I AM a man of the trees. I like to stand among them. I like to walk under them. I pat on the trunk nearly every day a favourite one with giant roots that periodically gets swamped by the tide on a little beach near my home.

My garden is half made up of trees, planted by a previous expert resident. Two of them support my hammock, on which I swing when in pensive or inebriated mood. I walk often in a nearby forest, and it soothes my soul. Usually, I stick to the path but sometimes I venture right in where it is comfortingly gloomy and I just stand there amidst the towering trunks, at some risk of becoming a tree myself or half and half like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings.

When I emerge from the forest, to the shock of a passing walker, I feel as if I have to explain myself. No one ever leaves the path. “Just went in for a slash,” I might say. “Fine,” they reply, and quicken their pace. Actually the time I said, “I just like to stand among the trees”, their flight was more rapid.

Trees are a boon to us, though not everyone thinks so. A friend of mine on a barren island said: “Trees spoil the view.” It’s a point of view, I suppose.

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Trees cool down the surrounding landscape. Historically, I don’t believe we’re supposed to be out in the sun so much. We lived under the shelter of trees. They protected us from rain and sun.

Now we need to protect them. And that is particularly so if it is true, as a new book claims, that they have consciousness, a heartbeat and feel pain. If it sounds like German author Peter Wohlleben is over-egging the poplar here, bear in mind that all these things are relative.

Consciousness is an awareness at some level of being alive, heartbeat is the physical contraction and expansion of an organ, and nobody and nothing likes to have a limb severed. A tree’s “heartbeat” is the slow expansion and contraction it practises to absorb water from the ground.

As for pain, in The Heartbeat of Trees Mr Wohlleben, says pruning a hedge is not like cutting hair. It’s like cutting fingers. Hmm. Need to think about it. Just as thought-provoking is the idea that the smell of cut grass is a warning to other grass to beware there’s a nutter with a Flymo on the loose. Oh, and I thought it was just a nice pong.

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But Mr Wohlleben believes grass should be cut where necessary, which will come as some relief to lawn-lovers. I’ve started cutting some of my grass in paths, leaving it wild at the sides. Looks fantastic. And it’s all green, a colour that the book says is calming to humans, which may explain why some people antipathetic to it for football reasons appear so destructive and violent.

The takeaway from all this is that we should at least be more respectful of trees. The book surely makes a fair point, or a fir point, when it notes that trees have existed on the planet for 300 million years, modern humans for 300,000, and the profession of forestry for 300.

That is one of many reasons why the Clyde Climate Forest project, that will see 18 million trees planted in and around Glasgow over the next 10 years, is such heartening news. The plan is to create inter-connected woods, which help wildlife and provide veins of natural beauty for surrounding communities.

Whatever the truth about heartbeats, consciousness and pain, it is encouraging that humans are turning over a new leaf in their attitude to trees. Now, if you will excuse me, there is a tree on a beach that I need to pat on the trunk.

Humans are bad eggs

YOU don’t get much of a life as a chicken. In our time of mass consumption, the poor beasties only get 33-81 days on the ghastly planet Earth before being blootered to satisfy our insatiable desire for their flesh.

Interestingly, or arguably otherwise, recent archaeological excavations reveal that, back in the Iron Age and even into the brutal Saxon (“the smiling killers”) period down south, chickens lived for two to four years. This was because they were thought sacred, and so were only killed for sacrifice or in cock-fighting.

Cock-fighting was the nearest our dumbo ancestors came to association football, while sacrifice was a tried and tested scientific process whereby they obtained favours from their psychopathic gods by killing things.

Meanwhile, a study in Sweden has shown that some nutter buried in the 7th century had a headless owl laid beside him. The best explanation of researchers is that this was to stop the owl coming back from the dead. Coming back? Why would it come back to this nuthouse?

Behold our European ancestors, folks. Headcases all. If they’re in any kind of afterlife, it must look like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

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Dancing is all balls

NEVER understood dancing. Men who excel at it are not to be trusted. To shimmy is surely unnatural. I prefer to just stand aboot.

However, I will own that the peculiar practice is as old as humankind, possibly ritualistic in purpose, generally as a disgraceful prelude to mating.

Disturbingly, research suggests Stone Age persons may have worn animal teeth while gyrating, as the sound of the denticles rattling gave rhythm. Finnish researcher Riita Rainio said: “Wearing such rattlers while dancing makes it easier to immerse yourself in the soundscape, eventually letting the sound and rhythm take control.”

It’s precisely this letting go that is unacceptable. True, I have danced, but only when inebriated, with my normally rock-sold inhibitions crushed and my mind inhabiting an illusion in which I am a confident and extroverted person.

Would it make any difference if I wore elk teeth round my neck? Unhand me at once, madam! It’s not the clacking teeth that give your body rhythm. It’s your rhythmically bopping body that clack the teeth. And I’m afraid that a man in my position can never be seen rhythmically bopping.

Boozeum? Boo!

I DEPLORE the idea of boozeums. Just as I don’t attend the pub to gaze upon ancient artefacts, I don’t attend museums for a pint of Tennent’s and a salted snack.

The idea of a boozeum is that museums should have a bar on the premises to make the institutions less “reverential” and more “casual”. Yes, why not have a discotheque too? Indeed, why not just remove the boring museum bit altogether?

According to Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, who thinks he knows what he’s talking about just because he’s a former head of England’s National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts and National Portrait Gallery, such institutions feel “middle-class and elite”. It’s the middle-class elite deploring the middle-class elite again.

Behind this push to let a lot of yahoos in lies an obsession with numbers. If I had a museum, I’d judge its success by how few people attended.

Sir Charles is inspired by an art museum in Australia, which visitors enter by catamaran. Enough! Rules for museums: no baseball caps, no carry-outs, no talking, no arrival by seagoing modes of transport. That should keep the riff-raff out.

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