AS President Obama settles down to another four years in the White House, it is worth breathing a huge sigh of relief over the fact that we in the UK do not share a political system with the USA.

The president there may enjoy a four-year term of office, but for pretty much half of that time, the machinery of election is grinding away, albeit at first in the background.

This is not the machinery of rumour and political manoeuvre that is rife in most democracies in the world. This the actual process of sifting candidates, selecting candidates, then pitting them against each other for months on end.

In the UK, we have fevered speculation about when a General Election will be held, then an announcement is made, we have three or four weeks of high profile campaigning, and then it is all over bar a couple of days of triumphalism.

I don't know about you, but that is quite enough for me. The thought of months and months of campaign ads on TV and radio, in the print media and online, in the first instance by people in the same party as they jostle for its nomination for the presidency, fills me with despair.

A couple of weeks of teeth-gratingly dull party political broadcasts from the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and other parties deemed big enough to warrant them, and I am yearning for the return of the television test card, just to inject a little excitement into television.

Over in the USA however, campaign ads - all prefaced or finished by the candidate stating "I am Barack Obama/Mitt Romney and I endorse this ad" - are aired by the hundred, thousands of times.

One figure quoted this week was that the Democratic Party alone made 125 million personal calls to voters. Clearly, many people received more than one such call.

Frankly, the electoral process is wearing enough without having to answer the phone one day to some enthusiastic party drone badgering me for my vote.

The UK's leading political parties are more than welcome to try this tactic next time around, but I must warn them that all they will learn are new and imaginative juxtapositions of several swear words and derogatory phrases.

As it is likely that said phone calls "may be recorded for training purposes" the air in the training room will be blue (not Conservative blue).

Really, a few leaflets through the door and a quiet walk to and from a sparsely attended polling station are enough for me.

We'll see less wood for want of trees

THE swift and seemingly inexorable spread of ash dieback disease in the UK is for many of us, one of those events the seriousness of which will only really be appreciated in hindsight.

As with the devastation wreaked on our woodland landcapes by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, it is the absence created by the loss of the tree or trees that truly hits home.

The majority of us take our woodlands, however small and seemingly insignificant, for granted. We enjoy the views they offer, the opportunities for walking they provide, the wildlife that live in them.

It is probably also true that the majority of us would not be able to pick out an ash, if asked, from an identity parade of trees. Again, most of us would only really notice it when it is gone.

The reports on the spread of ash dieback, or chalara fraxinea to be precise, are not encouraging.

More than 115 sites in 11 counties are now believed to have examples of trees with the disease, and talk of prevention is rapidly giving way to the phrase 'managed decline'.

So that is basically, the gradual removal of a whole species of tree from the UK, and ash happens to be the third most common broadleaved tree after oak and birch.

And there are more than 90 million of them. That is one-and-a-half trees for every person in the UK.

So we will, paradoxically, notice them when they have gone.

Plans are already being drawn up to replace them with other species, but it will not be the same. Our woodlands will change considerably as the disease takes its toll. I suspect all we can do, if we know the whereabouts of ash trees, is to appreciate them while they are here, because it appears inevitable that we will lose them.