Recently, I’ve found myself longing to daydream, although it’s not the sort of thing you can plan. Planning a daydream, that’s a different sort of alteration, chemical, I imagine. Drugs are expensive and their side effects produce dark and squirmy mysteries. Worms. I wouldn’t recommend it. A daydream is the way to go: a sudden wandering off often prompted by flowers and trees, but I think trees are more hypnotic. They move so well, and they let you know how they feel --- very moody today, and highly whimsical, likely to bend this way and that on the breeze. When they are angry, they lash about, storm and tremble. Trees talk to you, they make love, then turn away from you towards another.
The tree outside my window is an Indian bean tree so my neighbours say. Wide lime green leaves like palms, perfect for lying under in the summer -- so billowy -- a translucent lime-green blouse. She covers me and shields my eyes from the glare. Tree likes blue, and the sky looks good from underneath her; as blue as the Mediterranean, it is easy to travel there. You only need to be a little bit hot with your eyes closed. Indian bean trees have wide leaves that flap gently like a punkha wallah, the man who fans the hot and bothered people in years gone by. History is interrupting my daydream -- somehow it always does -- and the image of a fan-holder in the famous novel by E.M. Forster, a very reasonable man – Edward Morgan I mean -- who believed all men were equal and wished to make friends with ordinary people. I’m not so sure about the women, but you can’t be all things to all folk, and Edward Morgan felt that friendship was the truest bond.  And I think of this as I lie underneath my Indian bean tree, who is fanning me very nicely. I shall tip her; she is a most elegant lady. I wonder what sort of fruit she drops.

For Andrew