I don’t know if many of you realise this, but the wood chippings one can produce (with the hire of a machine for the purpose) after felling trees will smother the growth of anything – up to and including even couch grass. Couch grass roots in all directions and the more you pull it out, the more directions it roots in. You can apply Agent Orange, napalm, domestos, anthrax and Mario Draghi to couch grass, and the little bugger will keep spreading. But dead wood kills couch grass systemically: it starves it of light (not that it needs much) and then poisons the ground level leaves. I have a former woodchip patch near my Rosemary herb crop here, and seven years on the place where it was remains bare.

Dead wood kills healthy life. There is a lesson for us all in this.

Most of the world’s faux democracies are now led by dead wood. The US has a President who had the opportunity to be the next Abe Lincoln, but wound up very quickly morphing into the deader than dead wood cabin that housed Abe as a child. The Prezz now lives, in fact, in Uncle Tom’s cabin. The UK has a Prime Minister in David Cameron whose delivery is wooden and his creative brain dead to the reality of anything beyond his own pathetically backwards-looking philosophy. France’s President Francois Hollande manages to be both dead wood and waterlogged: he was dead in the water from the moment he beat the appalling Nicolas Narcozy by not being Nicolas Narcozy. Germany’s leader Angela Merkel has been dead from the heart upwards ever since she switched from being DDR petrified forest to CDU dead wood 10 seconds after German reunification. Ask any Athenian who knows Antonis Samaras, and they will tell you that Antonikis is thicker than a plank that has been to Deadwood University, the better to obtain a First in woodentopness. (They’re not a lot nicer about his predecessor George Papendrywood). The Australian PM Tony Abbott has, since his election to power, been doing an astonishingly lifelike and yet at the same time lifeless impression of a coolabah tree.

Dead wood promotes the proliferation of but one thing: the structurally destructive belief system we have come to know and loathe, neoliberal economics. Neoliberalism is the termite that burrows into the timbers of socialised civilisation…..and, eventually, causes the house to collapse.

But the presence of termites in the dead wood (indeed, even the decision to elect dead wood as the building material of choice) is no accident. From dead wood is paper made. And from paper is currency made….currency that has no worth beyond what some pestilent termite says it’s worth, but from which the dead wood we elect to use can amass a fantasy wealth.

So it is that termites persuade us to vote for dead wood. And then dead wood in turn tries to persuade us that termites are A Very Good thing.

Some celebrity termites whose names you might wish to note: Rupert Murdoch, Goldman Sachs, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, George Soros, J P Morgan, Boris Johnson, Deutsche Bank, Hillary Clinton, The Barclay Brothers, Richard Desmond, Richard Field, Paul Dacre, Mario Draghi, Lord Mandelson, and of course not forgetting Tony Blair.

Some dead wood the termites have invaded: Evangelo Venizelos, George Osborne, Barack Obama, Alex Salmond, Herman van Rompuy, Ed Balls, Wolfgang Schäuble, Mario Rajoy, Recep Erdogan, and of course not forgetting the Daddy-lush of them all, Jean-Claude Juncker.