The air is cooler now and out with the scarf and hat for the first time in six months. Yes, the air has more of a bite as I step onto Pembroke Road. The leaves – crisp and beige like parcel paper – scuttle along the pavement. They mass into drifts that gather under the wall where the grey from Buckingham Vale spooked me last time.
The tree hedge outside All Saints church is now bare. It still holds the shape of a London bus but now I can see the separate trees underneath, their wiry branches interlinked, and All Saints clearly visible through the branches. John Piper’s deep blue windows offers something comforting to the solitary pedestrian tramping past. People often mistake these enormous windows for stained glass but Piper made them from fibre glass and polyester which were then filled with resin. Most of the original church was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in 1940.
The Alma Tavern is busy tonight and not just with students. How much better a cosy pub can be when the temperature drops. On a table outside there is half a pint of Guinness, several dead matches and a dead leaf. The plane tree on the other side of Alma Vale Road is still covered in leaves, its African camo of browns and greens happily whooshing at me from above, that sound that always reminds me of the sea.
Do the stars seem brighter on a cool evening? Or is it because it reminds me of being a primary school boy in Charsfield walking home to the thatch and looking for that star, the one which guided the kings.
At the bottom of Alma Vale Road the leaves on the trees dance frenetically casting wobbly shadows along the road before the great red brick mass of Clifton Down Shopping Centre. There is the sound of humming electricity and creaking metal from within.
Along the side alley and out onto Alma Road. A happy transition. And here is the king of the plane trees at the end of Alma Road. It is a beast of a tree with a huge canopy that when I look up into it I always get lost. It’s not quite as big as some of those that line some of the most famous streets of central London such as the plane that has sat outside the front of The Dorchester Hotel since the hotel was built in 1931.
That tree is so grand it has become almost as famous as the hotel itself, being chosen as one of the sixty one trees that made it on to the list of the ‘Great Trees of London’ created by Trees for Cities after the great storm of 1987. I remember seeing a documentary about ‘The Dorchester Plane’ which said how that plane trees’ distinctive peeling bark is good at absorbing – and thereby reducing – traffic pollution. I suppose the Alma Road plane does the same for the traffic here. People often sit on those worn out wooden benches at its base watching the busyness of Whiteladies Road.
The Slow Walker 