What this crisis has really been about is not cash flow or credit. It’s nothing to do with liquidity — what it’s really been all about is words. It’s the drying-up of mouths, the logorrhoea jam, the stammer and mutter of politicians who are incapable of making a confident sentence. Nobody has been able to speak to inspire. They all retreat to quavering caveating and timid obfuscation. Politicians talk with the empty grandiloquence of butlers and the bogus jargon of technicians. They steal meaningless, empty constructions from each other’s mouths like excited myna birds. They have lost the oratory and we have lost the ability to believe or trust them — and, worse, to be inspired or moved by them.

The skill to declaim and convince was once a fundamental political tool; now, not one of them could sell a Big Issue. When was the last time any of us heard a great political speech? You’d need to be over 40 for it to have been in your lifetime. The death of political oratory and the authority of language is a more serious threat to the state of free nations than the price of gold.

One of the first casualties of this depression has been organic everything. Growing your own vegetables is a bit like making your own fridge or whittling a car. Possible, but stupid. And no furrow has been as intensively and commercially ploughed as Fearnley-Whittingstall’s back garden. If we asked him what he gets to an acre, he could probably tell us: “Twelve episodes, a couple of books, a diffusion range of chutney, 50 public appearances and an endorsement in a pear tree”. Not bad for a back yard. If you work out his carbon footprint, however, it’s probably the size of Milton Keynes.