On my desk I have a corn dolly, made by my nan for a harvest festival many years ago. She’s a brutal, pagan maiden who has lasted a thousand feather dustings.

I plan to pass the corn dolly down through the generations until that fateful day comes when, not knowing what she is, a great-great-grandchild of mine innocently drops her in a skip.

As for me I think I have a rough idea of what she is, but I’m mostly grabbing at straws. I’ve become so disconnected from the land. Scenes of bringing the harvest home are as staged in my mind as a BBC period drama.

Today I associate harvest time with the chance to clear unwanted tins of kidney beans from my larder. But in the age before food was stockpiled in carbuncle supermarkets here was a joyous time of mass gaiety.

Take for example the scene in Watlington in the 1840s when the landowner threw his annual harvest celebrations. Eighty labourers marched two abreast through the town in clean white smocks.

Ahead of them a brass band led the procession to a large tent where plates of roast beef and plum pudding, and kegs of beer awaited.

After lunch came the sack race and an hilarious two-hour contest to retrieve a leg of mutton from the top of a greased pole. Fireworks followed.

Then there is the church harvest festival as we know it, initiated by an extraordinary Oxford-educated vicar, the Rev Robert Hawker.

Hawker invited his parishioners to a thanksgiving service at Morwenstow in Cornwall on October 1, 1843, and the idea gradually spread, with hymns such as Come Ye Thankful People, penned the year after.

When I say Hawker was extraordinary it is no exaggeration. This was a man who in his early 20s would disguise himself as a mermaid and swim out to sea, singing God Save the King while combing a wig he had crafted from seaweed. All of which greatly confused the population of Bute.

Hawker’s childhood was marked out by pranks which included painting black stripes on to the village doctor’s white horse until it resembled a zebra. He was accompanied on his daily rounds by his pet pig, Gyp.

After one year at Pembroke College Hawker’s money ran out, so he married a wealthy spinster who was older than his own mother. She died after enduring 40 years of his japes. Following which the vicar subsisted on clotted cream and opium before marrying once more, this time to a woman 40 years his junior.

I bear Hawker no grudges and were this Cornish vicar still with us today my local church would be packed to the rafters.