In The Village Churchyard Where The Lovers Are Buried

The full version of today's newsletter is for paying subscribers only. If you'd like to read all 3000+ words of it and support my increasingly resolute attempts to be completely independent in my approach to my writing you can subscribe here for a minimum of £2 per month (or £20 per year if you prefer) and get access to everything new I write, plus my full archive, including non-fiction essays as such as last week's and short stories like this one.

In the churchyard along the river in a village I used to visit fairly often there’s a yew tree that’s around a thousand years old. It does not underadvertise this fact, having its own timeline carved in a chunk of lacquered wood beside it where it humblebrags about all the important historical events it has lived through. But when I could count myself as one of its neighbours I always wondered why people didn’t talk more often about another, even older yew tree, five and a half miles upstream, which has seen an extra half millennium of history and boasts the undeniable folkloric bonus feature of a visible woodwitch clinging to its trunk. Maybe it was just because the older yew, and the hook-nosed humpback figure attached to it, scared people or became associated with a dark incident at some point and they thought it wisest to let the tree go uncelebrated. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen if you walk around it seven times backwards, and something has made me shy away from finding out, but they say if you walk around the younger yew seven times backwards it will grant you a wish. I did it just over a decade ago and, soon after that, the wish came true.

Half a decade later, not long after I met my wife, I took her there and she did the same. 

“Do you want to know what I wished for?” she asked, a little dizzily.

“No, just let me know if it works out,” I replied. “Let’s keep at least some mystery in our relationship, even if it’s just for the time being.” 

She told me recently that the wish did, in fact, come true. It turned out the wish was kind of undramatic, really more of a sort of multinuanced hybrid of several wishes. I had not realised the tree also catered for that kind of wish, and if I had it’s probable that you would have found me hanging around the tree’s base more frequently.

I walked to the younger yew a few days ago for the first time in a while. I did half a backwards circuit but stopped, having remembered that one of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to give up the pursuit of yearning.