Dear Diary
Apologies for the lack of comms again last week but once again my mother had jetted off to foreign climes leaving me sans any form of communication tooling. Mainly because the biggest tool was on a plane…
I am going to have to remedy this situation, which means either asking Santa Paws for my own laptop or stepping up my funding of Herman the German Needles Man’s children’s private education by going back to seeing him on an hourly basis… every day…
Whilst this second avenue will ensure that she doesn’t have the funds to go anywhere other than a tent in the garden, it will also lead to mother sobbing hysterically – got to be honest, a red-nosed, wild-eyed, soggy haired snot goblin is not what any of us need, so on reflection that’s not an attractive option. Not only that, but I am just about getting to the stage of being able to see a rubber glove without instantaneous PTSD flashbacks of The Hand of Herman disappearing into parts of my body no human should venture near so perhaps not…
Thankfully mother was not bereft of a mobile phone so when Mother Nature decided to throw yet another of her fun fits last week, soaking us all and making nights colder than then mothership’s heart WHILST WE ARE STILL SLEEPING OUTSIDE, Crazy Self Employed Lady was able to phone and politely suggest I needed to come in at night as I looked more fed up than Trump’s security team. Mother, obviously suitably sedated on Italian happy juice apparently agreed so at least I had a few nights back in the relative warmth and dry of my stable.
It’s definitely safe to say we have skipped the “summer” programme this year and are safely now back in autumn, which means many things: darker mornings, darker nights, frost, seasonal sacrifice of the hair we have spent hours growing and the arrival of the season of spooktacular.
No, I don’t mean Halloween – I mean the stage of the year where the word “fresh” is used as regularly as the adjective that starts with F and sounds like duck. The season where falling leaves are now classed as would be assassins and people across the land jump for cover as horsepersons are seen piaffing down the middle of the road with about as much control as the PM has over his cabinet.
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The season where its “arm day” every ride as said horse person attempts to hold back ¾ of a tonne of freshly clipped, over excited, snorting dragon free-styling hard enough for Australia to kidnap them as their next entry to the break dancing at LA2028.
The season where the sales of stronger bits, sticky bottoms jodhpurs, calming remedy and gaffer tape go through the roof (often with an accompanying rider still attached), and of course, the season where peoples attempt to take the aforementioned steeds at high speed across the fields chasing men who have nothing better to do than run across the countryside being chased by lots of wide-eyed women swearing a lot. And for the record here I mean drag hunting, not a normal night out in Newcastle – that’s a WHOLE different thing…
Whilst I am now too old and much too mature for such shenanigans, the same can’t be said for Barbie Boy who blotted his copy book last week by rearing, like actually took two front feet off the floor, because he wasn’t allowed to go into the barn after the yartd floosie who was in season and wanting a little bit of action herself.
I hadn’t got the heart to point out that a) she’d done it to all of us males including Bob the human so clearly wasn’t picky, b) he’s as ball-less as the rest of us, and c) he’d have had to have stood on the mounting block, thus repurposing the name and the block for totally different things… bless him though. He didn’t half get mini-mother and the mothership riled up.
I watched on with amusement as I’m three times his size and have never won an argument with the mothership in the many many many many years she has been my minion so he stood about as much chance as the last custard cream at a fat fighters’ meeting. The yoof of today – not got the brains of an amoeba with a head injury…
Anyways, I am off to await the arrival of Cool New Shoes Man to fit me with some new dancing shoes so who knows – maybe I might throw some shapes over the weekend. You know, just to help mother tone those flabby bingo wings…
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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