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Lizards, Lava and Luck

5/26/2017

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I used to laugh at lizard conspiracy theories.  And then I got it, suddenly, in a flash of insight that came at the end of the hottest May afternoon in London in living memory.  Not only ARE there lizard people but there are LOADS of them.  They are everywhere.  More than half the people you meet are lizards.  You're probably a lizard yourself.
It's easy to work out if you are:
Lizards like the sun.  They are always cold and loathe winter.  They complain all winter how cold it is.  They turn up the heating until the planet fries.  The first hot day and they strip down to their underwear and lie on the (drying and dying) grass on their nearest square.  They will lie there all day.  Cities are ideal for lizards because not only does it get to 35C virtually every day in, say, London, but the humidity is around 98% AND it never ever rains (only those with a conscience have realised that it doesn't actually rain in London anymore and that it's in the grips of the worst drought, like, ever).  Add to the heat and the humidity the extremely high pollution and you've got one happy lizard:  basking in the heat and filth.  Lovely.  Lizards are happy to sit on boiling hot sidewalks on metal chairs drinking sweet sticky coffee substances and then, later, alcoholic substances (of which I know nothing except that it smells bad when it's thrown up along with their dinner on the same sidewalk).  Lizards have a great life - they never suffer in the heat.  They spend all their time wishing it wouldn't rain and then it doesn't anyway so they get their wish.  They don't even suffer in winter all that much given the phenomenal temperatures of every building you walk into - 35C again, just right for lizards. 
But what about people who aren't lizards?  Who hate summer?  Who start feeling depressed when the temperature ventures above 20C?  Who flake when it hits 25C?  Who are on their deathbeds at 30C and reach a state of entirely insane catatonia at 35C (i.e. the whole of the seven month London summer)??  These people are lava-bloods.  People with lava in their blood love winter.  They are full of energy on a winter's day and love walking in the cold, all wrapped up.  They love the freshness of the windblown air in winter.  They love the freshness of the rain in spring and its softness in autumn.  They know how to dress for winter and never complain about it.  They have the right sort of shoes for rain and their umbrellas actually work.  They remember a time when the streets of London used to be cleaned at least once a week by a downpour of some kind, when the shit and puke and other things you'd rather not know about used to be scrubbed away by real water that fell free from the sky.  It's a fond memory.  All lava-bloods have it.  They droop in front of fans that do nothing but shift hot air about from one end of the room to another and wish desperately to be cool.  Their fingers swell like sausages and their flesh burns.  The sun on their skin feels like torture.  The humidity is one long suffocating afternoon inside a woolly blanket.  Lava-bloods have to drink gallons of water until they feel sick.  They spend a lot of time in the fridges of supermarkets, the only place they feel normal.  They don't sleep for seven months either, as summer just goes on and on and on and on and on, the fucking lizards revelling every night with drunken parties in every room that is the London dystopia.
If the heat doesn't bother you and the cold doesn't bother you and you just muddle along not thinking about the weather at all, then you're just Lucky.
Picture
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Why does Camden Council hate trees so much?

5/14/2017

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The Orcs in The Lord of the Rings hated trees:  they cut them down and hurled them whole (in the movie, at least) into their furnaces.  Eventually the Ents of Fangorn Forest got together and fought back and – in the movie once again – got the trees to swallow up a lot of Orcs.  I rather wish that would happen in Camden.

Camden Council hate trees.  They pollard some of them every year so that many trees are just trunks without branches and just the occasional leaf.  A pollarded Plane tree is a tragic sight.  A pollarded cherry is sacrilege.  Not content with pollarding the huge beautiful cherry in my street, they then cut it down altogether.  It had been the ONLY beautiful thing in a street full of litter, dog shit, scaffolding, uncollected bins stinking in the sun, fly tipping and endless traffic.  It attracted goldfinches who gathered in it and chattered away all day with great cheer.  A year later, the destroyed cherry was replaced with a birch.  I’ve got nothing against birches (all trees are sacred to me) but a skinny white tree with a trunk an inch in diameter has zero shade.  And with a second year of drought in London and blindingly hot cement days, shade is urgently required.

The Camden Orcs clearly have something against cherries.  A skinny little cherry was planted a couple of years ago on Russell Square in the hottest part, receiving baking hot sunshine day after day.  After a dry winter and even drier spring, I asked one of the garden workmen (I wouldn’t call them gardeners) on the square to please water the tree – he was watering everything else, after all.  But he didn’t and the tree died.  So they took away the tree’s plaque (it had been dedicated to someone), uprooted it and planted another cherry in its place, full of beautiful pink flowers.  But it was another dry winter and another even drier spring and the buds it had clung to all winter never opened and the tree died.  So once again there is a dead cherry on the square, unwatered, unloved, uncared for.  Will they replace it a third time?

Leaving dead saplings for a long time is a favourite of Camden’s.  Gordon Square has had an appalling decade, losing at least six trees that I can think of.  Two came down in storms but the others were chopped down mercilessly.  The back part of the square, closest to the IOA, has become a dry desert where once it had been a riot of beautiful blossoms every spring.  In this desert, a single sapling was planted.  It never made a leaf.  It was dead before it ever had a chance.  And it has been left there for THREE YEARS, indicating that no one has bothered to check if it has survived. 

No one takes care of the trees.  Marchmont Street has three dead saplings and Tavistock Square loses a pretty flowering tree at least once a year, until eventually there’ll be nothing left except the hideously pollarded limes.  I’ve lost count how many trees I’ve seen die – and I’m only talking about my immediate area, a few blocks from my flat.  I’m not talking about ALL of Camden or even the whole of London.  It’s just Bloomsbury where big trees are constantly being hacked down and replaced by saplings which die almost at once. 
​
I suppose people would only care if it was kittens.  No one cares about trees.  And London, in the baking heat, the sickening filth of humidity and pollution, and the inhumane stretches of concrete deserts needs more trees than it needs more people.
Picture
This is the cherry that was chopped down - apologies for the stock photo but it appears to be the only photograph in existence for this lost tree
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