I thought I didn’t care much about trees, and the idea of hugging one has always made me feel rather embarrassed (the problem is that they’re usually so fat that it’s difficult get your arms round them. Also they’re pretty unyielding. Hugging a tree is like hugging a very rotund and disapproving headmaster who finds the whole procedure rather distasteful.)
Sometimes I think us sixty-somethings are the luckiest generation ever. We’ve never been in a war (though we have inklings of what it might be like, most of us having been born either during the war or just after), we bought our houses at rock-bottom prices, we were able to step into any jobs we wanted and get paid for them, too, we enjoyed the fruits of a National Health Service, we’re the first generation to be able to take advantage of cheap holidays abroad, and now, it seems, we’ve just scraped through in time to keep our free bus passes, unlike future generations of oldies.