Dear diary,
OK, enough is enough now. Whichever idiot made stupid statements like “we need the rain” without stipulating important parameters like how much, for how long and over whose head, needs to rectify the situation post haste. Because “wet and wild” is not a look that suits me – I can’t pull it off and end up more “soggy and subdued” or “moist and morose” or my current favourite, “watered and weary”.
Without fear of over-exaggeration, if this doesn’t pack it in soon, an ark is going to be required and I really don’t want Barbie Boy as my plus one on a boat full of love birds and horny rhinos.
It’s SUMMER.
The months in which we are out 24 hours a day to enjoy a permanent green buffet, not times where we are risking being water boarded if we put our heads any lower than our knees. The ability to turn my feathers brown is the fun I save for autumn and winter, when grass is a little less plentiful and I’m bored, not for the months in which we should be enjoying some rug-free time and the feeling of warmth on our backs, not being huddled in rain sheets feeling Niagara Falls run down our neck.
You can tell how bad it is when we’re being brought in at night to avoid any of us being swept away when the lifeguards aren’t in attendance, even though it’s summer and no one actually wants to muck out. I actually nearly shared my stable with a toad the other night and no I don’t mean Barbie wanted to bunk up, I mean like an actual toad. Honestly the world has gone stark raving nuts.
Mind you, the weather is affecting everyone. After a week off after the change in the weather flared my arthritis like an incoming paratrooper at a local air show (it should be noted that mother’s slightly bored – “just chuck a couple of bute in him, he’ll be fine” perhaps bears testament to either how well she knows my body or the fact her last nerve frayed some time ago and thus she is now unflappable), I was back out again with CBL. I have been known these past few weeks to have to play wingman to yet another neurotic ginger at the yard, and yes, there’s more than just Barbie – these gingers multiply like Ed Sheeran in rabbit form…
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This one is ½ thoroughbred, ½ quarter horse, ¾ high maintenance and 100% certifiable. He also is cannier than a fox with a degree in cunning and makes me go first past anything that he feels might get us – which to be fair to him, is only two things. Things that move and things that don’t…
He throws a hissy fit of such impressive proportions that I just get on with the task in hoof so as not to have to admit to knowing him, that combined with CBL’s thighs of steel and frankly any chance of me doing anything but be the bigger man is zero. As such, I have bravely walked past tractors of terror, trailers of treachery, clandestine clouds on legs and a very, very dodgy man who spends far too much time trimming his pampas grass for my liking. All of this leaving the yard means people are thinking that mother is prone to mass exaggeration about my hacking exploits and perhaps is only trying to detract from the fact that if talent were petrol, she couldn’t ride a moped around a fruit loop…
Anyways, I am off to try and find high ground, turn my bum into the incoming onslaught and pray for salvation in the form of any period of sunshine that lasts more than 20 minutes.
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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