How much is it to hire a plane or at least get a seat on one (although to be fair in my case it would have to be a big seat)? I’ve decided that if English spring is going to continue with this abysmal lack of fight back against a winter, which is hanging around longer than the smell from a silent fart, then I am going to have to leave the country.
So, my question then to my foreign fans is where should I go?
I’ve got to be honest and say I am not keen on anywhere in which I might feature on a menu. I have no issue with you munching on a marinaded mount or two when they’re of the thoroughbred variety, but one look at the prime beef cake which is the Destroyer and I fear I am going to be feeding a family of eight for a month…
I am therefore after somewhere warm but not hot – us ginger-in-the-wrong-light types do have a tendency to burn and I sweat more in the heat than an off-shore accounting specialist during a tax audit…
Somewhere where they don’t eat horse – or more specifically Hovis.
Somewhere with good grass and floozie-like-fillies of the grateful and adoring kind.
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And more importantly, somewhere where spring actually springs with a little more verve and vigour than an ageing octogenarian with piles.
I don’t want to leave, I love my country – but I love it a lot more when it’s not fetlock deep in water for 5784936252 days straight.
I love it when I have grass and not a sea of mud, which for those of us with feather of the white variety has led to us being an idol worshipped only by the shareholders of whitening shampoo.
I love it when then glowing thing in the sky actually shows up and you know, actually does its job.
Sadly all of the above have been sadly absent this year and frankly, as its now mid-April, the report card for spring reads “must try harder” and I am forced to look at relocation. All ideas and more importantly offers of board and rations welcomed.
Last week Cool New Shoes Man came and put some new shoes on me and the ginger whinger – although given all that’s been said above, I’m not sure that flippers might not have been a better move. He did tell mother that I was very stiff, which I think was rich bearing in mind I only leant on him for a cuddle and he turned puce, started hyperventilating and sweating more than mother before weigh in at fat fighters. I do think its adorable how after all these years he still gets so overcome being this close to a mega-star – I know it must be hard to reconcile but I am just a regular guy, just one with a world wide fan base, eight books under my girth strap and some of the biggest names in the business on speed dial…
Anyways, he’d be stiff if he’d not had seven days consecutive turn out since last year. Mother being mother however was concerned so spent the last week lightly exercising me and upping my supplements to “going-to-need-to-sell-another-body-part-to fund-this” levels. Bearing in mind the woman is held together with piano wire, alcohol and kill-an-elephant levels of opiates, then I am reminded once again of the double standards of the human kind.
So I am off to do some light yoga moves – mainly the “under the electric fence neck stretch” – and research relocation options.
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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.
