“Nobody needs one.” This is a peculiar thing for a treehouse builder to say about treehouses. But that is exactly what Paul Cameron tells me as he and his team at Treehouse Life put the finishing touches on their latest project, a multi-decked construction spiralling around a thick old blue cedar in the sweeping grounds of a property in Surrey, south-east England. “They are pure whim,” he adds, “an emotional space.”
It is a point made powerfully, I remember, in the Ian McEwan novel A Child in Time, in which a male character spends an increasing amount of time playing childish games on a tree platform he has built in a nearby wood. He is regressing as literally as he can until, one day, falling from the tree, he regresses all the way.
