Dear diary,
Last time I looked it was summer? Usually the time of dodging fly masks, stinking constantly of citronella and seeking therapy for the sight of humans in shorts who really shouldn’t be wearing anything other than a head to toe fly rug for the sake of all those around them.
So, what is with the wet stuff? The copious amount of wet stuff which left me only the other day looking like the sole survivor of a marine survival course for waterboarding otters? I am so used to water cascading off every part of my manly physique that I’m pretty sure I am currently available on Amazon as a large garden water feature. Only this morning I received a request from Cape Town to buy me for abstraction rights, while the other day, the newly formed Jamaican rafting team (Cold Swimmings) rocked up to use my buttocks and back legs as a convenient slalom time trial.
In summary, I am wet.
Very wet.
And markedly fed up with being so.
Let’s be honest, I am visually impaired enough as it is – I don’t need to be blinded by driving rain such that opening an eye further than a millimetre risks your eyeball being swept away in an eyelash generated tsunami. As my mother very rarely fails to point out my left eye cost like a billion pounds – I can’t exactly tell her that the artificial lens was last seen being used as a piece of flotsam by a mouse reenacting the final scenes from Titanic. And for the record, if she’d just moved her arse over an inch, Jack would not have been a popsicle – worth remembering, men, that there is no more selfish creature on the planet than a woman who doesn’t want to get her hair wet…
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What gets me is that we go from one extreme to another, basically dependent on that wench Mother Nature’s mood. For weeks we slow cooked like some sort of horse-related Heston Blumenthal multi-sensory experiment in which he wished to encapsulate the flavour of well done meat with a hint of fly spray and a side lashing of suncream flavoured sweat. My nose peeled so many times I started to feel like an onion, and that was despite being pinned to the floor every day and basted in every cream and potion known to man.
Then she clearly gets bored with that idea and rather than just turn the heat down a tad, maybe send a nice refreshing spray of light summer rain, she decides that monsoons and unrelenting wind are a much better option. The only good thing is that there is categorically definitely now NO suncream, fly spray or any form of chemical upon my personage. It would have been less abrasive to go to the local hand car wash and have some beefy man called Evan jet wash me from a distance of six inches.
As I have said a thousand times, this mercurial changing of the mercury just proves that Mother Nature is indeed a woman. The only person I know that swings that violently in mood is the mothership and half the time I think that’s only due to the fact she forgets what she was doing – sort of like Dory with added hormonal rage.
Anyways, I am off to take further refuge from the rain, try to avoid being used as a water park by the local mice and pray for autumn to come.
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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