W e have three fields of maize this year, which is more than usual. One of the fields should have gone into winter wheat last autumn but the ground was too wet to do a tidy job of working and sowing, so we decided it was better to leave it.

With modern kit and powerful four-wheel drive tractors it is possible to sow a crop into soil conditions that you just would not have contemplated years ago. But if the soil is not right you will see the results come spring, with lots of bare patches where the crop has simply not grown.

Two of our maize crops were sown by May 7, which is the date I always have in my mind as a deadline. We're in borderline maize-growing country here because of our height above sea level and if we sow it any earlier, it can suffer damage from late frosts.

Our worst growing years are hot, dry ones, because we have a low depth of soil and the grass will die off (we call it burning). Maize will thrive in those conditions and keep on growing and bulk up.

You can concentrate on producing top quality forage as much as you like but if you run out of forage at the end of January you are, to put it mildly, in a bit of a mess. Maize is a good banker for a dry year.

Our third field of maize was sown about 10 days later. This was because it was going into a grass field from which we wanted to firstly take some silage.

So we took a crop of grass and then there followed a frantic week, spreading manure, ploughing and working it down and, of course, drilling the maize.

We have a good young lad who works here part time but he also has his own tractor and he soon gets tempted away to join silage gangs for large contractors, so the week turned out to be more frantic than we thought.

Anyway, the maize went in in good order and because it was later going in we drilled it at a lower seed rate, 40,000 an acre, so that the plants mature a bit quicker in the slightly shorter time they will have.

The dog and I, driving past the field a couple of days later, reckoned between us that there were 200-300 rooks on there. This might have been OK but then again, it might not. There was a fair chance they were eating grubs, which was good. But while they stab away in the soil looking for grubs they could turn up a bright yellow thing and think: "Look everybody, corn on the cob."

The dog, who is a lot brighter than me, reckoned that 250 rooks eating 10 seeds a day for a week would make a fair inroad into the 40,000 we drilled.

I reckoned it was much worse than that because they cart a lot more than that back to their nests.

Clearly, we needed to monitor the situation closely. It can, if you let it, drive you to distraction. They would be there just after 4am until late at night. I could get up early and fire a shotgun at them but I'd never shoot one, it would just make me feel better.

My neighbours, on the other hand, wouldn't like it at all. Nor would they like bird-scarer guns going all day.

There had to be a better way. A quick phone call to the keeper and within an hour he had shot one rook and examined the contents of its crop, which was full of grubs, so I had nothing to worry about.

He said he would shoot another in three or four days time to see if their diet had changed. But in three or four days time there wasn't a rook to be seen and the maize was coming up fine.

■ It's MOT time for the car. Last year this was quite a protracted process. All the warning lights from the computer were on, one of which said the ABS (whatever that might be) wasn't working.

Cars that have ABS warning lights showing are not allowed to pass the MOT. If they don't have ABS, that's fine, it doesn't matter.

Some days the ABS light was on, some days it wasn't, so I left the car at the garage for four days and they MOT'd it the day the light wasn't on, which I thought was a triumph for commonsense over technology.

This year it only comes on if I drive a long way in heavy rain so it wasn't a problem. The car passed without any trouble, apart, that is, from needing a new front number plate.

The front number plate was cracked and split and there were a couple of bits missing. I told you I was no good at parking.

So when I went to collect the car I had a form to sign to say that I was in receipt of a new number plate.

"I need you," says the garage man, "to bring in your passport or driving licence with a photo on it and a utility bill."

"What do you want that for?"

"So I can identify you."

I toyed with the piece of paper he had given me, as yet unsigned.

"How long have you known me, Michael?"

"Well, your farm was sold after so and so died and he died three years before my dad and they went to school together and the year you moved in we had a dry summer and that was the summer Jack Lewis' donkey died because he went on holiday and it didn't have any water."

So, that was clear enough then.

The three men who, by then, were dealing with me, decided that they'd known me 43 years, which was two years out but I didn't have time to explain all that because it would have taken too long.

Michael actually knows me quite well as we're in the town band together. He plays the side drum and I play the big bass drum. Side drums are for wimps, big bass drums are real drums played by real men.

He marches in front of me and, a bit like me, he's past his prime. Sometimes he drops a drum stick, which poses a dilemma; if he stops to pick it up he gets trampled to death by the rest of the band as they march over him.

What happens in reality is that I keep kicking the stick along the road in front of him and eventually a lucky bounce will bring it into his reach, because apart from struggling to hold on to his drum sticks he struggles to bend over while he is marching.

I crumpled the unsigned piece of paper into a ball and tossed it into his bin.

"On your head be it; don't blame me if you have the police knocking on the door!" he said. And then it was all forgotten.

I can understand the logic, what with terrorism and all that, but we're not big on terrorism round here.