The King is Dead

This old beech was at the bottom of the garden all through my childhood. And beyond.

When I say old, it was truly old. It was marked as the most significant tree in Newnham on a map of 1820. My father reckoned that it had a good 3-400 years behind it. Planted about the same time as Charles 1 lost his head, he used to say.

Being old, it was truly enormous. Summertimes, the garden has been nothing but a green thought in a green shade - we would get a little sun at midday. Wintertime its black branches ramped across our sky, home to sleepy squirrels and irritable owls.

And..

This year - six months after my father's death and on the night between his birthday and my mother's - it split, crashed and fell into the Caius Fellows' Garden, rotten to the core. It was completely beyond saving.

And now the sad remains are being chopped down. My mother's nordic soul sees this as deeply significant.

I took this photograph just before we went over to Granchester to bury my father's ashes.

I suppose that is rather significant.