Just look at this tree. Is it not magnificent? I had been down in the country staying with my sister Anne, working on a script for another issue of Noe The Savage Boy. In my mind I felt as though I had spent weeks at sea on a nightmare journey on a North African Pirate Ship called The Issabella. (Not because my sister was mistreating me but because that is what the next part of Noe's story involves.) Feeling a bit stir crazy I decided to go for a hobble around The Black Island. My own Island of Adventure. As a boy I had stumbled across a downed Sontaran war Machine and only just managed to foil its pilot Field Marshall Soldar's attempts to conquer the Earth. I did so by jamming his breathing tube with a Peggy's Leg cola flavored stick of rock. A top tip if you should ever find yourself face to face with a lone Sontaran warrior. Also, it is not widely known but beneath the dark waters of Lake Muckno which surround The Black Island are a Zygon spacecraft (Who's crew rest in suspended animation) as well as a colony of Sea-Devils/Silurians (Who also sleep in suspended animation). Someday both sleeping crews will emerge from their deep sleep and that will truly be squeaky bum time. I feel connected to The Black Island. I always have. Even on the worst of days I have been able to draw some strength from it. I have sat beneath the spreading branches of ancient trees as rain of biblical proportions has fallen to earth. The trees never notice I am there. They rarely notice us as we move through our lives so quickly. To a tree man-time is like the beating of a humming-bird's wings. I have sat with my skinny legs dangling off Lake Muckno Bridge feeling the night draw in. Watching tree tops sway in a breathing motion as the wind explores its branches. Dark water below mirrors the darkening skies above as twilight spreads. Like a curtain falling signalling the end of one act and the beginning of another. A hunting man armed with a shotgun and a brace of Coneys passes me following an excited springer spaniel who's nose vacums the ground. The grass has stories to tell and a good springer can read them all. A sublime night is meant for walking on the water...And a tree like this is why this place is so special to me. I even scrambled about its rooty mossy base looking for a Carroll-like entrance to a world beyond this one. The kind of entrance a waistcoat wearing rabbit with a fob-watch might use. Alas no such Coney showed. No magic rabbit bounded by. No magic entrance or exit revealed itself that day. The day it does will be the last day this world sees me.
...Now if I can only remember where I found this tree...
