Well, who'd have thought it?

After a hideously early start and an infernal drive home through traffic jams, detours and road works, I went out for a run. A trot. Over a very short distance. And an even shorter distance when I decided to cross a field to take a look at a tree.

I wasn't expecting much. The tree was in a patch of scrub on what looked to have been an old hedgeline that had been cut in half. But when I got close enough to see over the nettles, brambles and small trees, I realised that what was there was huge... or had been huge.

The main stem had broken off as well as some of the main branches. The trunk... I measured it. Nearly twenty feet. Surely at least 500 years old? I have put it on the Ancient Tree Inventory to be verified.

I stood on the fallen main stem - which was almost as big as my old oak. I wanted to get onto the tree, but the break was about twelve feet up.

The tree was a monster! In the best possible way. I just stood there, staring. I couldn't get enough of it.

My presence did not appear to delight a local resident.

There was no nest in the oak. I could see a nest in a nearby ash, but it seemed too small for buzzards. What I did see was the picked clean back end of a rabbit on the fallen trunk. Maybe this was a raptor's canteen.

The buzzard went away, came back, went away, came back with a second buzzard and then they both flew off south-west.

That hour, out there, with a tree and the locals... it was enough to soothe me. Then I go home and as soon as I do... I start thinking of the work and the commitments. The things I find tough or troubling. The overwhelm. The organisation. And I just want to be out there. To have no reason to rush home.

My colleague said to me today, about working hard and saving, he said, "But who wants to be happy when they're seventy? Be happy now!" I am rather closer to seventy than he is. And I have been burned by the "being happy now" philosophy - I'm thinking of the horses - and yet, even so, I keep thinking how much I get from the trees and the creatures. My sanity, perhaps, as well as my feeling of rather delightful insanity. The work-a-day world has its pleasures - I do so appreciate many of my colleagues and at times even enjoy the work. Yet there is always this sense of a chasm ready to open, which the wonder of being outside alleviates.

While I was standing on the fallen main stem of this tree, I held on to the outstretched limb of an ash. The wind blew, catching the leaves of the ash and this branch pulled... a wonderful pull or gradually increasing strength - as when the sail of a boat windsurf board catches the wind and you feel, through the bar, the power, but the power is not a threat but a benediction, somehow. Holding you up. Offering the suggestion of flight.