M y son in law has put me on standby to drive his combine for two days at the end of the week. Whether I actually get to drive it depends entirely on the weather.

I've never had a combine, never grown enough corn to need one, but I have on occasion driven for other people in similar circumstances.

My son in law's combine is fairly old and relatively small by modern standards but it is pristine in condition and when you are up there driving it you do feel just a bit important.

It's a strange phenomena but when you do drive someone else's combine, parts of it become yours. For example, if a bearing should go while you are driving it, no one says "a bearing has just gone", they say "Roger broke a bearing".

Never mind that the bearing might be 20 years old, never mind that all you've actually done is put the mechanism into gear and made the bearing go round, which it's supposed to do anyway.

And if the same bearing should seize up in five years' time, they'll say: "Roger broke that bearing a few years ago and it's never been the same since."

So while you are driving along, all nonchalant, you are listening for anything that sounds a bit different because you know that the name of the part that breaks and your name will be linked together forever.

This linking of names and parts will be relatively local. It will start off in the pub where the farmers are comparing notes after a days' harvesting.

"How did you get on today?"

"OK. But we lost two hours when Roger broke that long shaft that goes down from the drum to the whatsit."

But that story will only go around two or three other pubs and will soon run out of momentum because as sure as night follows day, someone else will break something much more interesting.

There is an ultimate sin to combine driving. When you transfer the grain from the combine to the trailer there's a big auger that sticks out at the side, a bit like a phallic symbol, that unloads the grain. This folds back into the combine when not in use. You should never forget to fold it back when unloading is done because if you forget it is still sticking out you are likely to wrap it around a tree and if you do that, the story will travel from pub to pub and from parish to parish.

A useful tip for would-be combine drivers, if something breaks, is always look hopeless and helpless with a spanner in your hand. If you get too involved you get covered in oil and grease and all the bits of chaff and straw that stick to it. Wouldn't want that, would we? It's far better for someone else to do all that.

I can remember the first self-propelled combine coming to our village. It only had a 6ft cut and the grain came off in bags but the farmer who owned it had an aura about him that these days is reserved for celebrity sportsmen and astronauts. He wasn't big on maintenance and care, so when he finished combining he just drove it into the yard and parked it wherever he could.

There it stayed, outside in wind and weather, until next year's harvest came around. All he would do then would be change the battery and see if it would start.

It ran on petrol and paraffin in those days and eventually he would get it going. As soon as the engine would run at full revs he would give it all a bit of a token greasing and then put the mechanism in gear.

His hens had been laying in the bowels of it for nearly 12 months and out of the back would come live hens followed by wounded hens followed by dead hens.

Then the eggs would start coming. The smell of rotten eggs would follow his combine around the first two or three fields he cut.

■ A local girl asked me to drive her to church when she got married recently. I was proud and honoured to do it but the car presented a bit of a problem.

It was a big job to clean it up for a wedding, inside and out. She wouldn't want cow muck on her frock, would she?

Anyway, we did the job and compared with how it looked before we started, it was quite a revelation. I turned up at her home in good time to have the white ribbon fixed on and there were three other cars ready for the convoy to church.

Those cars were a fraction cleaner and shinier than mine but I have no doubt that they were in a much cleaner condition to start with.

I ran my eye over the four cars and thought I hadn't done a bad job. Then I noticed my tyres. The other cars had black tyres; my tyres were the same colour as what came out of the back end of cows.

I watch Country File quite often these days, now that it's moved to a prime-time Sunday evening slot.

But there's dangerous stuff on Country File and I think John Craven is dangerous, too.

Some years ago, John realised he was getting too old to tell the news to children and so he looked around for a new career.

Like a lot of people in the media with no real role in life, he latched on to the environment and green issues and now here he is, on Sunday evenings.

But in my opinion he hasn't sensed that things are moving on and that food security and supply are the new agenda.

On a recent episode, Paul McCartney was using him to drive a vegetarian agenda by promoting the concept of a meat-free day.

If that were successful it would surely move to two meat-free days, and so on until we are all vegetarians. And this is all tied to a greenhouse gas agenda that has nothing to do with global warming but everything to do with eating meat.

Given that Paul McCartney and his family do most of their travelling by private jet and helicopter it's a bit daft.