Happy New Year to all of you and I hope you had a good Kissmuss. Apologies for the lack of diary for a few weeks, but firstly the mothership bobbed off to see a big canary, and then to hog-her-mane in Scotland. Personally, I didn’t think she had the cheekbones to rock the shaven look and it appears the clipping person thought the same, as she’s come back with exactly the same length head bush as she left with, but there we go. Anyways, due to her selfishness I didn’t have a scribe, so hence radio silence, which I can only imagine has caused untold distress and possibly ruined more than one Kissmuss.
Mind you, my mother isn’t the only one who tried to ruin Kissmuss; the other looney mother (as in nature) has also had a pretty good go. I mean genuinely what the flip is wrong with her? For the love of whatever deity you believe in, will whichever one of you has peed her off go and apologise/fall on your knees and grovel/sacrifice your first born – whatever it takes – to pacify her? In my 21 years on this planet I have never known it this wet – and I was born in Ireland, let us not forget.
We haven’t been turned out for about a billion days due to the fields being an impassible bog in which a reenactment of the sobby snot causing bit of The Never Ending Story is a reality on an hourly basis.
Anything under 17hh needs a life ring for safety reasons, hay holders are bobbing about like buoys on the ocean and “white” as either a concept or a reality has disappeared like mother’s ability to wear size eight jeans…
None of us even dare to do the annual New Year revolutions for fear of causing a whirlpool of the type only seen when mother empties her bath and every molecule of water heads at speed for the nearest exit, in search of therapy due to having seen her sans pants.
We have had to take in some neigh-bores who have had their stables flooded out and mum’s Facebook feed has been full of dramatic rescues of horses and cattle from flooded fields and land. I mean I thought no one did peed off more dramatically than the mothership, but clearly this is mother nature’s way of saying “hold my pint” (which she’s then poured repeatedly over our heads).
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We had a brief period between kissmuss and New Year where she switched it up a bit and just went for high winds but no rain, so we did get out for a few days when we didn’t need the coastguard on standby. Personally, I love the wind and respond to it joyfully through the medium of dance. I also often work on the hypothesis that mother is a grumpy witch because she was deprived a childhood due to being “downt pits” or whatever they do with children in the north, so I use these days to give her back some of the innocence pleasures of youth – such as flying a kite. It’s hard for a 0.75 tonne wall of equine muscled perfection to pretend to be a flimsy bit of wood and material at the whim of the wind, but damn it, I love her and so I try very hard. Her smile of sheer joy always makes my efforts so worth it. Ginger whinger suggesting that it’s less a smile and more teeth clenching as she tries to keep said 0.75 tonne of muscled equine perfection grounded with a back so broken a kissing spines surgeon would cry in horror, merely demonstrates his lack of life experience. And intellect.
Anyways we are back to sideways rain, puddles deep enough to lose both the pint-sized pain in my posterior and his ego in, fields in which any sign of grass has been lost under 72 inches of thick clay mud and absolutely everything being permanently soaking wet. Even though it means yellow perils, bonking bunnies and a lot of use of the word “fresh” (along with choice adjectives as we piaffe past the parish priest) will spring please hurry up?
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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.
