The Big Frieze

I was driving home from work early evening and decided on cutting through Regent’s Park. I spotted what looked like a white tree.

As the most observant unobservant person, I seem to notice some things while missing the obvious. Anyway I spotted this white tree and my first thought was I have to take a picture that will look great in black and white.

I pulled over and thought I would leave the dogs and my sister in the car for a few minutes and quickly take my shot. I grabbed my camera still dressed in its thrifty fifty from my weekend shooting and ran excitedly into the park. Then I saw a statue of a skeleton slung across a chair in a feature fountain and thought ‘wow I could write a Hamlet blog’ and got easily distracted, forgetting about the white tree.

I started snapping away at Yorick with the words of Hamlet resonating in my head or the misremembered line from Hamlet that does not say “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”) So here I am on a different tangent and then quickly realised I was here for the tree not the skeleton statue, my sister is going to kill me (and alas I would then be keeping poor Yorick company in the park).

I’m well known for my ‘I’ll be five minutes’ line. Abandoning Yorick, I rushed off to the tree to then find silver heads on plinths everywhere, and I got even more excited and distracted. It occurred that this was more than just a white tree in the park probably suffering with a deadly tree disease and painted white so it doesn’t contaminate the rest of the park trees and spread across London killing every tree and then mutating across into deadly human strain. Oh no, I feel a sore throat coming, quick let me get out of here…I think I have caught it.