Posted by Mike Field on February 08, 2009 at 23:08:51 user mikefield.
In Reply to: Re: Cochy, and 'apologies' (was Four firs that used to be in a wood posted by Peter H on February 07, 2009 at 12:49:47:
Peter H, Andy's comment was of course patently untrue, and he was of course being patently literalist in making it. But why "Well done, Andy, for being honest" when he was so clearly being dishonest, albeit jokingly, until I made my comment? I had and have no particular beef about his comment (except perhaps that it was a bit blatant,) but you've now succeeded in making it sound as though he's a little kid owning up to having done something wrong only after having been caught out doing it.
I suppose I must stand corrected for mentioning this at all though, because, as you yourself say, you are of course "damn well right all along."
One of the strictures of this site is to "Please keep your posts appropriate...-ish, and continue private matters by e-mail please." But I can't email my reply to you because you refuse to make your email address public.
Having said which, I'm now happy to get "Back to topic," which was nothing to do with Cochy, or 'apologies', as you apparently decided it ought to have been, but with four firs that used to be in a wood.
As Peter C. suggests, it's hard to believe that four trees in a row like that would survive in the open for seventy years, as the Swallows' four firs would have had to have done to be photographed today. There are lots of reasons why they might have long gone -- wood-cutters, fire, rot, borers, who knows what? (and I'm no forester to have all the answers.) But I know that Monterey pines (Pinus radiata -- also softwoods) were planted out here in small clusters, or as individual trees, in the middle of large paddocks on cleared grazing properties to provide shade for sheep or cattle, and that many of those trees are still surviving at twice that age and more. So perhaps those four firs could have survived after all.
But regardless of any left-brain analytical view, what I was doing by mentioning that photograph at all was exactly what AR did when writing his books, and exactly what we all do when reading them -- using imagination. Who cares whether those trees are really firs, or larches, or pines, or even eucalypts? To me that photo with its four trees suggested the Swallows' four firs. And I know from Elizabeth's reply that my post struck at least one other person the same way.