Chapter 7.2: Nethy Bridge and The Real

In Nethy Bridge, and my mind is glowing. It's all downhill from here - the trip back to the train station at  Aviemore, the circuit out to the Western Isles. I chase about the tress, seeing the pieces that have been left behind by the community groups who are responding to the Giants in the Forest, and I know. This isn't the primordial woodland that traces its appearance back to a neolithic past. This is what the aftermath will look like: fragments of human activity, evocative and exciting, overpowered by the relentless growth of nature.

I like to pose and say: this is the desert of the real. I stole that from The Matrix. Intoned in the beautiful tones of Morpheus, portentous and serious, and stolen from Baudrillard. I have no idea what it means. Now I remember why I got lost in Falkland Estate. Now I know why I wanted to cycle across the northern passages of Scotland.

I have some vague idea that nature is more 'real' than the city. The desert of the real is the city, all symbols and no depth: too much spice and not enough substance, like those Glasgow curries that are like soup with chunks of meat, no vegetables. I wanted to feel the threat, the terror. I want to be hard up against the danger, the precarious nature of survival.

It's more sentimental nonsense. I posit a duality: between the inauthenticity of my urban experience and the truth of nature. The Giants are offering another standard, another perspective. Here, the clear lines of the plantation mark out how, once upon a time, wood from this forest was grown for export, to be included in the building of ships (fine masts). And the Giant, man-made but from local materials, is a symbol of a more gentle symbiosis, an art that doesn't need to force resolution or tension to make a simple point. As always, I look for the wrong qualities...