The anchor-points keeping us all calm

From a newborn calf to a sentimental necklace, Tom Ough discovers items of significance for these 10 public figures

When Roger Deakin, the beloved nature writer and wild swimmer, died in 2006, his friend Robert Macfarlane found a fitting way to remember him. Macfarlane, a fellow author who became Deakin’s literary executor, salvaged a sapling from Walnut Tree Farm, where Deakin had lived, and planted it in the chalky clay of his south Cambridge garden.

It was an “ur-apple”, whose species is the ancestor of the modern apple tree, and whose fruit is small, strange and often sweet. Deakin had grown a seedling from a pip he’d taken home from the wild apple orchards of Kazakhstan, having salvaged it from the “feral fruit”, as he called it in an essay since published online by Emergence Magazine, that he’d snacked on while walking.

After Deakin’s death, two of his friends grew the seedling into a sapling and, eventually, gave it to Macfarlane. In an afternote to Deakin’s essay, Macfarlane recalls driving the sapling home. “I put it on the front seat in its pot, strapped it in with a seat belt, checked that the passenger-side airbag was enabled and drove home, feeling as if Roger were beside me.”

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, Macfarlane tweeted a picture of the tree bursting, as he described it, “into bright leaf and bud with unprecedented vigour”. The tree prompted him to observe that “small anchor-points of calm/wonder in nature become important in a world turned upside-down”. The idea of anchor-points was an intriguing one, apposite for the moment. I asked him more about the tree and concept. Via email, Macfarlane described the tree as, at least until now, “a reluctant flowerer, and an even more reluctant fruiter.

“So as the Covid-19 crisis was breaking over the country in its first forceful wave, I was in the garden, just trying to orient myself amid the chaos, and I noticed that, not only had the tree burst into bright green leaf, but also into profuse, beautiful bud, hundreds more buds than I’d ever seen before on it.”

It was an arresting sight, and something of a salve, too. “Suddenly my mind briefly reorganised itself around that surge of life; there was temporarily, to quote T S Eliot in Four Quartets, a ‘still point of the turning world’, and I experienced it as a leafing of hope, too, a reminder that cyclical, seasonal rhythms were at work, and that things could still get more beautiful, not less.

“That prompted,” Macfarlane wrote, “the idea of an ‘anchor-point’, something small to moor ourselves to amid the turbulence, if briefly; and of nature’s power at this unprecedented time (the pandemic itself a version of nature, of course) to offer hope, consolation, calm, wonder, beauty and to take us out of our immediate circumstances. Spring is breaking over us in Britain at the same time as the pandemic is, and we will need the first to endure the second.”

The worlds of psychology and meditation tell us something similar: sensory appreciation of our surroundings, particularly when those surroundings include nature, offers us some respite from the frenetic activity of what neurologists call our “default mode network”, the seat of thinking, planning, daydreaming, worrying. A particularly meaningful anchor-point, we can theorise, might evoke feelings of comfort or familiarity. You may already be thinking of one of yours, whether it be a tree, an heirloom or some clothing.

As the crisis continues, I sought more ideas of what an anchor-point might be. Ten public figures offer examples of theirs here.