Wags jest that time has stood still on the Isle of Wight.

For Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, Time literally stops at six o'clock, making it perpetually tea time in Wonderland.

As protagonist Alice joins the Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse at this interminable tea party, she notices that, in order to get a clean place setting, the guests periodically shunt around the table - leaving dirty plates and other detritus behind for the next occupant.

I thought about this shambolic tea party as I recently drove through the boondocks of the West Midlands.

Pockets of light industrial zoning had become urban degradation, with closed and boarded remnants of (presumably) previously vibrant employment.

This isn't only a mainland issue; you could identify dilapidated and neglected 'wasteland' in Island towns too, and, sadly, some parts of the countryside.

Concreted spaces and empty windowless structures, presumably once shiny and new, falling into disrepair and becoming - frankly - a miserable eyesore.

“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”

As they all shifted to the next chair, the Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change.

Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk jug into his plate.

It struck me while navigating around Dudley, that the Mad Hatter's messy table is a metaphor for what us humans are doing with the earth.

And, like the Hatter, instead of dealing with the mess, we tend to move on to a clean setting, leaving metaphorical spilt milk jugs for the next person to handle.

There are piles of unworn clothes, while global garment factories churn out more.

Finite resources are squandered in disposable electronics and single use plastics; even water itself is polluted like there is more pure stuff on its way (which technically there is as the icebergs continue to melt, but you know what I mean).

The expansion of humans into even the most tenacious patch of wildlife demonstrates a degree of madness that would riddle our Hatter, especially when there is so much degraded land where almost anything would be better than stagnant ruination. Our wreckage piles up.

There is a chink of hope though.

The new government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, promises to "turbocharge building of houses and infrastructure", and at first glance, it seems this doesn't mean more of the rural 'greenbelt' being lost to housing or industry - or at least not without an administrative struggle.

Added to greenbelt and brownfield land designations is the new 'grey belt', once subjectively described as "poor quality and ugly areas" within the green belt.

The (re)development of brown, grey and green belt land - being facilitated in that order - suggests that, at least when building, we might finally be clearing the table before starting the next sitting.

Though, with technocrat Elon Musk setting his sights on colonising Mars, maybe we should add Red Belt to our list of protected landscapes?

We'd be mad not to.