Gone

This isn’t the post I intended to write tonight.

I’ve just heard that the famous sycamore tree at Sycamore Gap has been cut down. Deliberately, and not for safety reasons; as an act of vandalism. A sixteen year old boy has been detained for questioning tonight. Not making any guesses as to whether he was the one cutting the tree, or one of a group, or just someone who posted a video of the act on his social media accounts.

I don’t care who did it and why. The tree is down. There are thousands of images of that tree – not just the ones you can buy in the local shops on postcards and prints, but in the scrapbooks and files of people who made the trek to see it. People like the couple from Florida who came to England to see that tree (because it was in their favourite film). People like us who just wanted to see that perfect dip filled with a tree.

We saw it just once, this March, and now I am really grateful that we took the time to walk there. I hoped to go back and see it in full leaf or on a clear winter night with the Plough in the sky beyond it, but now that’s never going to happen.

What has really upset me is that this is just another incident of destructive, spiteful, unpleasant acts that have no benefit at all for anyone – not even the person who committed the act – and work to make life a little less magical for everyone else. I clear up the litter beside the road outside my house because the council never will do it and I hate seeing that someone has dumped their rubbish where I have to see it. I’ve slowed up on litterpicking. Two or three hours’ work will fill a couple of rubbish bags (which I have paid for, as my only attempt to get litterpicking equipment was met with a round of “Not me, ask him…” “No, not me, ask her…” that turned into a longer waste of my time than walking alongside the road picking up plastic bottles full of piss and discarded fast food containers and beer cans and even things like the cardbox box that once contained the prescription medicine of the person named on the label and an entire strip of cheap machine-dispensed nails. Within three days, there was more rubbish chucked out at the same place.

I’m tired of picking up after people who don’t care how they ruin a place for others. I am really tired of hearing what weak excuse they had for acting like a chimpanzee. I am angry that the penalty will probably be to do x hours of unpaid work (and I know how hard it is to get someone to do a few hours of paid work when there’s FaceBook to be checked). I don’t see any solution, or any way of stopping this. And there is no repair for this damage. They might carve some kind of totem pole from its trunk and place it where the tree once stood, but I for one could not bear to see it.