The message next week will be clear as farmers turnout to protest the Family Farm Tax - Sarah Todd

Secondly, after voicing fears about whether the National Farmers’ Union lobbying event in London next Tuesday was going to quite cut the mustard when it came to articulating the grass countryside’s feelings, a splinter rally is going ahead. This can leave the 1,800 NFU members, in three rotations of 600, to lobby parliamentarians at a building in Westminster, while they do the more grassroots placard waving.

There is talk that this other event may get past 10,000 attendees and while there are the same worries about keeping the public on side and not causing any French-style chaos, it will definitely be a relief to lots of people that ordinary farmers and those who rely on agriculture to make their living – farm workers, mechanics, machinery dealers, animal feed companies and so on – will have an opportunity to demonstrate how the potential loss of family farms will affect them.

No lip readers will be needed to see how angry people are which, in a roundabout way, brings us around to the absolute and utter outrage of national newspapers trying to find out what the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of Edinburgh were saying to each other while stood on the balcony this weekend just gone for Remembrance Sunday. This column has said it before and it obviously needs saying again; such scurrilous tactics should necessitate nothing less than a week of lone reflection in the Tower of London.

Turns out they were just chatting about Prince William’s beard and this and that, like ladies do, but what a monstrous invasion of privacy as they waited for the service to begin. Absolutely appalling.

Any lip reader attending a university may well have a hard job finding anybody actually speaking with lectures being so few and far between.

With tuition fees set to rise, the National Union of Students was right to call the move a “sticking plaster" for further education’s problems.

Rather than picking on farmers, pensioners, the self-employed and others, Sir Keir Starmer’s new Government would be well-advised to set themselves the challenge of sorting out the money for old rope that universities can be.

As a family, we will never get over continuing to pay full whack throughout Covid; both for non-existent lectures and for accommodation that was not lived in. Thinking aloud, the pandemic was probably the worst thing that could have happened for the future of university education. Some smarty pants then thought they could get away with having less in-person teaching.

Young people get so much less social interaction than their parents and grandparents ever did, that everything possible should be thrown at getting them to converse and interact in real-life situations in their late teens and early 20s. Some are getting only eight hours – or even less – in lectures a week. Would be interesting to study whether the boredom and isolation this brings about means more taking up pastimes such as drugs or experiencing mental health problems.

Finally, talking of isolation, there was a wonderful story in the news about 88-year-old Rosemary Stevenson who spends her days driving a lorry and helping to load it with furniture to sell in a tiny village in South Ayrshire.

It is one of the many ways her team have raised more than £1.5m over the last 25 years to support elderly people in the coastal village of Ballantrae.

Their ultimate goal is to build a care home to stop older residents being forced to move away from family and friends to get overnight care. The local authority will not pay for the nighttime hours care, which over the years has seen many of Rosemary’s friends have to move away from all they know.

Rosemary and her team already provide a day centre and run a shop selling the furniture, but the goal of their Ballantrae Rural Initiative Care in the Community (BRICC) is to build their own care home.

It is these people, the Rosemary’s of the world, that our leaders should be watching closely. Read her lips, she is talking nothing but common sense.