a field student of free love and reproduction

Lost and Found in E17 has of late become a site of increasingly morbid musings while attempting to commune with the spirit(s) of erstwhile psychogeographers. Indeed, swine flu, cholera, bubonic plague have all featured prominently in this consumptive process and so, in the manner of Daniel Defoe’s fellow fear stricken denizens, I made for the hills this morning, to commune with nature and free myself of the vice and miasma of the Big Smoke. Not for me then, the likes of the littered streets of Soho or the Machiavellian hive of E17 et al. No, the northern fringes and allotments of E4 verging on Epping Forest were to be my temporary sanctuary today.

On a belly full of coffee, toast and honey I decided to retrace the gallops of Dick Turpin up into ‘the Chingfords’, mentally and physically pedalling this picaresque allusion along the way. Little hope then that I would actually free my mind of the mores of more inner London.

In the forest garden sanctum it was not long before the sexual proclivities of Mother Nature were all around me in startlingly vivid analogue. A particularly fine specimen of a corkscrew hazel (Corylus avellana, 'Contorta') displayed its sexual prowess with pendulous vegetable grace. In a moment of strange temporality I was immersed in the erotica of this field somewhere between this

http://www.arkive.org/hazel/corylus-avellana/video-09.html

and these

.

.

And now, nowhere near where I was, I will make excuses for my relapse by claiming this field student of E17 was earnestly studying the cycles of reproduction which provide Walthamstow and surrounds with ultra local ambrosial delights. Near to this site of free love, apian gatherings were in evidence.