Angels in the branches

[Note: I used to play football most Sundays on Peckham Rye Common.]

The joys of this cannot easily be enumerated, but would certainly include, two Sundays ago, a certain rogue semiotician hammering, yes, hammering an equaliser late in a game that had until then seemed lost.

There is, however, one thing that, since it belatedly occurred to me the other week, will give me a tickling manner of glee regardless of who scores or wins.

There is on the common a venerable oak tree. There are a few dotted around, in fact, but I choose this one.

You will know the story of William Blake. How, well before he saw such things as the ghost of a flea, he was marked as a visionary sort of a chap by virtue of, as a child, seeing angels playing in the branches of a tree. An oak tree. On Peckham Rye Common.

Now, as I say, there are several candidate trees on the common, and it may even be that Blake’s oak is no longer standing, but I choose that it is. I choose that it is this one because it stands alone and central, because it feels right, because it is exactly the sort of oak under which an imaginative child might stand, gazing up, and translate the frankly huge flappy rooks into something altogether more angelic, and because, after all, it is the tree under which I play football on a Sunday.

One thing of which I’m sure. When young Wm Blake saw his angels playing, he certainly was not seeing some future echo of our Sunday afternoon kickarounds. Angelic would be entirely the wrong sort of a description, and I carry the bruises to prove it.