IT WAS heart-warming tale of how a lost collie dog was re-united with its owner – but only after it was tempted out of its hiding place by a cooked sausage!

Nell, the dog, had apparently been scared by the sound of the Coastguard helicopter when she was out on a run with dog walker, Ellen Macaskill's father. The collie took off and, as she was known to be quite shy, proved difficult to bring back to heel.

The Dundonnell Mountain Rescue team were alerted and came to help. As they have a nous for such things, they also brought with them a portable barbecue, with some bacon and sausage.

And so it was that the tasty treats on the BBQ brought Nell out of hiding for a bit of a snack. Try doing that with a Quorn sausage!

Being human

IT'S BEEN a strange old week involving street fights for toilet paper, empty shelves of fresh food supplies and old age pensioners being shunted out of the way so that 'desperate' people could stock up.

However, such extremis also brings out the best in people and facebook is littered with farming folk offering their services to the old, infirm or the sick to help them out by doing their shopping or collecting prescriptions.

Most think nothing of it and that's the way of it. Farming folk, generally, will do someone a good turn long before they will ever consider doing a bad turn.

Things like clearing roads of snow, helping strangers' cars out of ditches and running errands during the worst of this winter's storms. That's something to be proud of ... being part of the meaning of humanity.

A C and W nightmare

ONE MAN'S meat is another man's poison.

That came to mind when I heard the tale of how Dumfries-shire farmer, Sam 'The Spud' Patterson, his wife, Kate, and his sister, Caroline and her husband Jim Main, took off to Mexico for a cruise that was being fronted by country and western entertainers, Daniel O'Donnell and Nathan Carter, amongst others.

I'd say it was a mixed response whether they would have enjoyed the cruise as much had it been an extended one due to coronovirus fears.

Certainly, I'd say that Mr and Mrs Potato Head Patterson would have loved it, but I got the feeling that the Main man would have been 'man overboard' swimming for the shore at the notion of any more country and western nonsense!