Aspen Writes Poetry

The problem with trees, as the History Harlots have often pointed out, is that they tend to take a very long-term view of punctuation. A comma to an oak tree is roughly three centuries of looking at a rock, and a full stop is usually an ice age. Therefore, when an elder tree somewhere near the wetter edge of Bower upon Bough developed a sudden, violent case of What-If, the locals immediately blamed the towns lack of budget. It started with the towns third-best cider, which had fermented (forgotten) long enough to achieve a mild philosophical insight and a distinct gray goatee. The tree, let us call her Mrs. Scrope, because trees that have stood in a parish for four hundred years usually acquire a surname by sheer squatting rights, had spent the better part of two centuries listening to a dry-stone waller named Caleb complain about his knees, his sheep, and the complete lack of proper butter in the valley. Caleb was sixty-two years old, which, in geological terms, made him approximately...

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western electoral district lies a small, unregarded blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so astonishingly dim that they still think a pint of warm bitter and a grievance about wind farms are a suitable substitute for a civilisation. In these parts, "Community" is generally defined as an exclusive, mildly damp members' club designed to uplift whoever happens to be holding a microphone in front of a gastropub, provided they possess that particular shade of perpetual grievance usually associated with mislaid car keys or a deeply offensive beige cardigan. Mutual aid has long since been filed under "Anomalous Nuisances" right next to logic and basic human decency. True British values now consist entirely of pointing a trembling, slightly nicotine-stained finger at someone else while wearing a tweed jacket that smells faintly of historical irrelevance and private school overdrafts. The...