A little bit of Gondor in a grim winter England

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three.
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
~ J. R. R. Tolkien


After the frankly devastating letter I received yesterday my mental landscape is pretty much in sympathy with the drab, dirty, lightless winter we are enduring. Sitting in the car waiting for Catie I was presented with the all too familiar barren surroundings of the college car park... and then I noticed how like the White Tree of Gondor this birch looks. Most of the birches around the grounds are straggly and thin without their foliage but at least from this angle this echoes the lineage of the White Tree of Numenor. One shining object in a dreary urban landscape (the Fountain Courtyard of Minas Tirith it ain't). A little bit of Tolkein in a corner of the modern Shire so close to where he lived and wrote. I'll take it as a small sign of hope or at least a symbol of the better qualities of humanity as I wade through the current compassionless, small minded, brutal austerity of Cameron's Britain.