I’m a bad traveller. Fortunately, I have little need to travel as boats, planes, buses and cars all make me feel sick. It’s obviously fine when I drive myself but I’m always a nauseous passenger.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at a 50th birthday party in Edenderry and I had a couple of pints of Guinness, as Mrs P was driving home.

We took off from downtown Edenderry and the first few miles were fine and I thought this is grand. But the bad bends at the dry dock before Longwood necessitated some severe braking on Mrs P’s behalf and I began to feel queasy.

A couple of miles further on and I had to issue a terse command to stop the vehicle. I hopped out of the car like I’d been stung in the backside and sent a projectile vomit in a perfect arc across the hedge.

Was it the drink or the driving? In truth, probably a bit of both.

So why do I tell you this shameful story? You see, tractors were never included on the list of nausea-inducing vehicles. Until now. I was up with Anthony McCormick (a son of Bruno), mowing for the first cut of our silage and after a round or two, I began to feel a bit dicky. But it couldn’t be – not in a tractor. Was it because it was a new John Deere? I wouldn’t think so. I’m not particularly keen on John Deeres but they’d hardly make me physically sick.

After all, I never felt sick, years ago, when we used to travel in for the dinner standing on the drawbar of the swaying Eureka silage trailers.

I’d never felt sick actually sitting on top of the baler while my father was baling hay. Itchy and wheezy, yes, but not sick.

But I had to get quickly out of the Deere cab before I might throw up and this wouldn’t go down at all well with Anthony. Bruno would go ballistic.

I was thinking about this once I’d recovered. The fact that I felt sick in a John Deere was precisely because tractor cabs have become so cocooned and comfortable and car-like.

I never felt sick as a passenger when picking stones in the basic Ford 7600 or the Soviet Ursus 12011 drawing grain to, eh, Edenderry.

Quite simply, today’s sprung, air-conditioned and soundproofed tractor cabs have become so divorced from the environment around them that it’s enough to make you sick. Soon, there’ll be a market for convertible tractors where you can drop the roof to get the real genuine tractor experience of dust, noise and heat.

Maybe not. I vividly remember my brother Thomas cutting silage with the aforementioned Ford 7600 with a direct-cut Taarup precision chop harvester.

The noise from the screaming engine and the harvester in the non-Q cab was absolutely mental and louder than sitting in front of a stack of Marshall amplifiers at an Iron Maiden concert. As for earmuffs, we had none. They were only for astronauts.

The Ford’s transmission was hot enough to singe the skin on your bare legs and the temperature in the tinny cab was enough to roast a turkey.

But you know what?

Unbelievably, I used to get up with him for a round or two. That much hasn’t changed but that’s where the similarity ends.

Tractor cabs have been transformed in the last 40 years and a bit of travel sickness is a small price to pay for all this progress.