Hovis’ Friday diary: ‘I honestly pondered on whether I had passed over the bridge’
(Image credit: Hovis Facebook)
Dear diary,
On this day, day umpteen-billion-and-something-but-I’ve lost-count-and-the-will-to-live of the human strangles epidemic, I write to you from a new abode!
As I told you last week, last Saturday saw operation Hovis House Move be enacted by a stressed-looking mother and her mini-minion, who whizzed about carrying things like a small ant on blue smarties.
My removals people arrived nice and early, so I studiously ignored them and concentrated on the important job of removing every last shred of grass from the field before I left –to be fair, there was about as much left by this point as there are chocolates left when mother is “grazing” but I am nothing if not thorough.
All my worldly possessions were loaded onto the trailer and it disappeared into the horizon like the last vestiges of money in mother’s bank account – only in this case, I rather hoped to see it again. Sure enough, about 52 mouthfuls of grass later, it reappeared minus all my goods and chattles and mother came running up to the field to fetch me. Now “running” in fairness may be a falsehood of a description of mother’s method of locomotion – it was more like a penguin with piles on the run from a predatory polar bear, but her size belies her speed, and while she may have given herself two black eyes from the enthusiastically bouncing airbags, I was captured and taken to the back of my executive transport faster than you can get an HGV licence these days.
There I discovered the first issue. For there facing me was the ginger and blonde bum which had so fooled me when it first arrived, and for one brief moment I had thought all my Christmases had come early – only now I know it’s attached to the bijou blonde-haired bimbette Barbie Boy. I eyed mother with the sort of stink eye usually reserved for anyone suggesting stressage, but she seemed impervious to my violent disapproval of having to share space with the simpleton, and with a waft of a lunge whip I was forced to line up next to galloping gormless in the trailer. He screamed like a girl with excitement and promptly tried to eat my face (I know I’m delicious, it’s my cross in life and I have to bear it), so in the end, we were lashed to opposite sides of the telephone box on wheels, like tug-boats to a pier, to try and prevent a re-enactment of the facial damage of 2019 when my lady love took love bites to a whole new level about two weeks before Your Horse is Alive. I haven’t seen mother so upset since she realised the scales were broken and the last time she’d been below 10 stone was when she was still in nappies…
Anyway, we managed the short journey with our noses wedged to the opposite walls like two stick on Garfields and voila! We were there.
I was taken off the trailer first (as is only right – we know who the star is here) and was led down a series of fields until I spied lots of horses. As their fields are all on either side of the pathway, I walked down between then like Moses between the waves and the adulation was evident. As I approached, each one went as hysterical as a wrong direction fan when Harry tosses his mane and I loved every glorious second. Even more so when I was turned into a field with GRASS. SO MUCH GRASS! It was like knee high, seriously I could have lost Barbie Boy’s body in here and no one would have ever known. Between the number of girls and a slightly confused-looking dude plus more grass than I’d seen for years, I honestly pondered on whether I had passed over the bridge. Then I saw the mothership bearing down the lane with a load of fence stakes, trailing electric fencing like an Andrex puppy and realised that no I was in fact still here. Still, she decreed she would fence later in case I kicked off, and off she tootled to release Blondie Mc Blonde face from his two-inch tether to the trailer sides. As he’d already been out for the few hours that he is allowed, he was taken straight to the stable – oh how I laughed.
I wasn’t laughing a few hours later when it was raining sideways as mother and aunty Em battled to reduce my field to the size of a London flat’s patio area while loudly discussing being wet through to their undergarments. Call me old fashioned, but if I wanted to know about soggy over the shoulder boulder holders, I’d watch sponge Bob.
I was taken in after a far too long a period outside in the torrential rain, where I saw my new hotel room. It’s very swanky although I’m not sure about the sliding door – I keep forgetting to move my head and thus risk being decapitated every time mother wants to come in to do something. I have my own skylight and the grills on either side let me ogle my room mates. Sadly, on one side is Barbie Boy, but the view on the other side is pretty fine.
So far, I’ve had goo-goo eyes made at me by a fine-looking ginger mare and a pale blonde mare as well as an eventing type, who I’m sure is a guy. I mean, I get it – he’s an eventer and I am Mary King’s favourite steed, so I can only imagine the jealousy radiating out of every pore the way mother sweats when anyone says the word “vets bill”.
So far so good. Barbie Boy is being made to go in a gigantic hamster wheel every day and I’m being treated like the superstar I am. The guys who run the place are very cool and chilled out and clearly got the memo on how to deal with a man of my status, so I would rate the establishment highly on horseadvisor. No doubt as mother gives them a list of instructions longer than the allied invasion plans this may all change, but for now, I am a happy Hovis.
Laters,
Hovis
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