Somehow, even though he is whispering, what he is saying is such a heresy, such a blasphemy (especially in groggy Australia and when uttered in such a beer-worshipping place) it is magically amplified. Everyone hears it. There is a choral gasp of horror.

I am entertaining a similarly blasphemous fantasy, especially blasphemous in Canberra's garden city context. Reader, come closer so that as I whisper my shameful confession to you it remains our secret. Here it is.

I don't like trees any more. I think they're overrated. They get in the way. There are far too many of them.

Alas, just as in the aforementioned TV ad, there is something so shocking about my quiet confession that it comes, booming, off the page of your newspaper or the screen of your device. It has left this column's 250,000 Canberra readers ashen faced.

For here in the national capital we have what I will call an arborpathological crush on trees.

Canberrans too hard-hearted to ever pipe up on behalf of maltreated and oppressed members of their own species become agitated and activated about trees that are menaced with removal. The much-reported imbroglio (just resolved) over a nondescript Manuka tree is only the most recent example.

And of course it has been a pillar of the angst of the anti-tram Luddite cults that Northbourne Avenue's existing trees had to be euthanased to enable the installing of light rail's infrastructure.

But as an aesthete I assert that Northbourne Avenue has been at its visual best while not cluttered with trees, and that this is a typical example of the ways in which trees clutter and spoil places. Now the Avenue's temporary improvement in good looks is being spoiled as the light rail route's replacement trees (1200 of the brutes, vastly more than were there before) begin to assert their leafy tyranny.

While it was treeless Northbourne Avenue seemed elegant and sunlight-illuminated with whole vistas of southern Canberra and of the dreamy distances of the ACT suddenly at last available to the eye now that trees weren't in the way.

Quite well-travelled in our dear planet's far North, I have become appreciative of what character treelessness can give to places. I testify that Iceland's dramatic, vulcanism-sculpted landscapes and treeless Orkney's bewitching seascapes and islandscapes owe everything to clean, elegant, nothing-to-spoil-the-view treelessness.

Meanwhile ours is a city clogged, occupied by teeming trees. And what if they, trees, hate us, and are planning to one day swarm over us, conquering us? They already vastly outnumber us but have somehow persuaded their nave puppets, the Greens, to call for the already massive army of the "urban forest" to be swelled by 7000 trees a year.

But as I have confessed in another column in another place I am suffering from Trump Anxiety Disorder (Newsweek magazine reports that it is a real malady, now seen all the time by psychologists treating its sufferers) and it may be that I am only imagining that I can hear the trees plotting.

MEANWHILE, mention above of our nifty new devices moves me to say that while I am mostly in appreciative awe of my iPhone there is an element of texting (at which I am very good, my arthritic old thumbs typing at blurring speeds) that perturbs me.

Recently, my globe-trotting wife away again in the exotic Orient while I languished in soporific Woden, I found us having, by texting, exactly the sorts of conversations, about everyday things, that people have when they are together at home. The beloved might as well have been not in Shanghai but just upstairs or across the room.

I struggle to properly express why this doesn't feel right. But it has something to do with an evolved, human sense that being far apart should change things. True, deep, complete separation by vast distances should come with a bracing, poetic loneliness. But is a loved one really, truly overseas when, using the witchcraft of your iPhone, you continuously gibber with him?

Once upon a time these sorts of distance separations had a kind of deep, appropriate melancholy mystique. It is captured in the beautiful melancholy popular song (first released in 1952) You Belong To Me.

In this pre-texting ditty a wistful lover is begging with her globe-trotting sweetheart:

"Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle/See the pyramids along the Nile./See the market place in old Algiers/Send me photographs and souvenirs./Fly the ocean in a silver plane./See the jungle when it's wet with rain./ [But] Just remember 'til you're home again,/You belong to me."

"I'll be lost and lonely without you," the singer sighs and sings from the heart. "Maybe you'll be lonesome too, and blue."

The sweet song's wistful melody and the wistfulness imparted by the singer (my favourite version is by Patsy Cline but Bob Dylan's too is wistfully cool) tell us that of course the singer knows that the traveller doesn't "belong" to the singer at all, that distances and long silences imperil relationships, that for one of you to be seeing the pyramids along the Nile and having other adventures while the other is stuck at home is fraught with Life's stimulating risks and mysteries.

Perhaps there is such a thing as too much communication. Have our iPhones abolished the beauty, the bracing heartache of silence and absence?