I love trees

One of the biggest differences between Spain and the UK is the trees. The UK is fundamentally green. Spain is fundamentally beige. Especially at this time of year. It is winter, after all. We didn’t ever have autumn. The leaves never turned those beautiful shades of golden brown. Mostly the leaves didn’t fall off at all – not like in the UK…

…or in Germany, where this picture was taken. Palm trees don’t seem to be deciduous. But like sheep are shorn in the spring time, so palm trees are here. They go from looking like large umbrellas of shade to resembling improbable pineapples stuck on hairy lampposts. They make me laugh when I see them now.

That’s the palm trees that are left. Southern Spain has been struck by a mystery palm tree disease, and ever since I arrived here I’ve come across intermittent culls of sickly plants, great pyres of trunk and broad leaf, smouldering at the roadside. Like the countryside scenes during the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK a decade or so ago, but smelling less of barbeque and more of bonfire.

Another kind of tree, the one that lines most of the suburban roads, is shorter and gnarled and has large oval leaves in the summer. By the time I started working here the branches were spewing their crispy dead leaves onto the pavements. Recently the trees underwent a mysterious overnight haircut, ridding them of their original twiggy growths and any stubborn remaining leaves. They look strange now, but they fascinate me.

They are planted in rows, and they look like rows of bony hands reaching skywards. Their bark is whorled and dented, and begging to be drawn. I think that sometime soon they will start to re-grow. I hope that they’ll have blossom, although Spain doesn’t strike me as a blossom kind of country.

No news from work or life this week, but no news is good news. Into my letterbox fell a slice of Christmas cake, a few CDs of new music for my delectation, a bar of very dark chocolate, and a small bag of well-travelled walnuts in their shell (they’ve been from the tree in a garden in Holland to a student flat in Edinburgh to a newspaper bag in a Spanish apartment. Lucky old walnuts). I have no nutcracker though. I’m working on the best way to crack them!!

5 days now until I’m home for a holiday. A good length of holiday this time – a full 9 days. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and relaxing properly, going on a training course with all the other management trainees in other companies, and just being in Blighty. And I’m looking forward to seeing familiar, impressive trees in their naked winter glory!

Hasta Luego!