Welcome to Forest Leaves

My fellow-forestry student in 1961: George Matthiessen  – the most intelligent and at the same time the most mischievous man I ever knew (photo by Jack Bradshaw).     It was George Matthiessen who suggested the Great Orange Caper, and that should have been enough to make me wary. George had a way of coming up with little schemes and projects that ended badly, and having known him for a year or two, I should have been alert to their dangers by that time.   But he also had a wa

The once-iconic sycamore tree at a gap in Hadrian’s Wall   There is a fairy tale that goes: “Once upon a time, there was … …a woodcutter and his friend [who] spent all their time together. The woodcutter, the elder of the two, lived alone; he had no family. The younger man, who made his living fixing things, had a partner and children. Everyone knew that the two were friends. The younger man had a workshop that he shared with two owls. He was there one day when the woodcutter

The cover of my paperback copy of Guy Chapman’s book, the inspiration for this story   From time to time, I used to come across one of Alan Bennett's diaries, either in book form or published as a serial in The London Review of Books. They are good reading.  Bennett's writing is concise and witty; he has an artist's eye for detail and a dramatist's ear for dialogue. The diaries seem at first glance to be mere reportage of everyday events, but they are invariably interesting a

The common pigeon, or Rock Dove, found in Western Australia – seen here, on the grass   I was reading an anthology of wonderful stories by the American humorist James Thurber the other day and came across a line of poetry that he lampooned: “ Pigeons on the grass, alas”. It was only when I pronounced ‘grass’ the American way (to rhyme with ‘alas’) rather than the Australian way (‘grahse’) could I start to make any sense at all of the line – at least it contained a rhyme. But