Friday 20 June, the warmest day of the year. It’s 28°C, I’m driving up the M11 and squint at the Smiths Instruments cluster on the flight deck of the open-top Morgan. Volts are fine, oil pressure normal, fuel adequate for landing but hmm, what’s this? The water temperature is up to an unprecedented 95°C and rising, but given the day, probably to be expected.

I’ve had a lovely blast up from Camolin, at the legal speed limit. I monitor the temperature passing Bray, it’s still high but steady and no real cause for alarm. As I join the M50 the traffic slows and by junction 13, it’s 4pm and already gridlock.

The traffic is barely moving ahead and the temperature gauge is rising quicker than a USAF B-2 stealth bomber taking off. Seconds later, there’s steam rising from the bonnet louvres and I quickly zig zag across to the narrow hard shoulder, hazards on. I switch off the engine and it begins to cool.

But it’s a blistering 28°C, the coolant is 120°C and the road temperature is somewhere in between. Moneypoint will cool quicker after 40 years of coal firing, I think to myself.

Twenty minutes later, with nothing to drink, I’m on the point of conking out. There’s a lot of aggressive horn blowing, dangerous and threatening traffic and young drivers shouting abuse. I’m clearly seen as the cause of gridlock and it seems like there’s not a lot of sympathy when you’re broken down in an open-top Morgan. Maybe it’s the combination of Ray-Bans, Drummonds-logo shirt and Fendt baseball cap.

Did I look like a prat? No, but I feckin’ felt like one. Not good. Time to ring the dependable FBD Assist, who call M50 recovery. It’s not the first time that they’ve rescued me.

Half an hour later the recovery truck appears and I ask the driver if he has any water, first for me, then for the car. A Dub, he grudgingly obliges and we top up the radiator. The engine temperature is now normal enough and uneasily, I’m homeward bound. The combine overheating will never be as an unpleasant experience as this was. That’s reassuring.

On the previous evening, also in brilliant weather, Drummonds held its annual open evening on the farm at Termonfeckin, very close to the coast and north of Drogheda.

If I may digress for a moment, for a bit of very innocent fun.

As children we had a permanent summer caravan in nearby Port Oriel and of course being well-brought-up kids (don’t know where I went wrong), we were not allowed to curse. So, we took great delight, long before Father Ted’s same delight in the swearword, in pronouncing it as TermonFECKIN! The real trick was to say the Termon bit quietly and shout ‘feckin’ very loudly, maybe five minutes later, when you got a poke in the eye from your sister in the back of the Vauxhall Cresta. It still makes me smile and our kids did it as well. Oh, for the childhood innocence of another age. How far we are removed from that today.

Anyhow back to Drummonds which is the only grain and seed merchant in Ireland that I know of which runs a large trials farm.

This is a great resource because it’s local in terms of disease trials and also in evaluating new cereal varieties. With yellow rust excepted, the plots were fairly clean but it’s been a year of low disease pressure.

The Oak Park open day was also a smashing day out with a large display of tillage machinery, without tripping over feeder wagons or any dairy farmer stuff like that, which was (Termon) feckin’ brilliant.