This Is All (75 page)

The Ash and Inspiration. The ash is the tree of balance and the marriage bed. It links the opposites of our inner and outer worlds. Its ruling planet is the sun, the element of fire, but it contains the feminine element of water. Ash belongs to the Aquarian age of clear intellect and purpose helped by sharp intuition. That’s why so many cultures used its wood for weapons like spears and arrows, and for wands, protection against spells. It is also called the Venus of the Forest because of its associations with love. A girl who wanted to know who she would marry would carry an ash leaf with an even number of leaflets on each side in her left shoe and keep it hidden till she found her man, after saying:

Even, even ash

I pluck thee off the tree

The first young man that I do meet

My lover he shall be
.

Charms against many illnesses were made from the ash, including hernia, warts, toothache, snake bites, gout and impotence as well as to cure diarrhoea and dysentery, and to quell bleeding. Sailors carried crosses of ash to keep them safe at sea
.

Arry signals to Cal that all is well. Cal leaves my rope, takes the end of another, attaches Arry’s backpack to it, and hauls it up to us. Arry opens the backpack and produces a picnic box for each of us. Egg, tomato and cucumber sandwiches, and Diet Coke.

I’m touched that he’s thought of this; and am hungry from relief and pleasure and the appetising air. We munch at our sandwiches and swig our Cokes as if we sit up here and do this every day. As we eat, the bells in the church over the hill begin to peal. Nothing is said.

Arry finishes before me. Puts his picnic box away and takes out a little digital camera. He snaps me a couple of times, and returns the camera to his backpack.

‘Another reason for this tree,’ he says. ‘The real reason I chose it.’

‘Is?’

‘It was the one Will climbed the first time alone. To prove to himself he’d got over his fear. He didn’t tell me till afterwards. He climbed it with me the way we did today, the professional way, and then he climbed it on his own the dangerous way, like kids do, from branch to branch without a rope. Look up at the branch on your right, just above your head.’

A little metal tag nailed to the branch. Incised on it the initials WB and a date.

‘Here,’ Arry says.

He’s holding out a similar little metal label with a nail already inserted. I take it. CK and the date are inscribed on it.

‘Cal made it for you. Take this hammer.’

I can just reach up without unseating myself, to nail my label under Will’s.

I hand the hammer back. Arry passes me the camera. I snap the labels. Hand the camera back. And need to let out a deep breath.

We sit in silence again for a few minutes.

The church bells stop ringing and the clock strikes twelve.

Arry says, ‘What d’you know about the ash tree?’

‘Nothing.’ And then remember: ‘Except a rhyme about the weather that my granddad taught me.

‘
Oak before ash
,

We’re in for a splash
.’

‘
Ash before oak
,’ Arry adds, ‘
We’re in for a soak
.’

‘Which was first this year?’

‘Oak.’

‘And we’ve had a dry summer.’

‘They weren’t stupid, whoever made up those sayings. But one thing’s for sure. They don’t have headaches any more.’

He rummages in his backpack again. This time he brings out a little square-shaped paperback book.

‘Present,’ he says.

‘Why?’

‘Reward. And celebration. For beating your phobia and making your first ascent. Saw it in the shop at the arboretum when I went to collect my redundancy money, and thought you’d like it.’

‘Arry! I could kiss you!’

British Trees and Their Stories
.

‘You’ve read it?’ I ask.

‘I took a glance at the stuff about the ash.’

Page 34, The Ash. Irish name: Nuin. Ogham:

‘What’s an ogham?’

‘Ancient Celtic writing.’

Rune:

‘And rune?’

‘Old Scandinavian writing. Viking, so I gather. Each letter or whatever you call them had a magic meaning.’

My mind misses a beat. Like those scenes when a safecracker listens for the clicks that tell him he’s found the numbers of the combination. I’ve seen the same ogham and rune on Julie’s icon.

I scan through the pages about the ash.

‘Did you know all this?’

‘No.’

‘Did Will?’

‘Never mentioned it. But being of the scholarly sort, he read everything he could find about trees, so he must have.’

I look around again at the basket of branches that holds us, at the sky through the leaves, at the peeps across the valley and down at the ground, where Cal is stretched out, apparently fast asleep. See it now with different eyes, my bird’s eyes, fear allayed, if not entirely banished, for my feet still tingle when I peer at the ground. No regrets, far from it, all being as Arry had promised, and more.

>>
Flirting
>>

Flatulence aka Farting

One of the dictionaries in which I looked it up defined a fart is ‘a loud explosion between the legs’. But I was surprised to discover in my research that it’s more often soundless than noisy. By some people, especially teenage boys of the chavish variety and by adult males who have never grown up, farting
is regarded as hilariously funny. By many others it’s regarded as vulgar, disgusting, and impolite when performed in public. The fact is, it’s natural. And it’s essential. Like breathing, everybody does it. You’d die if you didn’t. Explode perhaps?

As it happens, the anus is one of the most amazing organs of the human body. It can tell the difference between a swelling in the intestine caused by wind or by faeces (i.e. crap). If gas is the cause, the muscle surrounding the opening of the anus, the sphincter, relaxes to allow the gas out but without allowing anything else to escape. Often it does this without you knowing it. Like your lungs, it works automatically. That’s why most farts are silent and go unremarked even by their owners. Unless they give off a pungent odour, a pong, a whiff, a nasal assault, when everybody, including the perpetrator, wonders who was responsible for fouling the air. (If in doubt, blame the dog, where available, or anyone who is asleep.)

If the flatus (gas) comes out too quickly or in a large amount, the mind becomes aware of it, and you can control the escape so that no embarrassing noise is caused. (This is what is happening when you see people easing their bums in a shifty way while pretending to concentrate on something else. You can tell by the look on their faces and the slight smile when the process is successfully concluded.) Sometimes, however, you’re taken by surprise, and the gas escapes with an unintended noise before you can prevent it. Sometimes people who couldn’t care less or think it funny, such as the aforementioned chavish louts and their doxy equivalents, squeeze the flatus out with force, deliberately intending to produce an impressive detonation. My father enjoys doing this because he knows it annoys Doris and (I pretend) me too. Doris sometimes makes a mistake when trying to let one off silently, it emits a sound like a mouse being strangled, at which she coughs and tries to look innocent. (I have yet to catch Julie emitting.)

It’s estimated that healthy people aged twenty-five to thirty-five break wind between thirteen and twenty-one times a day, producing about one litre of noxious fumes. As people age the frequency increases because more gas is produced as a result of less and less efficient processing of food and as the anal passage and control mechanism degenerate, just like every other part of the body. Geriatrics are therefore the most voluminous farters of all.

In everybody, frequency and potency of fart is increased by stress and by certain foods. Beans are well-known producers of flatus. The reason is that they contain sugars we cannot digest, which scientists call ‘flatulence factors’: raffinose, stachiose and verbascoes. Bacteria in the gut get to work on these undigested ‘factors’, eating them up and turning them into gas, which must then be expelled. Other notorious fart-makers are Brussels sprouts, corn, cauliflower, cabbage, milk, and raisins. But just as you have personal tastes in food (some people like sprouts, some don’t), so there are foods that produce more fart in you than they do in others.

It’s possible to hold in your farts if necessary, say, for example, during a job or university interview or when being told off by the head teacher or in a very quiet patch during a play or concert. Holding them in will not cause you grave injury. But the fart doesn’t evaporate inside you, as some people believe. It hangs around in your gut and will come out as soon as you relax or go to sleep. This is the reason you fart a lot after a social event, especially one that involves stress.

There are more than six hundred (600) words and phrases in English for this human necessity. (I have no idea if other languages are so verbally fecund or whether it’s just the English.) These range from
air attack
to
windy pops
, via
back-blast, bottom burp, colon calamities, flooper, hydrogen bombs, laughing ass
(American of course),
pluts, SBD
(Silent But Deadly),
stinker, talking trousers, ventifact
, and
wet one
.

Since Will and I conducted our experiment as described
here
, I’ve researched further into the question of whether fart can be seen in the air like breath on a cold day. Although our experiment suggested it couldn’t, I’ve read how other people have shown that a plume of fart can be seen streaming like a bushy tail from the backside in very cold weather, when the farter has just come outside from a warm room. Undoubtedly, however, the wearing of a number of layers of clothes, as you would in very cold weather, increases the likelihood that expelled gases will condense inside your clothes before they reach the air, which is probably why we do not witness fart-enplumed backsides as a regular phenomenon in cold weather.

As for me, the only thing I’ll admit is that detoxing is a great manufacturer of flatulence. I suppose because it clears out the rubbish, gaseous as well as organic.

That is all I have to say on this subject for the moment.

Flirting

As Cal lowers me down I feel higher and higher, so that by the time I’m on my feet again I can hardly contain myself which is why, before he can unhitch me, I grab him and give him a hug and a kiss (not on his luscious mouth but on his bristly cheek – he’s one of those men who sport permanent three-day growths), noticing he doesn’t smell at all bad, I suppose because I’m pongy myself and am dusty and grimed all over, sweated through from the heat of the day and from nervous excitement – how staining and sticky and contagious trees are! – by which, by my hug-and-kiss I mean, Cal is as surprised as I am, as well as so pleased, to judge by his toothy grin (he has big strong handsome teeth), the hug he gives me back is so crushing that it would have ended my life had he held on.

Because Arry is still up the tree, which prevents me from hugging and kissing him and I need to let off more steam and
don’t want to encourage hope in Cal, I call Dad on my mobile, as I know he was anxious about this escapade when we told him of our plan – ‘But you’re a height phobe, you get hysterical just standing on a chair [disgraceful exaggeration], so how the hell are you going to survive climbing a tree?’ – and tell him wildly of my success, which sends him high too with cries of ‘I don’t believe it, and you’re still in one piece, what a relief, well congratulations, sweetheart!’ – and I hear Doris in the background saying, ‘I knew Arry would get her through and see her right,’ Arry being by now the apple of her eye and incapable of doing wrong, because she’s quite as much gone on him as she would be were he the son she doesn’t have, which only sometimes touches me with jealousy, though Dad doesn’t mind because he knows Arry is no threat and that he, Arry, matters to me – and meanwhile Dad is continuing with his riff, which he ends by saying, ‘I’ll stick a bottle of bubbly in the fridge and we’ll have a glass in honour of the event as soon as you get home.’