the power dynamics and complexities of any situation, and ignores the fact that “being nice” is not a universal definition or action. it’s not a simple solution for a complex problem, it’s a vague solution for a complex problem. i don’t think the film imposes limits on compassion, but it does complicate it by considering how it relates to pain and anger i guess through tenderness,
and the specific tenderness that emerges as a result of surviving violence. first and foremost the wind that shakes the barley is a film about the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War and the centuries of atrocities the british committed in their attempts to colonise Ireland. within that there is a meditation on violence and compassion in climates of political extremity.
i am not trying to equate my own experiences with those of people whose daily lives were and are affected by the violence of colonialism. it's not mine to claim, and i hope this doesn’t come across as me doing that. recommended reading/listening (on the history of irish colonialism in particular. im afraid its very white man heavy at the moment):
the blindboy podcast (‘tiocfaidh ar lawn’ and ‘pavlova gonad’. ‘arse children’ if you’re feeling brave.)
the irish history podcast one man’s terrorist: a political history of the IRA by daniel finn dubliners and a portrait of the artist as a young man by james joyce a brief anthology of tenderness: that scene in bright star where fanny is lying on her bed with the window open and the wind ripples up her skirt the review by the white pube on tenderness in the 2017 wolfgang tillmans exhibition has stayed with me somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
04/05/2020, 09.44 am
#4: hello this is the one where i talk about bones just a heads up that i mention dry human remains, graveyards, and funeral practices in this newsletter. it’s unintentionally turned into the body (hhah) of the piece. the chat begins around “i’m living for my daily walks.” this topic can often be too close to home so please trust your judgement and feel free to opt out if that’s the case. if you do go on to read it i’d really like to hear your feedback – i love talking about death ! i think if the universe had shuffled me only slightly to the left or right of a decision i would have been studying it. aNYWAY it’s been a while. i’m quarantining in stonehaven for the foreseeable future and it’s taken a longer time than expected to adjust. i’m slowly getting into it but am finding it hard to focus on writing something sustained, and any focus i do have is being spent on my dissertation which is, to be quite frank, a slow cycle of hopelessness and resentment. i’m better at focusing on things with my hands. i don’t know if it’s because, being furloughed from hospitality, they miss having something to do, but i’ve been baking lots. i’m staying at my parents’ house right now and they have a garden so (at the risk of sounding like olivia laing) i’ve been put to work there and i’m finding a lot of meaning in it at the moment, to the extent that i have been lazily fantasising about a change in career, despite the fact that i do not have knowledge or the upper body strength to be a gardener. maybe the key to fulfilment is learning that you don’t have to monetise every single hobby you have. so far i’ve cut back our flowering currant and helped thin out the deutzia, then dug out three of these big bushes with orange berries which i can’t remember the name of but were tangled in our honeysuckle. i’m living for my daily walks: my browser is half dissertation tabs, half “responsible sourcing guide: crabs and lobsters” and “introduction to aberdeenshire’s historic kirkyards” (i'm obsessed with youtube's coastal foraging community). stonehaven has a significant number of historic graveyards which i visit on these walks – my favourites are dunnottar kirkyard and the chapel of st mary and st nathallan up on the cliffs. i’d comfortably date their kirkyards back to the late 1700s or early 1800s at least, which is to say they’re both full of old graves – the chapel has been there since the thirteenth century and while i don’t know how long it’s been used as a graveyard it’s long enough.
i’ve been looking up a lot on graveyard management and maintenance because covid-19 has meant that most sites aren’t being maintained as regularly, so there’s a more visible presence of human remains. not like yorick’s skull, just larger identifiable bone fragments. i’ve seen a tooth, a rib, and one of the long leg or arm bones (although caveat that i am by no means an expert at identification - i interned at an anatomy museum long enough that im comfortable saying it's a bone but that’s about it). i was curious about why this isn’t usually the case, hence the graveyard management guides. i think generally any remains and coffin material the soil will turn up are removed and disposed of with appropriate dignity and respect. in england i think you need a license or some kind of church permit to do it so i imagine it’s the same for scotland. i want it to be noted that i understand the suggestion of resurfacing after what you thought was the comfortable finality of your burial is not a reassuring thought to everyone, as my mum pointed out to when i explained the premise of this newsletter to her earlier today. i think she is convinced that i go around old graveyards wielding my trowel, leaving a trail of desecration in my wake. unfortunately the truth is much more mundane, although thankfully better aligned with best practice regarding human remains. i dont think seeing these remains is something to be alarmed by – the perverse combination of a knack for beachcombing with an interest in visiting graveyards meant i was finding remains on sites that were being actively maintained even before the pandemic. while it was a shock at first, it makes complete sense – graveyards are full of bones. when you combine that with soil erosion and burrowing animals of course you’re going to get a couple of fragments appearing every now and then and naturally that’s going to get exacerbated when nobody’s coming in to pick them up. i think what i’m struck by is the fact that they’re so there. my people, the WASPs (RIP), generally don’t have a particularly death-positive culture and a result of this is that most of the visible [read: public? visibly public? institutionally represented?] experience of human remains is limited to funerals and museums (excluding people from cultures with different death practices, doctors, archeologists, forensic anthropologists, and people who work in the death industry). it’s unusual to see a bone fragment in this context, in the wild – but then as i suggested earlier, it shouldn’t be unusual at all because that’s the completely natural outcome of being in a graveyard. i think describing it as intimacy is weird, but theres something about seeing these fragments nestled in the earth, like that john berger poem: What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pellmell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough. and thinking about finding human remains here, in the damp soil, with a blackbird shuffling the undergrowth on the other side of the wall, where the primroses are waking up, is a very different experience to seeing them in a glass case, or in the huge, complicated tumble of grief. reader, i touched one. it was the only person who isn’t a member of my household that i’ve touched in over a month. death resources:
ask a mortician on youtube, death in the afternoon podcast, and the order of the good death TRACES dead images project on the ethics of displaying human remains all that remains: a life in death, sue black
25/07/2020, 03.06 pm
#5: a pome/poyum i'm easing back in ! funnily enough after having a conversation with my friend james about how i hadn't really been doing my newsletter recently & didn't really know when i would be doing it again. well here we are james, sooner than expected ! i'm not going to go into the reasons for my absence because i'm sure it's patently obvious to everyone at this point. what i will say is: wear a mask, join a union, and stay informed on how you can continue to put your anti-racism into practice. donate to support Black organisations & organisers if you can (some suggestions: colours youth network, project myopia, & fringe of colour). usually i send out my ~thoughts~ & yes, i do have plenty of those percolating. still thinking about how the forest functions in titus andronicus, along with some new thoughts on the quiet queerness of joan eardley's paintings of the sea, andre aciman and rebecca solnit's blues in dialogue (thanks ben), and how delicious it is to go on pitchfork and read all of mumford & sons' terrible album reviews & then immediately go on to read all the reviews of laura marling's work. BUT i'm not writing about any of those yet, i am instead sending out a wee poem/pome/poyum that i've been sitting on for a while. and i thought ?? why not ? lets get a little ExPeRiMeNtAL. maybe i will submit it somewhere, maybe i won't. it is about, you guessed it, the sea. hope u enjoy it thank you xxx
difficult paradise, the sea a one-uv-a-kind composition, roughly modelled. afore ye, fault-line oan the east coast of Scotland, foam-nest an’ rock. visions of an old port: fading bounties, erased wisdom aboon, the gull-road runs, whooping, its dancers enact a sort of morality play a breeze blowing ontae the shore sun-thrown, birling, shadows of their shapes in relief holding memories, marking sorrow, embodying belief
04/11/2020, 02.05 pm
#6: wet grass
yes, it's another experimental newsletter (all of them are experimental, who am I kidding!!) coming at you. firstly though, as is fast becoming the way of things, i am going to tell you some thoughts i have that i’m not writing about right now but might write about? one day? i’ve been thinking about the void – probably a result of staring down the barrel of lockdown 2 (electric boogaloo) & perpetually writing a dissertation on edward ii. there’s a greenblatt essay called “marlowe and renaissance self-fashioning” where he talks about how marlowe’s characters all endlessly launch themselves into The Void & that’s how they confront the existential questions of the early modern era, this kind of tireless drive towards the absolute, towards unfulfillabe desire, objet petit a. then there are a couple of recent works which i know are in dialogue but i’m still working out what they’re actually saying to each other – yves klein’s leap into the void, bas jan ader’s entire career (thanks virgil), and that jam sketch with the mattress (cw for suicide if you decide to give it a watch). i stumbled across klein in a rebecca solnit essay on absolutism and you know it honestly never occurred to me that the man might have an artistic practice beyond klein blue, let alone a cohesive creative philosophy. so that’s something, whatever it is. but i wanted to write something softer & less academic, so here i am having a wee play !! i love to be self indulgent in my peepee poopoo newsletter x i woke up to the grey light, night-grown mushroom coldness seeping in through the window. damp is an old germanic word. like north, cold, sea, wood. like king lear’s last monosyllabic speech: “why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / and thou no breath at all? thou'lt come no more.” i remember something vague from linguistics about all the old words being germanic because theyre from before the norman conquerors brought french over. they were the words that were the most deeply entrenched. bone-words that return you to yourself, your body in the world, all of that. i’d say they orient you, locate you, but it’s all too latinate. they bring you home. the light dampens everything – sound, colour, sensation. i had a message from bruce. i thought about jonathan and all the filter coffees we drank on long september afternoons in marchmont flats that were too big to warm through. drip drip drip. the wheel of the year has an audible creak and in the silence of everything else i’m more aware of the turning of the seasons this year than ever before. i think back to that week at the end of august where we were waiting and waiting on rain. it was funny because i’d just started rereading sunset song & that book opens with a heatwave too. so this weird cyclical, palimpsest version of time cropped up – sunset song was written a hundred years ago and here i was, sweating and sweating and gaping open for the rain that seemed never-coming. & i’ve been thinking about all those little reminders, not of time passing because that’s too linear, but of time saying, we’re here again, every year you forget & every year i remember. we’re bad at object permanence when it comes to seasons. every autumn i’d go to visit a friend on the other side of the meadows. every year i’d trek across the wet grass in my summer trainers & end up with soaked feet. & i dont know, the damp, the autumn coolth & the inevitable wet feet aren’t fun, but i want to celebrate them. at a time when everything else seems so uncertain, there’s some small joy in inevitability.
16/01/2021, 06.10 pm
#7: these are a few of my favourite trees i keep thinking of this quote from the lord of the rings:
here, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. it was tolkien’s birthday earlier this month & in honour of that here is a list of my favourite trees & some thoughts on them for him (and you!). it is very earnest 1. the two yews in the woods yews absorb light in a way broadleaves don't – standing under a yew is stepping into a deep pool, dark & glossy with cobwebs. walking between them is crossing a threshold. they look deliberately placed, flanking the path, conspiring with each other. & to be fair dunnottar woods does have a decent amount of landscaping & planting, and they're right in one of the more landscaped parts too, up from the shell hoosie and next to the walled garden. but something seeming deliberate is not the same as something feeling man-made. like fairy trees - a single hawthorn or ash growing in a field that signals the presence of the sidhe i think they mark a thin place & do not belong to us. yews grow in churchyards all around the uk (another reason i love em). the choice of planting younger yews was partly pragmatic – they're poisonous and would have deterred roaming, grazing livestock from destroying the ground - but yews themselves can outdate their churchyards, remnants of older pre-christian sacred sites that the churchyards were built on. we don't know whether the yews grew from the sacred places or the sacred places grew from the yews. i've only spotted one or two yews in the woods, and for this reason i think they are perfect for clandestine meetings or exchanging tokens. i buried something for you at the two yews, by the part of the trunk that’s closest to the river. meet me by the yew on the hill at the next new moon. & they would keep your secrets. (my favourite website for learning about ancient yew trees is ancient-yew.org if you want to see if there are any near you !! also YES, i am still fixing to go on a tour of the UK’s most notable ancient yew trees when we can travel again)
2. the apple tree in the muckle house's field by the river
my friend robbie showed me this apple tree. it's technically in someone’s garden, in a back paddock, but for a while the paddock wasn’t maintained and it was easy enough to slip through their gate to pay the tree a visit. i’ve only ever seen it in midwinter but robbie says in autumn it basically collapses under the weight of its apples. even when i went to see it, the ground was thick with them. they taste like shit & are not worth scrumping. but in winter the apples that are left on the branches catch the low light like suspended baubles, two fingers up to the newtonian principles of their ancestors, a thousand tiny suns in orbit. so we repeatedly sneak into this stranger’s garden purely for the spectacle. it’s part of a longer walk i take that skirts round the fields at the top of the woods, & it's one of the best walks to see wildflowers on. & it reminds me of johnny flynn’s wee version of linden lea, i just love it !!
3. the climbing tree over the carron i have included this tree less because of what it tree is than where it is. i think it’s a conker tree but i’m trying to ID it naked with only photos i took last year so i could be wrong. i’ve tried to work out why it’s trunk is the way that it is (it's kind of split into a few little trunks, like it looks coppiced but not as bushy?) but i simply do not know enough about trees so if any of you happen to know please hit me up! & i do want to take a minute to say that i love conker trees and conkers are perfect charms to keep in a coat pocket & one of my favourite love tokens i have ever received was a little conker, i am in no way trying to diminish how beautiful these trees are in their own right !! BUT THIS ONE has a huge sturdy branch that stretches onto the carron river so you can dangle right over the water and spy on the fish (& the blue tits can spy on you). i'm not a gifted tree climber and so i kind of bumshuffle all the way along it & wreck my jeans in the process but it's worth it it’s also notable because it’s one of places in the woods where the leaves catch the light in just the right way & it turns your skin green. i was going to add a picture i took of the tree the other day but it felt almost indecent to post a picture of it in winter because it is so undoubtedly a summer tree – rob macfarlane tweeted ages ago about may-shine, "Maienschein" -- lit. "May-light", "May-shine"; the green glow of sunlight through spring leaves (also "Mayenschein"; German, poetic-archaic). cf Japanese komorebi (lit. tree-passed-through-by-sunlight)" but this tree is june-shine, june-glow – i float just above the water, nestled like a candle in a paper lantern – no enemy but winter & rough weather.
4. honorary whin bushes i have included whin bushes because EVEN THOUGH they are not trees i have so much affection for them it cannot ! be ! contained ! the climbing tree is june, but the whin bushes are summer in its entirety, their smell sweet and thick rolling lazily down the hills, coating everything in yellow, sticking to the back of your throat, up your nose, in your sweat ! DELICIOUS. i live for the season of knowing what way the wind is blowing from smelling gorse on the breeze, finding patches of it to change behind on the way to the beach, bright blue & yellow stretching for miles. my favourite thing of all is that there are always a few bushes that will flower in winter. they say when gorse is out of blossom, kissing’s out of fashion – even in the middle of winter there is summer, & its shadow is only a passing thing. go out, kiss a branch (not a yew branch tho), & tell me about your fav tree(s) please
thanks for reading xxx