Cross country, passing from the north of England and through somewhere in the middle. I’m in a hot tin tube, heading south, and it’s getting hotter. South – somewhere that, for me, mentally ends at Durham, or York at its furthest – stretches ahead, dreary and unending. I pass rapidly through a despoiled English landscape that once I thought I understood, through English towns in ugly upheaval, all servants to the great ant-hill in the south-east; all outraged, all indifferent, all powerless.

Decayed industrial landscapes litter the outskirts of every conurbation and materialise even in approximations of “countryside”, in suppurating rashes of neglect and abandonment. Concrete culverts silencing streams, battered piles of broken cement, scaffolding, rusting pipes, dented and twisted Heras fencing (long since made functionless). Roofless warehouses, their guilty asbestos now removed and stashed god-knows-where.

Small, ornate, brick buildings, the decorated products of a former industrial age, stained with smoke and half-hearted graffiti, stand forlorn and forgotten in the middle of demolition sites, For Sale hoardings and ugly, cuboid sheds and hangars, all decked in strident colours and enormous marketing symbols. Roots of great trees poke out from under piles of rubble. All is change, all is directionless, all is outside anyone’s power to influence or care.

Everywhere are living trees, ungainly and wrathful, determinedly self-perpetuating in cracks in walls or paving. Nowhere are woods and forests. Everywhere are the ruderal wildflowers and gutter-shrubs, poking out of the tops of walls where the coping stones have crumbled or been knocked out, Bright poppies and ragwort seed furiously, despite the half-hearted scorching of the weed-killing brigade. Nowhere are there meadows. This is nature’s agenda, not that of humankind.

Now the tin tube is full; standing room only. Eyes averted from the landscape fleeting by, onto phones, laptops and tablets. The constant ping of notifications to a carriage-load of devices merges into one doleful knell, punctuated only by the loud complaints and criticisms as the angry, unhappy middle-aged blond without a phone castigates and abuses her 90 year-old mother, who closes her eyes and ears in weary despair.

Are we happy? Are we content? Perhaps we’re too busy to know or care.