The good ship Brexit flounders on through stormy seas, while the ghost ship pandemic slips in and out of the fog of reality.

It’s difficult to know which of our current misfortunes are on the deck of either. Meanwhile, Boris appears to be like the dormouse at Alice’s tea party trying to find sanctuary from all the current ills by hiding in the teapot.

Unfortunately for him, the music has stopped in the game of pass the parcel and said parcel is sat firmly on his lap.

No longer can he protest 'it will be aright because I say it will be alright', while having MPs sunning themselves in the Caribbean while their loyal voters walk around in not-so-sunny Devon.

Perhaps Boris should consider ennobling the chief executive of a reliable removal firm in the new year’s honours list.

Death knell for coal

When Boris stands on the steps of Downing Street stating that the COP26 deal is a death knell for coal having just signed a deal with Australia, the worst coal-producing nation on the planet, reminds me of Chamberlain returning from Munich and saying “I have in my hand a piece of paper”, just before the onslaught of World War II.

Gove, meanwhile, seems to be making his presence felt, but I remember attending the World Dairy Conference in Dublin three years ago and Gove gave the opening speech. It was so riveting I actually fell asleep.

Wheels have come off

The wheels have come off the bus in the Northern Ireland protocol. The youth of the nation will always be the conscience of the nation and express this by protesting, and each government has to be robust enough to stand up to challenge.

But I do object to the children of the nation gluing their must-have environmentally damaging plastic trainers to the road, asking all the questions while providing no answers. Anyone can shout 'shoot the ref'.

These said children are waiting for the arrival of shiploads of containers full of plastic goodies from China for their Christmas presents. Surely, the children should be crying 'let’s have a plastic-free Christmas'.

Input costs

With agriculture facing an enormous rise in input costs and facing fierce competition from southern hemisphere imports, Boris must realise come the next election that the current sons of the soil will no longer blindingly vote Tory as their forefathers did, nor decorate their miles and miles of hedgerow with blue signs informing the travelling British public how wonderful the Tory party is.

Never seen anything like it in living memory

On the farming front, I have been very reluctant to comment on the prodigious grass growth this year in case it stops.

'Never seen anything like it in living memory' is a comment heard at every agricultural gathering.

Milking cows are housed and settled into the winter diet, but not yet roaring away in terms of yield.

Labour shortages are causing the sale of many 300- and 400-cow herds, like it was a spring sale.

Normally, any slack in milk production would be taken up by remaining herds expanding, but that isn’t likely to happen as the threat of analysis of carbon footprints and of demand for increased slurry storage and the aforementioned rise in costs, some of which have trebled, will not cause any current producer to move forwards with any confidence whatsoever.

Dying breath

With one milk processor throwing its producers a 3p/l increase, this smacks of a last-gasp dying breath since the said processor is having to buy spot milk at 42p/l.

I can see, with the run-up to Christmas, spot milk will hit 50p/l, but then you probably think I still believed in Father Christmas.

It’s no longer lock up your daughters, it’s lock up your fertiliser store.

As we move forward to next year, hopefully the uncertainties of the last 12 months will metamorphose into profitable certainties, with the public accepting that they have to accept a realistic increase in their food budget.