Slinging my hammock

Last year I bought a simple brightly striped cloth hammock for £5 from a local supermarket and then had to hunt for a place to hang it.
I needed two trees about 3 metres appart with trunks that bifurcated into stout branches at shoulder height. The reason the trees needed to bifurcate at shoulder height was so that two iron bars slipped between the metal rings at each end of the hammock would press against the branches and keep the hammock in place without the need to screw strong hooks into the living wood.
I found two suitable trees, a hedge hawthorn and an aspen I planted about ten years ago after weeding it out of a vegetable bed, in my mini-wood,( i.e. two border beds one between a pebble path and the overgrown hawthorn hedge dividing my garden from next doors and one between the same path and a winding lawn so narrow that in garden professional vocabulary, it is known as a ride. Over the past fifteen years, I have planted up these two borders with trees and tall shrubs.)
By the way a garden here in the UK is what North Americans call their yard. Being British we usuallly surround our gardens with fences or hedges. My hedges once enclosed a tiny private field on the edge of one of the village's great common fields and may well be over 200 years old although my house is only just over 80.
We had such a bad summer last year that I didn't get much use out of the hammock until the autumn - but what magical moments I enjoyed then with the sun shining through chinks in a curtain of red and orange leaves created by a virginia creeper that had taken over the hedge.
I took the hammock down for the winter but when I went to sling it up again this May, I found the hard way that the hawthorn tree I had used last year had rotted.
It took me some time to find a safer hawthor suitably close to the aspen but now the hammock is back in use for the summer.
I wonder whether I find the hammock so much more relaxing an outdoor resting place than either recliners or those metal and overstuffed-cushion monstrosities that have usurped the title hammock, because of some remote tree dwelling ancestor who constructed a sleeping place out of branches. It could be though that it is because both i need to sleep with my legs rest higher than the base of my spine or else I wake with a stiff back. It could be also that the surrounding trees and the enclosing canvas keep off the chilly winds so I am warmer in my hammock den than I am out in the open on the lawn.
So far this late spring and early summer thre have been several days when I have been able to lie in my hammock reading. I prefer reading outdoors in summer as on a clear day I don't have to use spectacles. I just hope this summer is going to be better than last year's washout.