Sir,

I want a week off! Thank the Lord it is Christmas.

I write a letter about eating meat one week provoked by the daft Eco Loonies, I feel obliged the week after to point out how the whole Tory party is as useful to agriculture as a chocolate teapot, and now I read on the front of The Jockish Farmer that another group of lefty loonies at some university in England has written a report for the Scottish Land Commission about a cracking idea to tax land values in Scotland. So I have to get out my pen and ink pot full of electronic vitriol and write again.

Now that commission, they couldn’t possibly have an agenda could they? I remember as a young banker going to a meeting chaired by a wonderful banker/politician from ABN, Hermann Langmann, who told us that we had to pay lots of money for a report from McKinsey but ‘we shouldn’t worry our little heads about that, he (Hermann) had written the introduction and the conclusion and McKinsey were filling in ‘the middle bit’’.

I know it’s just me and as landowners we are a form of pond life, but it just occurs to me that real wealth is in intellectual property these days (the FAANGs they call them in America – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) not really in land.

I am silly enough to think that keeping our money in an estate in Scotland, where in a good year we might break even and where we care about the place, look after the SSSIs, the environment, animals etc is rather better than keeping it all in a tax haven invested in lots of companies from around the world... just me I know, and it’s a minority view.

Hermann also told a good joke about needing thick carpets in the Amsterdam HQ of ABN to ‘keep down the noise of the clogs’. That might be an important lesson for us all if the Tory Trot Brexit comes to pass.

Yours etc

Adrian Hill

Coshandrocaid

Tayvallich Estate

Argyll

PA31 8PQ