Talking Trees

..and
roost there?
In the spirit of inquiry I paused under the first talking tree and looked up.
Yes, there they all were. I couldn’t really tell what brand they were,
and just as I was thinking that they started to get nervous and about half of
them fluttered noisily from the canopy in some sort of panic before I decided
to move on.
I walked on past McDonalds and then crossed the highway and headed back up the
hill and approached another talking tree with a big semi parked next to it.
I wondered if any of the regulars had to forego their perches while the truck
was parked there and if they were being temporarily billeted by other birds
on their special branches (special branches..) in the meantime.
I paused again and looked up into the foliage, but this time moved on before
a general panic took hold. Over the road, where I had disturbed the first talking
tree, I could see several birds still nervously decamped on the power lines,
so my presence was clearly unwelcome.
I’d just got into the van with my noodles, when a bloke I’d noticed
sitting dejectedly by his car with the bonnet up, tapped on my window and asked
if I could help getting his car started. My first reaction was of annoyance,
not wanting my noodles to get cold, but he seemed a nice enough young chap,
so I offered up my battery to his jumper leads. It started first go, and I left
the car park feeling almost blokey and happy that I had helped a fellow human
being. (Mind you, I did check to see that my wallet was still in place as I
drove off).
Last night was the final episode of Life On Mars. If you haven’t seen
it, it’s about a 21st century cop who’s had an accident that puts
him in a coma, and he wakes up in 1973 not knowing what’s real or if he’s
gone mad. I came in on the second series and was reminded of the late Dennis
Potter with the attention to detail and the moral thrust, but I was almost dreading
the last episode in case it was a dreadful disappointment. I don’t know
if it’s because I’ve been revisiting the ‘70s as I experienced
them a lot lately, but I found myself in tears in the last few minutes. The
hero, Sam Tyler, is brought back out of his coma to the 21st century, but is
so disenchanted with it all, he jumps off a rooftop in an effort to return to
the world of the ‘70s that he found in his imagination.
And it’s undeniable – the ‘70s as I experienced it, and as evinced
by this series, was like Frontier World compared to today. There was still the
opportunity to do something that had never been done before, to go where your
parents would never have dared, just because you could. But somehow I can’t
see myself ending it all out of sheer disappointment. I’m still of the
belief that we make our own worlds to a large extent. As our former manager
used to say, (in a completely different context), perception is everything.