Hovis’ Friday diary: ‘Forget the Ark – I need a chuffing submarine’
(Image credit: Karen Thompson)
Dear diary,
So, if 2022 was the year of Mother Nature forgetting to take her HRT and thus causing us all to sweat down to the size of a Shetland, then 2023 seems to be the year she forgot her Tena, because lord above it is wet. Like really really wet. Honestly, the amount of water sitting on my eyelashes alone would keep Cape Town out of drought for a month and let’s not even talk about the waterfall pouring down my buttocks. Forget the Ark – I need a chuffing submarine.
Having had a few duvet days last week due to there not being sufficient lifeguards to ensure we didn’t drown in the divots, the mothership turned up at the weekend like a soggy welly wearing apparition, wafting an air of British determination to carry on regardless. Barbie Boy (or should that now be buoy?) was dragged in from his lake first, his water wings removed and a lunge line attached before being frog marched (see the amphibian reference there? How I don’t have a Pulitzer is beyond me..) to the school.
There he was made to splash round in circles for 20 minutes, showering himself, the surrounding area and a mutinous looking mothership with water and that sand-based mud that seems wet and then dries with the sort of cement-like stick that Gorilla glue can only dream of. He looked about as excited as a New Year’s dieter in the salad aisle at Chavda on 6 January.
After a suitable length of time/layer of school surface being liberally applied to his ginger nut coating, he was brought in, showered off in the hot box (the princess pony doesn’t do cold water) and put in his stable, whereupon the usual ritual of him rolling while staring balefully at mother was undertaken. I have to give him his due, I do occasionally quail under mother’s patented death stare (honesty, it would make Darth Vador think twice), but with him, not one duck is given.
Anyway, while mentally she plotted the ginger ninja’s demise, I was summoned, NAKED I hasten to add, to splash landings and prepared for launch while the weather worsened from merely raining cats and dogs to a monsoon style sideways torrent. Forget otters’ pockets – within minutes I was wetter than Herman the German Needle Man’s shoulder was the other year when he told her he’d exhausted the limits of his acquired-in-a-cereal-box veterinary degree, and I was not long for this Earth. Mother looked like the girl from the old Timotei shampoo advert – if it had been filmed under Niagra Falls, and she had nice long hair, not that resembling an electrocuted poodle, oh and she was about five dress sizes slimmer and about two centuries younger…
By the time I had completed four circuits, I was fending off offers from the Olympic synchronised swimming team, had turned the last few white bits on my body a very dodgy looking shade of brown, and was in danger of sinking Norfolk via the waves I was creating in the school. By the fifth circuit, when it became clear that mother has the staying power of a Kardashian without a pre-nup, I decided to take matters in my own hooves and stop. Mother, possessing the intelligence of an amoeba post-full frontal lobotomy, clearly thought I was merely objecting to the direction I was moving in and thus suggested politely through the medium of both body movement and a very large whip I might like to run the other way. Bearing in mind the rain was lashing down horizontally and I was running in a CIRCLE, I’m not sure why this was going to solve anything? But then my mother’s IQ is only rivalled by a garden gnome, so that probably explains it. I therefore declined the kind offer to change direction.
A stand-off thus was created.
I stood and looked at her.
She stood and looked at me.
The rain lashed both of us as Mother Nature unleashed her unfiltered view on the relative stupidity of equestrianism as a winter sport.
Rain poured off my nose, my eyelashes and my ears.
Mother’s resemblance to one of those mops from a 1970s school canteen grew ever more obvious.
She wafted her whip menacingly.
I stood on my hind legs and gesticulated towards the barn (helpfully, in case she didn’t know where it was).
She loudly and forcefully suggested my parents weren’t married and that there may be some form of waterfowl in my genetics.
The standoff resumed: it was likely watching a re-enactment of the Cuban missile crisis – two superpowers at total stalemate.
Eventually, after it became clear that we were going to stand out there all night if needed (when I say “became clear”, what I mean is after mother had reiterated this with a lot more adjectives multiple times), I agreed in the name of peace and de-escalation, to walk around in a few more circles – with my eyes closed, as by this time, I need windscreen wipers fitting to my forelock. Thus, with her honour (and ridiculous belief that she is in any way a horsewoman) still intact, mother and I beat a hasty retreat to the wash room where she spent another 10 minutes getting even wetter as she washed all the school surface off my feathers. If you ever want to know what illogical looks like, I present my mother…
Anyway, the rain continues with no sign of letting up. The fields are swimming pools, the mud is 20 billion feet deep and my mother is a moron. Please let 2023 be the year she sells me, preferably to someone in a warmer clime – please send all offers to:
I’m not a sea horse get me out of here,PO Box 666,Wetlands,IH8 H2O.
Laters,
Hovis
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