We had just entered The Common Market and the 1970s were a good time for farmers.

Bank managers, too, were doing well. Pillars of their community in a world where most small towns had a branch, their profession was described as 3-6-3 – borrow at 3, lend at 6 and the golf course by 3.

Back then, my tenanted hill farm was doing well and my bank account was in credit. At the time the Farmers Weekly ran a competition. Entrants had to place a list of qualities required for starting farming in the correct order.

I didn’t do very well. The Farmers Weekly’s No 1 hit was 'the ability to borrow money with an easy conscience'. I had it well down the order.

By the late 1970s, war existed between government and the trade unions; inflation had risen rapidly and 1979 was subsequently known as 'The Winter of Discontent'.

The harsh winter weather also ranked in severity with 1947 and 1963. Snow started after Christmas and never let up until it finally petered out in sleety rain in mid-May.

Summer 1978 had been sunless and wet, and forages were poor. My hay had ran out in mid-March. I had to keep buying it at high prices as the alternative was to see our sheep die in huge numbers, as had happened throughout the nation in ’47 and ’63.

At the end of that winter, I had my first overdraft. It wasn’t a good time as the base rate was 17%. As a tenant, I was paying 2½% over base and my overdraft kept rising.

From the outside, the farm appeared to be doing well but most years some of my employees made more than me, some years they all did and every year the bank did. I worked all the hours of daylight and could hardly sleep at night, particularly when I received my bank statement.

Whatever I did, my overdraft never stopped rising. For the first time since 1930s, land prices dropped, particularly after the appalling summer of 1985 and the hard winter and late spring of 1986. By the end of the decade, I was the only tenant left in the Lammermuir parishes of Longformacus and Cranshaws.

In America, too, during the presidency of the genial and popular Ronald Reagan, farmers and small businesses went bust in numbers only exceeded in the Great Depression. I was only too aware that my ancestors, through frugality and good farming, had survived that dreadful period.

I wondered if I would be the first in the family to fail. Thankfully, a succession of local bank managers never pulled the plug and in the nineties fortune smiled again. More by good luck than good judgement I got my overdraft paid off.

My bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, has had its own share of drama since then. In the late 1990s, after a bitter struggle with the Bank of Scotland, it took over the National Westminster Bank in 2000.

In 1998, Fred Goodwin had become finance director. He took the credit for the successful takeover and became CEO in 2000. After that, one takeover succeeded another in Europe and America.

In the 1980s, the CEO’s salary had been about 10 times that of the average bank employee. Fred paid himself 180 times the average. RBS sponsored sporting events throughout the world.

The now Sir Fred, a petrolhead, flew in the bank's private plane to the Grand Prix in every continent. Through the 2000s, banks everywhere had been making huge profits by ‘slicing and dicing’ consumer debt and mortgages until it became impossible to estimate their soundness.

By 2007, they were in trouble. RBS had just taken over the Dutch Bank, ABN. It was the wrong bank at the wrong price and at the wrong time and RBS itself came within hours of becoming insolvent.

In 2008, Goodwin was sacked. His salary was £4.19m. When asked if anyone else was getting more than him, he replied 'nearer 200 than 100'. Despite the fact that RBS had 393 subsidiaries in tax havens such as Jersey, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, the UK taxpayer bailed it out.

In 2008, government took on the genial country squire, Stephen Hester, to sort RBS out with a golden hello of £9.6m. Employees were cut from 20,000 to 9000. Despite the bank still losing money, Hester insisted that its executives still must be paid huge bonuses.

His tenure was hit by two scandals. His subordinates, as part of a wider conspiracy, were found to have rigged LIBOR, a mechanism for setting interest rates, to their advantage.

In 2013, the Tomlinson Report found that RBS had 'purposefully engineered financial distress and defaults in its own small business customers'. After busting them, a separate division of RBS, West Register, which had benefited from inside information, bought their assets cheap. In 2013, Hester too lost his job with a golden parachute of £5.8m.

In October, 2013, RBS head of retail, Ross McEwan, became CEO with a golden hello of £3.2m and at a salary of £3.5m. On his first day in office, he urged staff 'to obsess about customers all day, every day'.

Much of his time was spent closing branches and cash machines, and in atoning for the banks bullying behaviour in previous years. In 2018, of 16 banks ranked, RBS came last.

In 2019, Alison Rose succeeded McEwan. Branches continued to rationalise and last month Rose was summoned by the dreaded Treasury Select Committee (an invitation she initially declined) to explain why rates for borrowers were rising much faster than rates for savers.

In our operation, digital banking has been a success thanks to the kindly lady from Hawick who held my hand. Her successor is a disembodied voice called Cora who, when things go wrong, doesn’t understand how I speak and usually answers the wrong question.

Gone too are the understanding 3-6-3 managers of long ago who backed me. The stone-hearted computer which handles our business now certainly won’t allow beginners like I was then to borrow money if profit doesn’t meet budget. Herein lies lessons for us all!