Running on water

Today I went for my first run by, and on, a beach here. It was spiritual - it gave me such a playful relationship for 20 minutes with the biggitude of the universe. Running is really pleasant in its childishness - in my case, anyways, the last time I ran for fun was as a child, and tearing around a pretty park full of birds puts me back in touch with that. And probably that, even more than laziness and misanthropy and an inclination to tardiness is why I'll never be a competitive runner; I'm not sure I ever want to run for anything except the fun of it. But running on a beach where the waves are lapping on to your feet, while the big Pacific waves are grinding away just 20 feet down the slope, is frolicking in a way that I haven't frolicked outside of the bedchamber since - gosh! - certainly more than 14 years.

It was also my first barefoot run - out of an hour, 20 minutes of it were bare, running in and out of the licking tops of the ebbing waves - and that was really pleasant too; I'm not used to my feet being tactile instruments, and they were happy. When I got back to the path to put them into the running shoes again, they were sad - they felt disappointed - and my feet have never felt that way before. I'm going out again - today was to Ballina, tomorrow will be to Byron Bay.

It's really beautiful here, you know. Yesterday I didn't run because we went for a little bushwalk instead at the Nightcap Range national park and that was the pure opposite of the ocean - a jungle of spiralling, coiling vines that looked like a photograph to me in their stillness, but in Plant Time, were probably intensely aware of some sort of immediate and pressing struggle. What a thing time is. How weird it is to think of how different time must be to a plant.

It's really nice to be happy, isn't it?

Plantentuin

Have discovered the botanical gardens here. It's not just that peice of shit downtown, they have something that'll really be world-beating out in Meise, just outside of Brussels, when it's properly established. Right now the greenhouses are just a cacaphony of young plants and the grounds are full of babies too . . . but also have a metasequoia . . . and when I went last weekend everything was juuuuust about to burst into leaf. By the time I get back it will have. Buds are pregnant with promise everywhere and I've started eating nettles again because the air is about to be full of plants having sex and making hay fever sufferers sneeze.

So it's very exciting, it means I've survived another damn winter, and now I'm moving to Australia so I've almost made it . . . Seriously, winter, fuck yourself.

Also love botanical gardens because they are the Mistress La Spliffe versions of five-star hotels, in that they keep out the riff-raff. You can pay several hundred euros for a night in an institution which keeps out poor and middle class assholes, which just leaves you with rich ones. Or you can go to a botanical garden, where nobody goes unless they're the sort of people who like botanical gardens, who are the sort of people who don't make me feel crowded, which keeps out rich assholes as well as poor and middle class ones. In Madrid, for example, when we came across some kids who were getting high in a greenhouse in the botanical gardens, they didn't just play loud annoying music or speak in awful high-pitched voices, they shared. Mind you that's probably just Spain. God, I love Spain.

Wrong side of the picket line

Finished the Colin Tudge book. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to rush out and plant a forest. Speaking of which, some environmentalist groups that like forests picketed us yesterday. Not us-us, as in our grunt work office, but shiny-happy-MBA-us, which at the time was congregating with hundreds of our shiny-happy-clients, including some whose companies are responsible for some ecological hecatombs. Shiny-happy-MBA-us is abuzz with annoyance that they would have dared.

Me, I think it's a great idea. Okay, maybe you can raise a nice stink having a dowtown demo about how great forests are and how it's shitty to cut them down. Maybe you can chain yourself to some excavators. Maybe you can even get on the fucking news. But I think it's a far better thing by far to show up at industry events like ours and make every effort possible to embarass the motherfuckers who are actually in the process of paying for the cutting down. I have to talk to these people on a daily basis and they are absolutely convinced of the rightness of what they're doing; maybe a little personal embarassment will force them to re-evaluate their morality. Probably not. But it's worth a shot. And the least they deserve is a little confrontation.

I was talking about this with the F-word last night - trying to work out how many lives your average Catholic paedophile priest can ruin over a career (my guess was 800) or a serial killer can put a full stop on (I don't know, lots?) and how many lives one of these companies at the industry event in particular has ruined or ended by this point (without even counting the orang-utans). I'm not saying anything in defence of Catholic paedophile priests, mind, or of serial killers. But I was just a touch overwhelmed that society is so unfond of them, and then are willing to pay executives of these life-ruining companies tonnes of money to keep up the good work - especially the people, there but for the grace of God go I, whose job is to paint environmental turds green. Okay, I know the wherefores. But last night the irony got to me.

So much to read

So little time. Rodelinda loaned me An Instance of the Fingerpost a little while ago and I made the mistake last night of reading the first chapter whilst in the thick of The Secret Life of Trees, which continues beautiful. Fuck. The first chapter snared me. But I will wait until done the tree book.

I've put the Nancy Mitford omnibus by after finishing The Pursuit of Love, which I found actually terribly moving. Thought about just continuing reading, going on to Love in a Cold Climate, but I found I actually needed a rest after that. I think the closing line of the Pursuit of Love is one of the best in the history of literature. I have a nasty habit which I work with occasional success to suppress of reading the final few lines of books after reading the first chapter - in the case of The Pursuit of Love I failed to suppress it (though I didn't go back far enough to 'ruin the ending' as it were). But that last line still managed to catch me absolutely off-guard.

I'd rather be reading

Reading The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. So far quite nice. Very conversational style without being illiterate, which is something that the vast majority of popular fiction and non-fiction writers seem incapable of lately. And it's nice to read a book about trees by someone who evidently likes trees and understands many many people like trees who perhaps couldn't yet tell their haploid from a diploid. That is, me. Early days yet though. We'll see how it goes.

Also making my slow (and during working days, it is very slow, or slow for me, anyways) through the Men At Arms episode of the Sword of Honour trilogy. At this point, mostly fascinated with jacket blurb from Cyril Conolly about how this is the only WWII book guaranteed to survive to posterity. Really? Well . . . anyways it has its moments but I'm not completely enjoying myself and sneaking suspicions keep making their way in that I'd rather be reading the Trees book, and honestly - and maybe this is why it's a really good thing I never went into a university lit programme despite my propensities - I think Spike Milligan's war memoirs are about four times better. There's a sort of innocent cynicism to Evelyn Waugh that makes it almost a burden to wrap up. But it all hangs together very nicely.

Suicide trees of the world

So this feeling of liking trees better than people probably has a lot to do with social dissatisfactions springing from the unsavoury things being done to and with trees that I come across at my job. A lot of it probably also has something to do with getting really high and watching The Private Life of Plants and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever. (Still do.) A lot more of it also has to do with growing up with a surfeit of trees and a deficit of people, while presently living in a situation with a deficit of trees and a surfeit of people.

(Almost funny story: a couple of nights ago, we were walking home and I - ever a pleasure to live with - was maintaining an unbroken stream of profanities about stupid Belgian wankers, et cetera, incapable of all of the fundaments of livable civilized organization, et cetera, plus the weather sucks . . . on the last stretch, the F-word broke in to request I shut up so we could concentrate on enjoying the evening air. I obliged, but almost without missing a beat a guy ten feet in front of us started being violently, noisily, extendedly sick on the pavement, and a yelling drunk chick thirty feet in front of us started leaning on her car horn. Neither stopped until after the arrival home. Nearly a moment of win, except it was really disgusting and annoying.)

Anyways, wherever the liking-trees-better-than-people has come from, obviously it's made me quite interested in trees, and the more I find out the more interested I'm getting. They are so fucking cool and their reproductive strategies are mind-blowing - or rather, their life cycles are mind-blowing, in the sense that time and mortality to a tree mean something completely different than what time and mortality mean to an animal, that is to us.

I guess the most remarkable example, because of the way these different conceptions of time and mortality intercept with a homonym, is the suicide tree. Say it to some people, and they'll think of the cerbera odollam, an Indian/Malagasy swampy tree, used as an ornamental, whose kernels have been used countless thousands of times to stop the beating of otherwise healthy human hearts in some of the most crowded and impoverished parts of the planet, where our race's life has been, as a generality, fruitful and yet horrendously, unignorably short. And yet not short enough for some. (That having been said there are an awful lot of them in Kerala, which is a remarkable place.)

Say it to others and they'll think of the tachigali versicolor, a central American jungle-y rainforest-y tree that lives to be about a hundred years old, grows to about 50 meters tall, flowers once, and then dies. The thinking goes that the gap it creates in the forest canopy by its death benefits its saplings by letting them get a little more light than they would otherwise, and that the benefit of releasing seeds so seldom (the species has a seeding event every five years or so) is that predators are rather less likely to eat them or the saplings: flowering, seeding and sprouting so intermittently, they would never be a primary food source that predators would learn or evolve to rely on.