I was being suffocated, like hands were around my throat, unable to breathe, being starved of oxygen, and unable to live as life was squeezed out of me. I was confused. Why would someone want to murder me? What have I done to them? Why was my life snubbed out? I repeatedly asked them to stop, but my pleas went unanswered. Maybe they didn’t hear me. Perhaps I didn’t scream loud enough.

They said they were trying to preserve me, protecting my life, wrapping me as if in a womb. They were doing the exact opposite, slowly and painfully killing me. My skin started cracking and shedding like a leper’s. Flakes of skin fell like a winter snowstorm. I tried to cry in pain, but no one heard me sob.

They planned to highlight me on the centre stage so people could admire me. I was famous, or maybe infamous. I didn’t want to be recognised, I wanted them to stop.

They wanted to increase the number of visitors that came to see me. Only they didn’t spare a thought for my feelings as others viewed me like a piece of meat. Visitors came, poking and prodding me, thinking it was acceptable for my space and dignity to be invaded. They were trying to protect me from being removed from this world; sadly, the result was the opposite. I wanted them to stop, but no one heard me ask.

They poured concrete over me, decimating everything in its wake like a volcano erupting. Only it was not hot like lava: only hard, unforgiving concrete. It would have been a far less excruciating death if they had just chopped off my head, as Henry VIII executed two of his wives.

The football fans cheer their team from the cowshed stand in the stadium. The new houses stand pretty and grand, soulless of character, standing to attention like soldiers on parade. One hundred and thirty roundabouts on a grid road system where people are conditioned to travel by car, driving around at inhuman speed. Some find this acceptable, to compete in a concrete rat race. The first car had a top speed of ten miles per hour, and today the fastest car can clock over two hundred fifty miles an hour.

The beauty beyond the concrete jungle is thousands of trees of all shapes, sizes, and colours. Meticulously sewn to bring splendour to the eye through the changing seasons, except one tree, me, the five-hundred-year-old oak tree. I was too magnificent, too old to chop down and destroy. My legacy lives on with a hundred of my acorns planted, but it will take five hundred years for those acorns to reach the greatness I once was before I was murdered.

My life expectancy was a thousand years, until Lord Campbell had a plan.