To all those people tonight who find themselves starving in Athens thanks to Berlin’s austerity drive, frustrated in South Africa’s informal communities thanks to the élite’s sex drive, flatlining in France thanks to Hollande’s lack of any drive whatsoever, rendered powerless in the EU by Brussels’s desire to drive a coach and horses through democracy, pissed off in Hungary because the neoliberal colonialists want to drive Orban from power, piggy in the middle of Washington v Moscow ego-drive in the Ukraine, being driven mad in Scotland by entirely materialist scaremongering – or dying in the Middle East thanks to the average American’s need to drive internal combustion engine vehicles everywhere, the following is dedicated.

As we enter the third quarter of September here in south-west France, the shadows lengthen at either end of the days in direct proportion to the shortening of those days. So there is less time to appreciate the soft light, but the experience of being alive becomes somehow more intense. You will never get closer to reality than this season of collection: of grain harvests, fruit picking, nut gathering and the soft willingness of an Autumn Haut Agenais climate to let you do it with minimal fatigue. The only thing more supremely involving than this is being in the African bush, and watching the various prides, packs, swarms, shoals, flocks and tribes going through the infinite process of survival.

It is so long now since most people in the West had to fight, kill, rummage and ruthlessly compete in order to live, our disconnect with the real nature of Life on Earth has been almost totally lost. I do not in any way wish – like some demented neoliberal – for a return to that state of Hobbesian brutishness; but I do believe very strongly that all those with aspirations to run the show (or receive State largesse) should be exposed to the verités of life on a reasonably regular basis. 

Not all natural life, after all, is a nightmare: here in the gentle South West, it’s as near as damnit a Paradise. If you have the eyes to see such things, there are colours on every tree turning to yellow with crisp brown edges. The outer skins of walnuts develop black cracks, and set free the protein within. The soft fruit trees have nearly lost all their foliage, the few crumbling golden leaves a memory of the delicious taste that came before.The dry grass needs only a night of rain to restore it to the verdant landscape that first drew me to this region forty-three years ago.

Because we are Homo sapiens, we do not just hunt and gather: experimentation, ingenuity – and of late technology – have allowed us to store. All three fridge-freezers here are now full to the brim with produce, jams, sauces and flavoured alcoholic forms.

Yes, tonight, my world here feels settled.

But the planet we inhabit will never be settled, because we live in a Time-induced three dimensional existence. In that context, the following three facts will always represent absolute Truth:

All things must pass.

Everything is in transition.

Nothing lasts forever.

One day long after I’ve gone – and a thousand generations following mine have demanded a permanence that doesn’t exist – my little corner here will have disappeared forever.

There is nothing tragic in that: far from it, permanent change offers hope for all those who find themselves suffocated at the bottom of the pile.

The Third Reich was scheduled to last a thousand years: it managed twelve. The Apartheid regime in South Africa was designed as an eternal Biblical certainty: it lasted fifty years. The EU is heralded by Barroso and similarly challenged failures to be a given, a certainty, and a permanent European feature. I would give its existence another seven years at most…and less than that for the euro. Your great-grandchildren will see it as a folly on a par with the First World War.

Whatever happens in Scotland tonight (and the polls don’t close for another two hours yet) globalism, the Nation State and the SupraState are finished. New and more manageable units of genuine community will develop. They too will thrive, and then decline, and then die. I have no clue what will be going on by the year 2314, but I do know that everything we take for granted now and see as an infinite feature of life will be dead and gone.

For that reason alone, my question to the Scots tonight is this: do you want to hesitate in the face of short-term scare-mongering bollocks from the criminals in Westminster, the City, Wall Street and Frankfurt? Or do you want full control over your destiny?

If you want the latter, my neighbours, then vote YES.

Earlier at The Slog: Fine words from Muslim leaders, but what do they mean?