Dipping in

SEEING the spring lambs in the fields reminds us of a few farm stories that have appeared in The Diary, including the reader who assured us that farmers of a dram would buy generous quantities of the smooth blended malt whisky Sheep Dip and put it through the farm's books as a tax and VAT deductible expense.

Prince baled out

WE also liked the great story of Prince Philip, told to us by a Bearsden reader, who said: "When we lived in Windsor in the sixties my father was a part-time fireman. The brigade was called to a fire at Home Farm on the Windsor Castle Estate. To prevent it spreading the firemen climbed up and down a ladder removing bales of hay two at a time. Prince Philip came to help. He was then challenged as to why he was only carrying one hay bale instead of two. His reply was 'because you lot are being paid to do this and I am doing it for fun!’"

Quacked it

A BBC4 programme which celebrated the old teatime telly magazine programme Nationwide, reminded a Glasgow-based former BBC man of when he worked on the show in the early 1980s. A film of a skateboarding duck was a big hit on the programme, so the hunt was on to find other unusual ducks. When a farmer in Norfolk phoned to say he had the oldest duck in Britain, a film crew rushed to his farm only, said our reader, to career into the farmyard, drive straight over the aforementioned duck and flatten it.

Write answer

A READER once told us about his six-year-old daughter having to write the traditional what-I-did-on-my-holidays essay on her first week back at school. Reading it over, he expressed his surprise that she had chosen to write about a rain-soaked day at a farm park at Ayr rather than their glorious sun-filled family fortnight in the Canary Islands. She merely replied that Ayr was easier to spell than Fuerteventura.

Herd instinct

A GARAGE manager told us that a customer brought in his car which had two side panels bashed in, and told the mechanic that he was driving in the country when it was hit by "a herd of horses". The mechanic looked puzzled and told him: "Herd of horses? Is it not a herd of cows?" But the customer replied: "Naw, it was definitely horses.”

Cluck that

PETER Kerr, who wrote about running a farm in Majorca in his book Snowball Oranges, reminisced with us that the old Majorcan farmer across the road once offered to sweep their clogged chimney. Said Peter: "He arrived with a ladder and a sack containing his chimney-sweeping apparatus, and emptied contents of sack down the chimney. There was much noise from up the lum, heaps of soot came tumbling down, followed by the 'apparatus' - a live hen. It worked a treat, and the hen just shook off the soot, clucked indignantly, and wandered back over the lane.”