The Farmer and his Breadwinner have been back to Glasgow, the city in which he had his first job, at the university, where he had to help students to learn about economic history.

I put it in that slightly odd way because I was in no position to teach anybody about anything, 23 years old and straight from the University of Aberdeen.

I'll never get over my first class. It was a tutorial in which I had to get eight students to discuss the topic of the day, which was Malthusian Economics. Now that's all about population pressures and the fact that, left to themselves, people will breed at whatever rate is necessary to eat all the food available and to leave some people hungry.

You will quickly see that it isn't easy to have a discussion of that without getting into the question of whether it is better to let abstention, disease and famine, or contraception tackle the problem. Fair enough. It sounds interesting.

But what did for me was the composition of the class. There were not one but two mature students, which means they were a bit older than your average student and had done a job, and they were both Catholic priests.

I had no idea what Professor Checkland my boss, had let me in for. I think he knew fine though, and I soon learned.

I have never known an hour pass so slowly with so much heat and so little light.

Despite that rocky start we really enjoyed our time in Glasgow and I worked there for 13 years in two spells. So it was great to be back with a while to stroll around gawping.

We had always admired Glasgow's early 19th-century sandstone terraces. They've had a clean up in the last fifty years which has enhanced them a lot.

But when the Breadwinner and the Farmer came to St Vincent's Crescent she compared it ecstatically with Royal Crescent in Bath. Perhaps it is even better because it isn't on such a monumental scale.

I was particularly keen to see the new developments down by the Clyde. We have seen so much made of river fronts all over the world that I was eager to see how Glasgow was getting on.

It had been a pretty desolate industrial wilderness in the sixties. Well, it's still not Paris. It's still not Sydney or Melbourne, but the closeness of the water seems to take the pace and the threat out of city life. We did like it. We had a very agreeable, delicious and most un-Glasgow lunch on the balcony of the café of the City Inn.

Then we crossed the Millennium Bridge,which is a disappointingly inelegant thing to put upstream of the beautiful Finnieston Bridge, and got a cuppie of tea and look round the new science centre.

We couldn't avoid the new BBC building. How creative. An absolutely oblong building in the shoebox style. Who can have thought of that across the water from the wonderful Armadillo?

Incidentally we were amused when we were looking to see if there might be another cup of tea at the Armadillo when this very agitated woman came out at us. "This isn't a tourist attraction, you know. You can't come in here."

"Well, it attracted us," said the Breadwinner. We thought of La Scala in Milan where we were so welcome to go in and admire and to buy souvenirs of that iconic building. We were able to get in to the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and enjoyed a cuppie of tea there too.

We weren't tourists anyway. The Farmer had been down to the court in Glasgow to plead the case of a young Kenyan cricketer who wanted to come to Scotland for what they call a working holiday.

Moses had played for us to make up the numbers when the village team went to Kenya for a tour in January.

It turned out he was working without pay at the world-famous New Stanley Hotel just for experience. He had had college training in most hotel skills and certificates to prove it. And he can smile as only Africans can.

The Wasting Asset had been very impressed by the atmosphere in the Nairobi restaurants and offered him a job at the Salmon Inn. Moses had only ever had three months of paid employment and the minimum British wage would give him as much for a morning as he got in Nairobi for his whole three months.

Moses wanted to come to earn money to start a business in Kenya and for experience of dealing with British people who are the main tourists. The holiday part of his time here would help him to chat up British tourists - and the cricket team are always short.

Coming from an old Commonwealth country and speaking perfect English, we thought it would be no bother. But he was turned down. He appealed and the Farmer had to go to Glasgow to speak for him.

Judgement is awaited.

And finally I have been gobsmacked once again by another milestone in the inexorable upward march of prices.

As I have often told you, my father bought Little Ardo after the war for the princely sum of £4300. For that he got 234 acres, four farm cottages and a beautiful 18th-century farmhouse and a steading which was nearly up to that date.

Well, of course Little Ardo isn't for sale, but the few bits of comparable farmland that are becoming available are now attracting bids of roughly that amount PER ACRE.