At home and abroad in 2025, Daniel Williams found his perspective framed by trees.
Caught by the Seine
I don’t travel as well as I used to do. I’ve become so rooted in the heathland common landscape in which I live that I find it increasingly hard to leave, for fear of the hiraeth I will experience when elsewhere. Even with the routine of work and chores, home is where I feel most myself, where I can shift at a moment’s notice from those obligations into time to walk and think and write and be.
My perspective is framed by trees. I identify strongly with the ones which bound and surround me – the slim, wild Scots pine at the bottom of the garden, its supple trunk bending with the winds; the magnolia echoing one which stood outside a childhood home; and the sweet chestnut and English oak just beyond the front gate. I look out upon them and wrestle with words until their shape on a page pleases me, if no-one else. Increasingly I’m a gnarly old oak myself, mindful in this mast year of the continuation of the species, trying to be as productive as I can, spreading out a carpet of acorns beneath my canopy. Robert Forster once described the unwillingness ever to leave where you’re from as a ‘Cat’s Life’, a thing he couldn’t understand, until he could. Something of the feline seems to have come over me.
Nevertheless, I do manage to tear myself away from home from time to time, and this year took trips to Manchester, Newcastle and Paris. Inevitably, having made the effort to travel, I find myself inspired and enthused by the differences from my daily lot. A professional interest had me visiting Manchester’s Mayfield Park, created around the cleaned-up River Medlock, and noting green walls and other elements of beneficial urban design in Newcastle. We are adapting our cities to the climate, knowing now that we have to do so alongside decarbonising, balancing realism with the hope that we must try never to lose in the face of our bloody-minded attempt to extinguish life on earth.
The same attempt to make the urban realm more resilient and biodiverse has been happening in Paris since I last visited. The Seine has benefitted both from traffic being rerouted away from the bank, and a billion-euro clean-up of the water, so that this year, after a century-long ban, public swimming is once again allowed in the river; the Olympic Games was just a staging post in the environmental effort. It’s a much greener city than it was. Seeking relief from the summer heatwave, I’m struck by the oases that have bloomed under Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s transformative administration. While you can still find plenty of examples of clipped, boxy shade in the formal gardens and parks, there has been a move to more naturalistic planting, softening the streetscape, making it more inviting, not to mention cooler, and ultimately more resilient to climate change. And then there is Paris Respire. Paris can indeed breathe every Sunday, due to the car-free scheme launched in 2016 and still going strong.
In the August heat, we drift by the Seine where once cars used to rattle along. It’s been fifteen years since my last visit to Paris, and thirty-odd since the first. Inevitably memories are awoken and reflections set in motion as the sun glints and plays across the rippling surface of the water. Moments where my path and the Seine’s intersected, here and downriver in Rouen and Le Havre. On the passing of time; how cities change and yet somehow stay the same; the Babylonian pleasures of language; and the nature of parental influence (or otherwise), for my daughter is about to start living and working in this fabled place.
If I can claim any influence over her embarking on a second half-year stay in France, three decades after my own six-month stint, it’s to have helped foster a perspective which looks out from our island and doesn’t imagine the coast as walls. When I was growing up, France was little more than a once-visited campsite near Calais with an on-site restaurant which served up andouillette (sausage made from the lower intestine of pigs) to my unsuspecting brother. The language I was learning at school was an academic exercise, a Molière stage play, not a living, breathing thing. Thinking back, the real source of my Francophilia was likely the Style Council, through both the piano-heavy À Paris EP – the cover of which features Paul and Mick looking impossibly cool next to a fountain with the Eiffel Tower in the background – and the torch songs and Gallic jazz inflections of the Café Bleu LP.
Inevitably we pass something of ourselves onto our offspring – genes, tastes, attitudes, perspectives, opinions – even if we are wary of that process. But as often as not they define themselves for themselves – neither in contrast, nor as updated replicas, but through the trial-and-error process of opportunity and engagement with the world beyond home. This I like (music, gymnastics, languages). This I do not (football, scratchy indie records from the 1980s, blue cheese). Music was always in the air, but it wasn’t force-fed. My daughter’s taste is very much her own, not that of her parents, save for a grounding in Gershwin and the Beatles with a dash of Tracey Thorn (singing not ‘The Paris Match’ but Tinsel and Lights). Equally she is now creating and defining her own version of Paris, free of the influence either of The Style Council or Georges Perec. And while I hope it’ll be a while before she settles into any kind of cat’s life, that’s her call.
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