I could tell you about the interesting morning I spent at the Irish Tillage and Land Use Society (ITLUS) winter meeting in Co Louth, with a visit to the Drummonds cereal trials farm. I learned a lot, but I’ll let tillage editor Siobhán Walsh fill you in much more accurately than ever I could.

For me, meetings such as these are as much about the people you meet – and typically the craic over lunch – as the official agenda, and this event didn’t disappoint.

And reader feedback at such a gathering suggests to me that nothing I write could (or should) be taken seriously. And so, characteristically, there’s other entirely unrelated stuff on my mind.

West Clare retreat

I’ve always had a hankering for a retreat down in west Clare, waking up with the wild Atlantic framed in the front window and champion Charolais sucklers grazing out the back. Nothing posh and the more basic the better. But even this sort of humble stone cottage is now ridiculously expensive and more than I can afford. So it won’t happen.

It wouldn’t suit me anyhow. On any sort of a summer’s day, it’s very likely that I’d be no further west than Ballivor, before meeting either a Rattigan or Rickard sprayer or combine and it’s squeaky bum time for me and the end of holiday mode.

In good weather I’d get no use out of the cottage at all – I have to be in the fields. Yes, it’s sad but that’s the way it is.

But there’s a compromise. It’s a camper van and the investment would be hugely less.

A caravan would be even cheaper still but just as I hate a trailed sprayer and love a self-propelled one, I’d have to have a self-propelled caravan and that’s called a camper van. Caravans are awful things and if something doesn’t have a seat and an engine, I’m unexcited.

But I’m not even camper van material. You won’t see fellows like me in them.

I’ve no interest in pulling into a campsite with a dozen other prawn-eating and prosecco-drinking poseurs socialising at their picnic tables. I’d rather spend the weekend in Mountjoy than that. No, I just want to pull up in a rough and wild spot and me and Mrs P do our own thing.

And I think I’ve found the perfect solution. A demount camper body for the Hilux. It’s like a snail carrying his home on his back – or a demount sprayer on the back of a JCB Fastrac. Azar in Poland do a lovely one, I found it online. I showed it to Mrs P on the phone.

“I won’t be sleeping in that contraption,” she said, “It’d be like sleeping in a MRI tunnel. I’d much prefer a weekend in The Olde Ground Hotel in Ennis.”

“Well then,” I say, “I’ll have to find someone else to bring. I hate sleeping on my own. And there’s no separate beds so it’s going to be fairly intimate with a fellow traveller in one of these capsules.”

“Go ahead,” said Mrs P, “you find a victim. I’ll see you in Ennis.”

The terriers

So an impasse has developed. I thought of a brilliant new angle. We could bring the terriers as they’re always a problem if we want to go away for a weekend. It used to be the kids, but now it’s the dogs. They’d love a demount camper. I try Mrs P with this new marketing line.

“We could bring the lads with us and wake up on the seashore.”

“That’s all very fine,” says Mrs P, “but I don’t really want to wake up with Billy’s bum in my face.”

The project’s on hold for the present. Maybe I should have written about the ITLUS event instead.