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For a while in my youth I was a rather inept technical and business advisor to farmers. I remember when I was new to the job, a seasoned old colleague talking about some of the precarious, ramshackle businesses that clung on on small farms on marginal land, held together with bailer twine, twisted wire and very little else. These enterprises were clearly unsustainable, but they never seemed to die. "Ah well", he reflected, "it's amazing how long you can live on depreciation"

What he meant was that these people were surviving, just, by not spending any money, not investing in the future of the business, buying machinery or buildings, improving their livestock or their land. Instead they were, of necessity, keeping things together by spinning out the use of the investments that had been made in the past, by themselves, their parents and grandparents. They were watching these assets depreciate until they were worthless, outdated and inefficient, leaving them with too big a financial mountain to climb to get back to a sustainable position. The end was inevitable but, while there was bailer twine and wire, it would not necessarily be quick

I sometimes feel that for much of my life we have been running the country in much the same way, reaping the benefit of Victorian sewers, a national electricity grid created in the 1920s, railways and rolling stock in an increasingly dilapidated state, too many public buildings, hospitals and schools that are deteriorating rather than improving. The insanitary fire-hazard that is the Palace of Westminster is perhaps the most iconic example. If government is executed in a decaying ruin, what do we expect the resulting country to look like?

Maybe I should write to someone