Forty Winks

One afternoon when the chairman of the Friends of Margravine Cemetery delivered a plan of the trees in the cemetery, as I had requested, I was very obviously asleep on the sofa in the front window.

Subsequently when thanking her I apologised, saying I she had caught me taking forty winks in the guardroom. The look she exchanged with me was worthy of a Wodehouse aunt. My brother, now eighty, taught me the expression and you don’t get to live so long and be so healthy without taking 40 ws in the gr of an afternoon. Indeed, a great niece told me on Sunday how competitive he still is on a tennis court. I cherish the memory of his trying to burn me off on hired ‘cycles in Mayo on a day when the fishing was hopeless. Although an unfit city slob he didn’t take into account my eleven years advantage.

But I digress. The tree planting in Margravine Cemetery is admirable and I must ask the chairman who is responsible, very likely herself. There are a few specimen trees that will be of significant interest to future generations. It is fast becoming a small arboretum as well as a functioning cemetery and recreational area. The latest I have noticed is a Pinus wallichiana. It doesn’t look much now but golly it will.

It “is a coniferous evergreen tree native to the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains, from eastern Afghanistan east across northern Pakistan and north west India to Yunnan in southwest China. It grows in mountain valleys at altitudes of 1800–4300 m (rarely as low as 1200 m), reaching 30–50 m (98–164 ft) in height. It favours a temperate climate with dry winters and wet summers. In Pashto, it is known as Nishtar” (Wikipedia)

Here is what it might look like.