Dear diary,
So, it looks like the holiday is going to be over soon as the mothership starts to get me fit for things later in the year. I do laugh because she’s not going to be the one doing the ‘fittening’ as she’s going in for spinal surgery at the beginning of July, so I expect the search for a test pilot will soon commence.
Cool New Shoes Man is booked in for today to come and sort both my feet and those belonging to the fluffwonder, who is in the good books at the moment due to his growing partnership with mini-mother. Apparently the black and white boy blunder managed to jump (well ‘step’) over a jump the height of vertically challenged shrew and now everyone thinks he’s amazing — life is deeply unfair, when I think of all the mega jumps I’ve tackled and no one has done anything than lambaste me. Admittedly no one told me the criteria for success included mother staying on board while I did it but let’s not let that little fact cloud the situation — quite frankly everyone thinks he’s cute because he’s a short arse. That’s all there is to it.
And let’s face it, this unfairness is very well evidenced: small people run around naked and no one bats an eyelash, larger people do it and you either have to be on a nudist beach or German for it to be ok. A small person is caught short and wee wees in a bush and it’s all “bless them” — a bigger person does it and its “arrest the pervert”. Cow child bucks and it’s “high spirits”, I do it and it’s “high jump” — when mother has been retrieved from the tree I catapulted her into… Do you see my point? The world is size-ist and cuteness is blinding us all to the reality of the situation.
Anyway, if CNSM so much as glances at him with longing then I shall flick him into next week. Admittedly I’m not a fan of him sticking his tongue up my nose and posting it all over social media, but I’m not having him flirting with the waist-height wastrel either. He might be a weirdo, but he’s my weirdo.
So, hopefully this visit from CNSM will see the hole of Hovis having nearly grown out and a minimal amount of filler having to go back in. If all is well then stage two of my ongoing mutation into the world’s first super-horse is going to be put into motion. Those of you who have read my diary for a long time (and if you haven’t, what on God’s green earth have you been doing?!) know that I have already been injected with mutant blood several times and that I have a bionic eye. Oh, and that in unrelated news, my vet lives in a 10 bedroom mansion with a swimming pool with my face tiled on the bottom…
So, now mum is selling off the remains of her pathetic broken body and I am to have revolutionary stem cell treatment for the arthritis in my front foot. I am reassured that this will not do anything other than fix my arthritis and that the ‘stem’ bit will not turn me into some sort of herbaceous border or any form of Hovis-shaped Hyacinth. Which is a relief.
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Herman the German Needle Man is very excited by this, mother is walking around like a woman who is going to have to offer favours to the bank manager and somewhere, some place, in a little laboratory far, far away, a scientist’s dream has come true — he/she has got to finish my transformation into the Hoverine: super-powered bank balance drainer!
She-who-helps-put-my-vet’s-kids-through-college has asked if she can pimp Herman out to over-enthusiastic members of the Hovite Army to raise funds, but she reports back he wasn’t forthcoming. Never mind ladies (and gents, heh, I’m all for equality) — just offer 50p and half a Polo to Cool New Shoes Man and he’s all yours — only can you please wait until he’s done my feet and please, for hygiene’s sake, remember where his tongue has probably been…
So, the final instalment of Hoverine mutation is likely not to happen until the mothership returns from Africa in a month’s time. Apparently, I am allowed to “gently” work between now and then in walk to keep my weight down. I do protest this, as in my mind, if it goes down any further, I am going to be a walking advert for neglect. Did you not see my skinniness in the recent video mother posted on my Facebook pages? How you all didn’t call horseline immediately I know not — I am skin and bone as it is; my stomach is totally flat. Only the ‘L’ is silent…
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On a plus, I might at least get the fun of jogging sideways around the arena while Aunty Em frantically tries to stop me for fear of one of us being murdered by a fire-breathing, mother shrieking “*Expletive*! WALK! *expletive*!” like a lolly pop lady with Tourette’s. One has to take life’s small gifts.
So, I’m off to plot the colour of my cape and mask combination — I’m thinking ‘bank balance red’ — and to exchange hot and heavy looks with the new girl; she’s hot and I’m heavy…
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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