Tolkien

Greetings, greetings from the land of Tolkien. From the land of Tolkien. From the land of Tol-ki-en. Someone I’ve never read. Maybe I should. Maybe this is going to be my year to read Lord of the Rings. I don’t know. I think I might have made a couple of stabs at it, but maybe only when I was younger. I feel like, as I grow in my decrepitude, I’m moving more towards, for want of a better word, a kind of Tolkien-esque vibe, particularly when I’m walking through a little bit of woodland in the late afternoon. This is just my little local patch of woodland, Stanmore. Just two tube stops away. I’m very lucky to have it because it’s more than just a park. Fryent Park is more than a kind of urban park in the sense that it actually has a little bit of wilderness in it. This is genuinely a little slice of wilderness. Wilderness in inverted commas, of course. Well-kept woodland is not really wilderness, certainly not in the American sense. Walking along on a relatively marvellous, miserly, drizzly Saturday afternoon, birds singing around me on my way for a meet-up with Father Oak, my psych-oak-analyst. That one will never die. It’ll never die. A little bit of sheng. A little bit of sheng under the oak. A little bit of talking with a bloke. Even if that bloke is just a tree, at least it’s a tree that wants to talk to me. Actually, maybe not all trees want to talk to us. Never a truer word said in jest. I was admiring a couple of horse chestnut trees outside Stanmore Station and chatting with my naturalist buddy, this folder I’ve set up where I send an image and it creates this whole piece of content for me. I think AI is going to be used more and more for this. It creates something made specifically for me. Of course I could watch YouTube videos or read Wikipedia, but what if you had the all-knowing naturalist who also happened to be your friend and knew exactly what would pique your interest? The bot was regaling me with this incredible essay and I thought, “That’s an interesting video idea.” The horse chestnut feels quintessentially British, part of the landscape, part of the archetypal post-war imagination. Conkers at school. Trees planted in public spaces to signal civility, pride, order, the seasons passing. Yet it came originally from the Balkans. And travelling with it came its enemy, this moth that creates those necrotic channels in the leaves. By the late twentieth century the balance seems off. Horse chestnuts often look shabby long before autumn ends. Their grandeur turning ragged. And maybe that is one more signal from nature saying: yes, things are out of balance. Maybe the primates won’t fix it. Maybe we bite the dust and the trees carry on evolving into something unimaginable. Then I started thinking about the future-self journalling project again. Maybe it needs to be more deliberate. A philosophy project in the broad sense. A four-wing-five project. I’ve been randomly sending things into the future. One year. Three years. Ten years. But maybe every message should ask: which future self needs this? The self next year? The self at sixty? The self ten years from now? Imagine wandering around Dublin one day and suddenly receiving a message from yourself written ten years earlier. That feels magical. And if I send something to a friend it’s hopeful too, because the gesture says: perhaps we’re still here. Perhaps we’re still friends. So no, not one year. Let’s send it to 2036. See you in 2036.