LET me clarify: I do not consider myself a hillwalker.

The ascription suggests professionalism and seems a poor man's mountaineering. I disapprove of mountaineering, with its jangling equipment, beards and use of nature for leisure-amenity.

I feel I should stop there, on a nicely negative note, before I get all positive, which makes me feel treacly. Negativity is man's work, but I suppose a bit of boyish enthusiasm is called for here.

I'd be lost without hills. Recently, when considering a colourful tattoo for my pallid torso, I listed loves that had stood the test of time: Hibs, the guitar, JRR Tolkien. I'd never get a Hibs tattoo. It'd be like having "fail" stencilled on one's body.

I love Tolkien, but in isolated putrid places on the internut, you find him advanced falsely as a purely Anglo-Saxon writer. He was, say the new supremacist nutters, anti-Celtic, which is absurd, as much of his inspiration was Celtic and his Elvish language based on Welsh. I dread the discovery of a letter in which he expresses anti-Scottish sentiment, as did George Orwell, for example.

I wouldn't get a guitar, as it contains too many strings, which prevents me from playing it properly. And I wouldn't get a hill, though I've always needed one in my life. It wouldn't work as a tattoo, unless maybe mid-chest, where it might resemble a third moob.

Nonetheless, I need my hills. They allow the sensitive citizen to rise above the furore and breathe. There's nothing better than a local one in the city.

Even when living in a wasteland, I ascended acid-soiled slopes to seek freedom and perspective that little bit nearer the sky. Grass underfoot, with a wind caressing the lobes, you rejoin the conspiracy of wild things, and thank Pan for the gift of an uneven terrain.