In summer 2011, Private Eye featured in their ‘Funny Old World’ column a letter written by one Radnor the Wise. He had sent this letter to the Surrey Advertiser, in an attempt to address local concern about the Wiccan practice of draping a sacred tree in underwear.

Radnor is at pains to emphasise the intellectual sophistication and relevance of the tree-dressing practice, enacting as it does the potential intersection of religion, fashion, feminism and ecology in modern culture. He also takes care to frame sacred trees within the recognisably normal: what could be ‘sinister’ about anything followed by a barbecue and quiz night, that staple of Anglican social life and no doubt often advertised in the Peaslake parish magazine? Yet Radnor is fighting a losing battle here. For there is nothing sophisticated about sacred trees in the public imagination. To the contrary, sacred trees almost always find themselves stereotyped as the preserve of the weird and deluded, something very much marginal to the concerns of mainstream society. For most people today, ‘Funny Old World’ is simply the only appropriate kind of space for giving any thought to sacred trees.