Dear diary,
I am setting up a GoFundMe page and I need your help. No, this is not, as you may all be guessing, a fund for my elopement/my vets bills/my solicitors bills or indeed anything to do with me; it’s to buy Spring some balls. Or maybe some new springs. But basically, something to help it, you know, like, SPRING? It’s not even trying right now – it’s worse than me doing a stressage test back in the day – no effort at all.
Everything else is trying; the yellow perils have bravely stuck their heads out of the soil only to be battered by 40mph winds and a monsoon of rain.
Little clouds on legs are arriving and then having to be rescued by farmers as they are too cold and wet – although I do confess to finding the idea of saving a lamb’s life by putting it in the AGA slightly amusing. Circle of life; start life in the bottom oven and end it in the top one…
Baby bunnies are being kept underground to avoid having to have underage swimming lessons and let’s not even talk about the grass. I know vets around the land have issued the usual laminitis warning (moment on the lips = shorter lifetime for the hips), but I think in some places they have overlooked the fact that, with the exception of aardvarks, none of us can actually find grass under the sea of mud…
This weather now is about as welcome as the in-laws at Christmas and has stayed about as long. Enough is enough. Spring needs to fight back – it’s not even trying.
Talking of trying – that brings me on to my mother, who has once again shown a scant regard for both my feelings and the extent of the underground equine network, through whom I have discovered another one of her betrayals. For this week she has been with mini-mother in Scotland and they have ridden OTHER horses. Now I’m used to this, but the pint-sized pain in the posterior isn’t, so with some relish I did inform him that he’d been relegated to “the one she has at home”. In fairness, he had his head down snorting lines of Ventipulmin at the time like a Happy Mondays drummer in their heyday, so I’m not sure how much of it actually reached his furry Welsh ginger ears, but I will remind him all weekend.
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Apparently (so the jungle hooves tell me) they went riding in a forrest and onto the beach in conditions so bad that even the hardy Highlanders nearly went on strike. I hear tail (do you see what I did there? Not a mis-spell, a cheeky play on words – just reminding peoples who the creative one is here…) that mother was so wet through to her underwear that even after an hour’s drive home with the car heaters on full blast, her other half still went and bought her some pants for incontinent older ladies, so sure was he that she’d wet herself. To his family and friends – I’m sure the fact he hasn’t been heard of since is just a coincidence and he’s totally fine…
Mini-mother, who was raised firmly (by me) not to be a fair weather rider apparently had a total ball and has proven to both herself and the mothership she can ride something much bigger and stronger than the ginger whinger. I am thus starting applications to be her next steed – only fit 14hh females need apply…
So, remember the ask(s); please seek out my GoFundMe page and help me buy Spring some bigger balls and send me CV of fit females who would like to come and be my play thing mini-mother’s new ride. I await both while looking mournfully out of the stable at the river of water flowing between me and what was once a field…
Laters,
Hovis
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Hovis shared his weekly diary each Friday on the Horse & Hound website between 2008 and February 2025. Initially located on the popular H&H forum, he moved to the main website in February 2013. He published nine books, each to raise funds for his local equine welfare charity Bransby Horses. You can read all his diary entries below. H&H also published a final tribute to our much-loved equine contributor.
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