Mossie is sair come-at. He has hundreds of acres of other people's crops to cut to justify the cost of his £300,000 combine. He has his own harvest which, if you believe him, takes much longer because it is so thick the combine can hardly get through it, and he's next year's crops to sow.

This is always a busy time, but this year it is worse. Our champion cereal grower has to prepare for hosting next year's Royal Northern Crops Event.

Everything must be planned to the nth degree, and sown to perfection and timeously. Worse than that, Mossie's entire outside staff (one tractorman) has had to give up with depression.

I asked the Guru of Grain why he had agreed to host the event. After all, he had been asked before but had knocked it back as a lot of work whose main effect would be to publicise his precious secrets.

He was glum. "Well I thocht I should put something back into the industry - and then I minded that, in 30 years, I hadna taen onything oot."

The weather isn't helping. There is far too much rain and far too little sun and wind to dry the land between showers. And it's so unpredictable.

Last Wednesday we had a beautiful morning with the sun beaming down at us from a clear sky.

The Breadwinner went with her pal Shieldie to climb Bennachie - at 1733 feet the nearest thing we have to a mountain. Then suddenly, from that clear sky, we were hit by perhaps the fiercest storm the farmer has ever seen.

The torrential rain was accompanied by thunder, lightning and hailstones which briefly turned the countryside white.

Though it only lasted 10 minutes, that storm filled the barrow to a depth of an inch-and-a-half and set Mossie's work back again. "I'm jist awa tae get depressed. The weather forecast did say it would be bright intervals but that turned oot to be the lichtnin'."

Luckily, the Breadwinner and the Farmer have been away from that struggle. They managed to secure a berth on the second-last ferry from Rosythe to Bruges and back.

It is such a shame that they are stopping it. It made a fine break to have a night on the boat sailing under the historic Forth Bridges and across the North Sea, with great food and pretty awful entertainment, two nights in the medieval town with its cobbled streets, cathedrals and canals, and then another overnight trip back in the boat to Rosyth.

We really enjoyed Bruges, and the Farmer was particularly struck by the similarities between the Belgian attitude to the French and the Scottish attitude to our much bigger neighbours.

They tell the same stories about the French as we do about the English. Like the time during the Creation when an Angel says to God, "With respect sir, don't you think you've given Scotland too much? You've given it beautiful scenery, rivers full of salmon and pearls, wonderful water to make unique whisky, abundant offshore oil, the Lothians which is so fertile that any fool could farm it (and many do) and people with a desire to work and succeed against all the odds?"

God replies: "You might think that, but wait till you see what I've given them for neighbours."

Well the Belgians tell that one about the French (as do the Danes against the Germans). And we came across a fine example of such racist abuse when we visited one of Bruges's breweries.

The young lady guide explained the whole process of making their very tasty but far too strong beer and then took on a serious aspect.

"It is absolutely not true that we take the water for beer-making from our filthy canals. Only a small quantity of beer is made using canal water and that is exclusively for export to France."

And the Belgians are taking their reaction to their bossy neighbours further. They are promoting Belgian beer as a replacement for wine in the kitchen.

Where French cuisine might use white wine to make a delicious fish sauce, the Belgians recommend lager.

And in place of red wine in the preparation of beef they are using dark beers. Even a French classic like beef bourguignon is offered made with strong ale.

And so to my selection from the dross of my in-tray.

Joe Mackay was a mason who in the 1930s worked from a wee croft on the edge of the village.

He was popular with the loons by virtue of his Lea Enfield motorbike which he rode around the country at speeds which didn't often exceed 15 miles an hour. This earned him the nickname of Hurricane Joe. I don't know if his slowness was to save fuel or not, but Joe had a repu-tation for extreme meanness.

One day, Joe skinned his knee in an accident at work and took it to the doctor. His leg was duly dressed, for which the doctor asked no fewer than five shillings.

"That's surely an awful lot Doctor. How do you get that?"

"Well," said Dr Stephan, "you had a consultation, which was three shillings, and two shillings for the dressing."

Joe paid up with two half-crowns and bade the doctor a satisfied goodnight.

However, the wound had not healed well and in a few days Joe was back at the doctor's.

When his turn came he held up his hand before the doctor could say anything, "Nae consultation this time Doctor - and only half the dressing."