Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?

In the forest, when a tree falls to the ground – does it make a sound?

This is a question that has taxed the minds of great philosophers for over a hundred years. Does something happen only because we perceive it happening?

I can now answer that great question concerning the tree deep in the forest. I can definitively resolve the conundrum that has occupied great thinkers for many years.

The tree falling to the ground cannot be heard.

“BECAUSE THE NOISE OF THE CHUFFING CHAINSAW IS SO LOUD YOU CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING ELSE!”

I was at it this week. Chainsawing.

At this time of the year on quiet days, you can hear the sound of other chainsaws echoing across the valleys of Brittany. It’s like a distant mating call from another beast, in this instance a 2-stroke one. You stop and listen and wonder where it is, and how far away, then continue, no wiser, all the while wondering if they can hear you.

There is something worryingly pleasing about using a chainsaw on a tree you want to get rid of, although this time round it was a hedgerow.

I had planted it about 20 years ago with 2-foot hornbeam plants bought from the Buckingham Nursery catalogue (readers of the GG Handbook will know how much I enjoy buying stuff from Buckingham Nurseries. Although less so since they stopped using string, bamboo canes and straw packing, like it was the 1930s).

Over the years, despite constant pruning, the stumps had got bigger and bigger till some of them were over 25cm in diameter. Prune them back in the winter and by summer’s end the new branches would be up to where they were at the end of last year. Or so it seemed. There was no respite.

Then at Christmas, the traditional time of getting the home videos out, we watched footage of the children running around the lawn in 1998 when the hedge was tiny and hardly visible. And it looked a lot better.

So that was it. Its fate had been sealed, and I went over for the day on Tuesday and removed it as irrevocably as a major character in Game of Thrones*. It was perishing cold with snow swirling around, but thankfully not settling. If we’d had the 18 centimetres that fell on Paris this week then I’d still be there now.

The hedge has been piled up ready for a surreptitious burning in a few weeks’ time when I return to do some serious logging. ‘Surreptitious’ because the French have introduced a law where all outside bonfires are banned. You can’t just pile up a load of firewood and burn it, you are supposed to take it to the 'Dechetterie' where they recycle it.

They've never really got over Joan of Arc.

Needless to say in rural areas the stubborn Bretons seem to ignore it and burn away. Unless they have a special license for bonfires. I won’t be taking any risks. I’ll be having mine some time after 11pm in the evening.

Once, when I had my flamethrower, I set light to the field below the house. It was Easter weekend and the bracken litter was still dry and combustible and it spread down the field causing a huge pall of smoke. My neighbour, an old farmer called Norbert saw the smoke in Plessala five kilometres away. He said, "I knew it was you."

*with the exception of John Snow.