Dear diary,
I have decided I don’t want to horse anymore. If you human types can decide what you identify as, then so can I. And I have decided that after much thought, I now identify as a hamster.
Why this sudden crisis of identity I hear you ask? The answer is simples. Earlier this week I was left OUTSIDE in the worse downpour since Noah built the Ark. Outside. In the cold, the gale force wind, the driving rain and the thunder and lightening. Outside. ALL NIGHT.
By the time morning came I looked like a cashmere sweater in an industrial washing machine and was about as happy with my life as the manufacturers of EVs are with the current human herd leader, which is to say not very. The arrival of a very flustered Crazy Self-Employed Lady wittering on about how her apple had said it wouldn’t rain until the morning did little to assuage my drowned feelings. I might suggest that in future she actually consults a weather forecast rather than asking the opinion of one of her five a day…
What made the matter worse was the evening before, the mothership had come up and made me work, like actual work, for 20 minutes on the lunge in which she had rather rudely expressed surprise and well-hidden delight at just how sound and athletic I am at the moment. When I say “well-hidden” I mean between clenched teeth as she struggled to contain my enthusiasm for life and curb my joyous return to my native roots via the medium of river dance. It’s fair to say that at approaching 22 years on this planet, I am still a bouncing Tigger-like testimony to just how far the right attitude will take you (that and a good vet, farrier, dentist, hand-made shoes, expensive IR rugs, supplements, carefully monitored diet, high quality hay, mostly new body parts and a sponsorship from Mastercard…). Mother on the other hand, well let’s just say her body is a temple: old, crumbling and possibly haunted…
After I had completed my repertoire of kicks and high knee trotting, mother then deemed it time for a bath. Which is probably why it then peed it down all night like an elderly male wine taster. She scrubbed me to within an inch of her life (trust me, the wincing and groaning going on every time she bent over, I considered phoning the local wildlife rescue), made my feather all Daz white and shiny, washed my mane and tail and generally made me look and smell like some sort of overgrown poodle. As I was returned to the field, the mistress of the understatement briefly looked at the sky and suggested it looked a “bit black”. If my mother had a higher IQ and she applied herself properly, one day she might just qualify as a garden tool. “A bit black”?! That was the front of a storm that raged all night and left me and my other unloved equines wetter than the inside of a scuba diver’s back pocket. Amused I was not.
To be fair, CSEL has not made the same mistake for the rest of the week and as such, we have been in every night, which has minorly appeased me, but not by much.
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So if anyone needs me, I am currently looking for a smallish cage, in a nice warm living room where I get to exercise in a ball on the carpet and be fed nice things, which I will stuff in my cheeks for later. Hovis the Hamster has a nice ring to it I think?
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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