Brian Henderson: How my poo samples were mistaken for biscuits

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be…” or so the old saying goes.

It’s probably a good motto by which to live if you can manage it.

However sometimes necessity dictates these good intentions have to be put to one side.

And so it was a week or two back, when I found myself furtively raking through the farmhouse broom cupboard in search of an extension tube and brush attachment for the vacuum cleaner.

I was intent on returning the “borrowed” cleaning accessories before my subterfuge was noticed,”

I needed an extra bit of reach to get to that awkward corner in the grain drier during its pre-harvest clean-out.

Thinking to myself that it was a good idea to have the same model of Henry vacuum cleaner – other brands are available – in both the house and grain store, I was intent on returning the “borrowed” cleaning accessories before my subterfuge was noticed.

It’s funny how the tools and electrical appliances bought specifically for use out in the sheds don’t look much different after you’ve finished using them.

But anything borrowed from the house never looks the same again.

It takes on the appearance of having been dragged several miles behind a donkey across the middle of some forsaken desert – or even having been used for cleaning out a grain drier.

Everything from kitchen scales to warming blankets has another use

And over the years I’ve found my assumptions of the dual purpose nature of many household instruments and appliances haven’t always been met with a resounding degree of enthusiasm from the rest of the family.

There were the kitchen scales – who would have thought they couldn’t cope with a 50kg (110lb) sack?.

And household buckets – why do the handles always fall off?

Multi-purpose plastic buckets. Image: Shutterstock

There were brushes too. The ones for sweeping the floor are bad enough but never, ever borrow a hairbrush to tart up the heifers before the store sale.

Kettles are just so easy to run over after they’ve been used to clean up the tractor’s battery terminals.

Warming blankets – for lambs, of course and shopping lists that were useful to keep track of the loads of grain coming off the combine somewhere.

Let’s not forget the calculators – need I mention IACS (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland) – and items of clothing. Well, that scarecrow just needed a final flourish to finish it off.

‘Gone missing’

Rubber gloves – don’t even ask – and hair driers, for the lambs again, are also among the hundreds of items which have sometimes mysteriously “gone missing” from the house, never to be seen again.

When the food blender was borrowed to make a meal round at the farm cottage, I was glad I was able to refute the immediate assumption I’d misappropriated it for some agricultural purpose.

But I have to admit it did conjure up some interesting ideas.

Now for that empty biscuit box

I was particularly chuffed with one piece of repurposing earlier in the year as I hastily finished off one of the biscuit selection boxes we’d received at Christmas.

I’d come up with the idea of using it as an ideal container for taking samples required for a faecal egg count to the vets.

For the uninitiated, faecal egg counts are a useful way of finding out if animals need to be wormed – and if the wormers you’re using are effective.

It involves delivering dung samples to the practice – and the vets always ask for them to be collected from a number of animals. They must also be kept separate to ensure they are properly pooled, in order to deliver a valid overall result for the group being tested.

Biscuits — Brian’s vet was expecting tasty festive snacks like these. What was in the tin was very different. Image: Shutterstock

My daughter is one of those vets, and we’ve repeatedly been told not to deliver a bucket-ful. Only a small sample is required from each animal – an end to which the compartmentalised plastic divider of the biscuit box seemed admirably suited.

And so it was that later in the day I found myself having to hastily correct the misleading impression which the practice receptionist had shown when the biscuit box was welcomed with an enthusiastic “oh that looks tasty”.

Brian Henderson farms a mix of arable and livestock enterprises with his family on their farm in Perthshire.