I once knew a man who was haunted by three trees. He lived on the edge of the village where I grew up and beyond his house was nothing but fields and woods all the way to the South Downs.

The trees were at the bottom of his garden, about twenty feet from the house. When I was a boy my mother used to visit this man, Mr. Bennett, and I was left in the lounge while they talked. I would lie on the carpet, concentrating on my colouring book. I was a very serious child.

Mr. Bennett would come in after a while with some orange squash and a plate of biscuits, brightly coloured Party Rings. He would tell me the pictures looked good and I thanked him, even though he only said it to be polite.

One afternoon he gave me a photograph to look at. “That’s them three trees there,” he said, pointing at the trees near the hedge.

They were tall, probably forty foot high. Thick branches reached up, twisted and gnarled. The photograph showed the trees some distance behind the hedge, in the field that backed on to the garden. I looked out again and saw they were inside the hedge.

“Is your garden bigger now?” I asked.

“Nope. They’re getting closer. Have been for years now.”

He put the photograph back in his pocket and left. I didn't even mention it to my mother, didn't think about it much.

Years later I went back to the village. Walking along a shady path I passed close to Mr. Bennett's house. I found it destroyed: the roof collapsed, the walls crumbled. Three trees grew in the centre of the ruin.

Background

This was originally the prologue for the novel I wrote as coursework at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Continuing Education. It was a strange story that was a little like The Matrix, if The Matrix was about houses that were alive. It was the third novel I finished. None of these books were any good and I’ve destroyed all the files. The best I can say about the novel I finished in 2007 was that I really liked the prologue.

Recommendations

The first money burning I heard about was when the KLF set fire to a million pounds. Most people found that ridiculous, but I was fascinated by such the act. It was irreversible and truly nihilistic: to think of all the things you could do with that money and yet decide you'd rather destroy it.

The first time I saw money burning was at Festival 23 in 2017, when Jon Harris led a money burning ceremony. Fire takes on a whole different meaning when it's fuelled by cash. All that potential going up in smoke.

Jon Harris runs the Church of Burn, an organisation dedicated to money burning. He's thought and written a great deal about what it means to destroy currency. The first time you hear about the church, you might imagine it a prank or a joke. Once you engage with Jon's writing you see the theoretical weight behind this idea. And you begin to wonder why more people are not setting fire to their money.

You can read a good introduction to Jon's thought by the great CJ Stone here. There are big plans being made for the Church of Burn and as part of them Jon has started a mailing list, CoB’s Creation Diary where you can sign up to follow them. Jon is doing some good work here, and the Church of Burn is an organisation with the potential to do great things.

Meta

I’m still planning to migrate my blog off Substack due to my political issues with the platform, but time has been short recently. That change is still coming, but might be a few more weeks away.