Hovis’ Friday diary: fearing for my bum hairs
(Image credit: Karen Thompson)
Dear diary,
Well it’s a wonder I am able to write to you at all this week, after ensuring seven days of mother nature throwing the biggest wobbly since the nurse told the mothership she was in the same weight category as Queen Elizabeth — and to be clear she meant the cruise-liner, not the monarch…
At the weekend storm Ciara hit us and it’s fair to say I haven’t seen wind like that since mother’s 2009 ill-thought out attempt at the “cabbage soup diet”. Despite having done up the fillet string tighter than a nun’s knicker elastic, my rug was flapping up around my muscled buttocks like Donald Trump’s toupee in a tornado, my tail was wafting that violently I nearly achieved the vertical take off of a Eurofighter with hiccups, while every hair in my mane did a Wrong Direction and went their own separate ways…
Indignant at being left outside, I expressed my disgust through the medium of modern dance until someone finally took notice and brought me in, only for there then to be a power cut leaving the barn blacker than the inside of mother’s soul. As I stood in the pitch darkness pondering whether mother was wearing a headtorch or if the light was actually just the daylight between her ears, I felt a tongue reach in through the bars and start to slurp at my manly face fuzz. For one brief, wonderful moment I thought that I had finally succeeded in pulling something more than a muscle, when the lights briefly flickered back into life like a glow worm with flatulence, and to my abject horror, I came literally face-to-face with Bob man-mouthing my moustache. To be fair, he backed off faster than David Cameron leaving a Peppa Pig-themed party, but still the damage was already done — to be clear to my moustache, not to the creepy-eyed pig. I spent the next few hours standing in the dark with Bob slobber all over my ‘tash feeling more violated than a traffic law on a Top Gear episode, while mother nature did her very level best to re-enact the three little pigs. Honestly, life sucked harder than a turbo-charged Dyson…
And then it got worse. Because, not content with throwing more wind at us than at a baked bean eating contest, the she-witch, which is that Nature woman, then decided that she’d then turn on the taps, full bore. Sideways. Within minutes on Sunday my eyelashes were spread-eagled across my face like Incy-flipping-Wincey clinging on to that spout; I will never have to wonder what the term “drinking from the firehose” means — I know only too well. My mane and tail were that wet, Cape Town has applied for abstraction rights. If I bent down to try and get a mouthful of grass, I got the full waterboarding experience as water poured down my nostrils like prosecco goes down the mothership’s throat. Honestly, I was wetter than a submarine’s number plate and about as bemused as an octopus in a sock shop.
THEN, then what does the delinquent diety do next? I shall tell you. SNOW. The woman is clearly having some sort of malfunction. If we’d have done any more seasons in one week, Frankie Valli would have been doing us for plagiarism…
The only positive of all if this horrific weather this week is that no one has been outside, and if they were then they had eyes down trying to avoid having their eyeballs skewered by sleet. For which I am endlessly grateful. Why? I hear you ask. I shall tell you, dearest diary: one word.
Scissors.
Harmless, neigh, some might say useful contraptions in the right hands.
Continued below…
Hovis’ Friday diary: new equine sacrifice to the tractors of terror needed – any volunteers?
Subscribe to Horse & Hound magazine today – and enjoy unlimited website access all year round
