Tree spotting and pedantic teenagers

I want to know about trees. The ones I pass every day, what are their names? The nomenclature of nature is one of those things you think you ought to know about but life is short and the desire gets buried along with a thousand others like a pile of autumn leaves. I know oak, horse chestnut, willow… maybe beech, but what about the threatened ash, or elm? Not re-ea-ly sure… I search the bookshelves for the old Guide to Trees. Ah, there it is. A note in the flyleaf takes me back to my student years and a friend I loved. Goodness me. Shut the book and get on. The day has dawned golden over a sparkling frost. Must get out before it all melts. I make a thermos of coffee and wrap two – no three – biscuits in foil. Like going on a picnic.

The girl delays me with a level of pedantry hitherto concealed. She is applying to the sixth form of another school in order to have a choice next summer. The form needs to be interpreted: ‘No but should I put all the exams I am taking or just the GCSEs? What does it mean by GCSE level?’ I mildly make suggestions which are treated with scorn. ‘No Mum they are trying to get at something or they wouldn’t have put it like that and I can’t fill it in’. I escape by directing her to our lovely teacher-neighbour and march off to GreenwichPark.

After the bustle of Lewisham market, emerging on to Blackheath is strangely peaceful like entering a submerged world of distant and distorted noise. Frosted leaves crunch underfoot. Pigeons pecking at the ground are puffed up against the cold like little turkeys. Walking into the park, the trees on the main avenue are bare of leaves but there are plenty on the ground. One type of leaf stands out: still golden-green, it looks like a hand with five long fingers or ‘lobes’. The Guide, after some fumbling with cold hands, suggests it belongs to the Oriental Plane. I look up for a tree with balls hanging from the twigs like a London Plane. Ah, there it is. Yes, lots of furry balls, which the Guide calls fruiting catkin, and still quite a few leaves on the branches. A vast tree which has been allowed to grow without the pollarding so common with planes so its crown is shaped like a mushroom. I love to stand inside and look out through the knobbled fretwork of catkin and twig.

Leaf like hand

 Walking further into the park, a squeaking sound makes me look up. A stunning green parakeet sits on a branch with long tail and curved beak. And there’s her mate. The tree they occupy is gnarled and knotted like an Arthur Rackam illustration. The long, now copper leaves with spiky edge or ‘tooth’ tell me it’s a Sweet Chestnut – a tree Greenwich Park is famous for. The oldest ones were planted for Charles II in the 1660s. Crows and squirrels are also busy overhead and in a moment of seasonal complicity, a robin poses on a lone pole against a backdrop of red berries. I can only see conker husks beneath the avenue of horse chestnuts, the leaves have gone, but the book confirms that the abundance of short brown leaves are beech. And finally, walking towards a magnificent giant of a tree silhouetted against a sky of luminous cirrus cloud, the fallen leaves tell me it is an oak – not your usual English but a Turkey oak. The lack of acorns puzzles until I realise that the clusters of hairy little goblets, like coir matting, are the cups. The low sun dazzles as I stride back over the heath and home to my pedantic teenager.

Oak with cirrus cloud

Making bread in Notting Hill

Spent a wonderful morning at Recipease, Jamie Oliver‘s cookery school in Notting Hill. I’d finally signed up to a bread making class after being given a gift voucher many months ago. I fear if I had still been working I would never have got round to it.

Four of us faced the teacher across the counter, a friendly, accomplished young woman who showed us how to mix the flour, salt, sugar, yeast and water by hand. It reminded me of my mother-in-law making dough for rotis and paranthas. We made loaves, rolls, stuffed bread and focaccia. I realised many things:

• bread making is about practice but also attitude
• if your dough is sticky you don’t add more flour; you work it in olive oil
• you can’t conflate all bread making wisdom into one – there are many different recipes, dough textures and levels of stickiness
• you can wrap a load of meat, cheese, vegetables and herbs in ordinary dough and turn it into a ‘filled loaf’
• you don’t have to knead for ages, just five minutes or so, until springy to touch
• it doesn’t need to be cooked in a tin or pot – the dough can simply be put on a piece of greaseproof paper on a baking tin
• dough will rise in the fridge overnight; it just takes longer in the cold.

So yeah, really good fun. The kitchen is set in the centre of the Jamie Oliver café and shop, an informal mixture of high-tech design and domestic clutter with background chatter, music and divine aromas. And all around, iconic London life in the shape of red double-decker buses, plane trees and high street bustle can be seen through the floor to ceiling windows. We got to eat bacon rolls made with our own bread – no, it was actually delicious! – while the final batch baked. Noone wanted to go home at the end.