How a Test and a TV series brought back memories

HURRAH! The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest has been voted the nation’s favourite tree by Broadleaf, the magazine of the Woodland Trust.

The oak is around 1,000 years old. Its massive trunk is said to have been the hide-out for Robin Hood and his Merry Men but it was once also the occasional gathering spot for less celebrated Nottinghamians such as your correspondent and his rabble.

We young Nottingham bloods would occasionally pay a visit to Edwinstowe and cram inside this trunk. Such activities were curtailed in 1974 when the oak was fenced off, the half a million annual visitors badly compressing its roots. It’s now supported on crutches, robbing it of a certain dignity but presumably too much of a tourist attraction for Notts County Council to consider euthanasia.

The news about the Major Oak is among various items that saw your correspondent indulge of late what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’ – a powerful yearning for the place you came from.

I grew up in Sherwood – though the north Nottingham suburb is now some distance from the forest itself. I left my home town in 1965, a journey to Tyneside via Sheffield and London, having been an adopted Geordie for half a century.

I also experienced this same ‘hiraeth’ while sitting in front of the TV watching the recent test against New Zealand at Trent Bridge. What a fine ground, I thought.What a fine setting. Within a short distance, not only this international cricket ground, but two professional football grounds, a racecourse, a national water sports centre. Even the erstwhile putrid smell of the nearby glue factory is no more.

‘Hiraeth’ also occurred watching the recent BBC1 series Sherwood, with its backdrop of the 1984 national miners’ strike and the contemporary consequences. Nottingham miners were controversially and often confrontationally involved, their breakaway union (whose members, continued working) bitterly and sometimes violently opposed by their NUM counterparts.

For once the cast of a TV series came good on the flat Nottingham accent. Normally on the small or

large screen (see most DH Lawrence adaptations) actors adopt a pseudo-Yorkshire voice when faced with this challenge and that’s not it at all, me duck.

And this ‘hiraeth’ also happened witnessing the promotion back to the Premier League for Nottingham Forest, still the only British team to win two consecutive European Cup trophies (1979-1980).

Nottingham doesn’t have as strong an identity as Tyneside and the latter’s taste and flavour bowled me over within a few weeks of moving here.

And Geordies are fiercely proud of their city, possibly more so than any other with the exception of Liverpool. This unique flavour is nowhere better captured than in Dan Jackson’s recent book The Northumbrians.

But Nottingham – it’s the city of my birth and of my first 21 years. And at times it can tug me like an impatient dog.

Onto other matters. The award for National Scallywag of the Century (thus far) looks to have few rivals to Boris Johnson.

What/who will remove this scoundrel from office? Not (thus far) the Tory party, happy to watch him blunder his increasingly ineffective way on. Not the electorate seemingly still hoodwinked by the charlatan. How about an overnight coup? This might upset the Queen, something no selfrespecting British coup person could contemplate.

An assassin’s bullet? Happily we don’t do politics like that over here and (also happily) unlike the USA, few of us would know where to lay our hands on a gun anyway.

As one politician put it, ‘you’d need forcibly to carry Johnson out of Downing Street, kicking and screaming.’

Becoming PM has been Johnson’s lifetime ambition. It has nothing to do with a vision for the country, a desire to make the UK a better place or to reduce the disgraceful levels of inequality.

It has to do entirely with the narcissism of being Boris Johnson and enjoying strutting the world stage

So where is the person who can take this from him?

And is this Starmer’s time (at last) to play a stormer?

■ PLANET CORONA The First 100 Columns, IRON Press, £8.00

■ pmortimer@xlnmail.com