Hovis’ Friday diary: ‘destroyers don’t walk’

Dear diary

I need help people. I need mares with lose morals, I need carrots, I need haylage, I need lickits, I need ANYTHING to help me cope with this excruciating BOREDOM. Walking is what tortoises do, not what destroyers do. Destroyers canter, they trot like equine powerhouses through the Lincolnshire countryside, they prance through long grass (not like a fairy — that was Hotstepper’s domain, god rest his high-stepping soul). They race through stubble fields with their manly manes flowing behind them like an equine shampoo advert.

They do NOT walk. SIX WEEKS of this. SIX WEEKS. I can’t do another SIX HOURS. If I so much as jog half-heartedly on the spot, mother is having a total mental meltdown. Two strides of trot and she’s nearly hysterical, any walk-to-canter transitions have resulted in her nearly pulling my head off to make me stop. If the emergency brake is applied many more times, you will be able to smell something like burning rubber — which is in actual fact my feathers going up in flames.

I’m pretty much on a ban from leaving the yard after a small incident with a tractor the other day, which may or may not have resulted in a hasty sideways evacuation through a recently ploughed field. I am claiming no responsibility whatsoever but, to be fair, if a scientific investigation of the size of the hoof prints was carried out (sort of like that Cinderella chick with her shoe), I suspect the number of suspects might be small. Like one.

Mother pretty much gave the game away anyway by her loud and, as usual, extremely lengthy tirade of basic and highly-fluent Anglo-Saxon. Where she learnt all those words, I know not but my gosh she’d make a sailor blush — I’m sure there’s local rabbits with a vocabulary that would make Vinnie Jones learn a thing or two…

What she got so excited about I know not — I was saving us from a tractor of terror. Why she never sees it that way I truly don’t know. She has the survival instincts of a lemon. Or is that Lemming? I can never remember…

Anyway the upshot of it is, mother thinks I am an untrustworthy idiot with the mental capacity of a wheelbarrow and until Herman the German Needle Man sends her something to “help me keep my clod-hopping soup plates on the ground” (I’m assuming this might be superglue?), I will be confined to the school. Except for days when mother can almost guarantee the absence of any form of farm machinery. She is such a drama queen. Aunty Becky is much easier to lead astray, so I’m hoping to convince her that hacking is at least slightly less boring than school work — she’s also got a stickier bum then mother and slightly less of a tendency to go totally hysterical if I so much as skip.

I’m praying that when Herman comes to do my reassessment, he says I can at least do a few strides of trot because any longer of this walking-only lark and one of us is going to end up in the loony tune house. I’ll give you a clue — it won’t be mother. She already has a season day pass and one of those coats with the interesting cuff detail that does up at the back…

The only good thing is poor Dolly is back on a sick note, so hopefully she can come out walking with me soon too. Which at least means I have something to perv look at while walking slow enough to do a passable impression of a turtle with haemorrhoids.

Life sucks.

Yours slowly and sulkily

Hovis

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