Tree-climbing, at last! Today and in spite of our city being festooned with trees, it is rare, almost unknown, to see a child let alone an adult happily orangutaningup in a tree. But urchins of my generation (I am a gnarled 70) seemed to have very different, knockabout, kneecap-skinning relationships with trees. Quite how we have got to the point where we only ever look at our trees with detachment, like works of art in a gallery, is unclear.

But my inner urchin's, my inner orangutan's excitement at the announcement has been a little tempered by the discovery of what these championships are all about. It is the first tree-climbing event ever held in Canberra, but it is not an event for average, knockabout clamberers.

The competing tree climbers, event organiser Christine Rampling explains, will all be accomplished, competitive arborists. They will use the equipment that arborists use when they go about their work and the competitions require them to demonstrate, albeit with elite flair and at elite speeds, some of the work that workaday arborists do when they're intrepidly aloft.

This is Canberra's first championship, but in the wider world these sorts of tree-climbing contests have been going on for ages. There is even an annual International Tree Climbing Championships and this year's has just been held in San Antonio, Texas.

And it emerges that Australia has a kind of Nick Kyrgios of tree-climbing (we speak of our climber's flair and success, not of his temperament, which we're sure is an improvement on Nick's) in Barton Allen Hall. At San Antonio he became the No.2-ranked tree-climber of the world.

And he is coming to Canberra for these championships, Ms Rampling confirms, excitedly.

We're told organisers have chosen the seven trees that will be used in the Canberra championships, but other than that they are at Telopea Park and that they are tall and burly (they need to be large and stable for safety's sake and so that the "limb walk" sections don't send competitors out on a fragile limb) but organisers won't tell us which trees they are.

This seems to be because if competitors did know, they might get in some pre-match stickybeaking and planning, perhaps even some surreptitious moonlight practice ahead of the event.

We wondered if the tree-climbing events will be a good spectacle for spectators and Rampling, a highly-credentialled arborist herself, assures us that "Oh, absolutely! It's pretty exciting!"

She promises that the rescue event, in which a climber has to rescue a dummy climber (while always pretending that the dummy is alive and injured) from high up in a tree is loud (lots of shouting) and entertaining.

The competitions are at tree-rich Telopea Park on Saturday,  May 7 from 7am-5pm and on Sunday May 8 from 9am-5pm.

Meanwhile, one does wonder why it is that in a tree-upholstered place like Canberra one seldom if ever sees a Canberrans blithely babooning about up in a tree. How has it come to pass that our relationships with our trees are so aesthetical now, so arms-length?

Do any mature-age readers, always clambering in trees when they were urchins, still feel that tree-climbing itch but know just how eccentric they would look (sure their curtain-twitching neighbours would call the police) if they did any tree-scaling in the Canberra of 2016? What if we form a support group, lobbying for some corner of the spacious National Arboretum to be assigned to us for our orangutany recreations?

To this day, because I was a tree-climbing boy (growing up in rural England and romping in woods that belonged to a tweedy squire who somehow never sent his gamekeeper, Mr Mellors, to chase us out) I can never look at a tree without part of my assessment of it being whether it would be fulfilling to climb.

Alas, on my recent visit to my childhood corner of England it emerged that the present squire has had those once wide-open woods securely fenced off. We learnt it is because in these nannying, litigious times he worries that anyone who comes a cropper in his woods (everything from being savaged by a man-eating mole to being concussed in a collision with a daffodil) will sue him for millions.

In the olden days when we played in the squire's woods it would never have occurred to people of our lowly class to sue a nobleman! Every night before bed we would kneel and pray "God bless the squire and his relations/And keep us in our proper stations," and God, being the Church of England's deity, always did enforce that status quo.

Now, reluctantly leaving the tree canopy behind and coming back down to earth, right down to the streets, we continue our occasional series of homages to weird and wonderful masterpieces of street art. We encourage Canberra's street artists to be world class.

But you might shin back up a tree to escape a dog like this! This image of a terrific mastiff guarding Hosier Lane in Melbourne has just been posted on the always-stimulating Snapping The Walls street art blog.  http://snappingthewalls.tumblr.com/post/143423534985