Most mornings I have to take out Lilly the Dog for a bracing walk in the British ountryside.

As I trudge through the fields I muse on the transience of things.

These fields near where we are were once were part of a large estate, which in the past century or so was broken up into smaller farms. The interesting thing is finding almost every day traces of what was going on there in the past.

Scraps of plastic from lunch-packs tossed in the hedgerows by passing farm-workers.

Old horse-shoes or other pieces of agricultural metal which broke off during earlier times and all that horse-drawn ploughing.

Fragments of blue china plates. How did they end up in the middle of a field? Were people on a cart on a long lost track going to a picnic when a plate got broken and they threw the pieces overboard?

And all the fossilised oyster-shells littering the surface, from the time when this part of the world was ravaged by dinosaur-made global warming and had been submerged under a warm shallow sea.

Things come. Then they fade away.

Take the European Union.

Will it be there in a one hundred million years’ time? No.

One million years’ time? No.

One hundred thousand years’ time? No.

A thousand years’ time? No.

A hundred years’ time? Probably not.

Fifty years’ time? Maybe, but very different

Ten years’ time? Probably yes and recognisably as it is now.

Five years’ time? Yes.

At some point along the way, probably within the lifetime of some people now alive, the European Union will give way to Something Else. As will the USA, and Russia, and India, and the UK.

None of us now know when or why or how that will happen. And whether the process will lead to something better or worse or just different.

But it will happen.

Because that’s just the way things are, and always have been.

Take a walk deep in the countryside, and you’ll see.