My mother has officially lost it. Totally and utterly gone around the bend and back again. I intend to add to my ever-growing mane-isfesto and include the need for our human “owners”/slaves/bringers of hay to have annual psychological evaluations, which will help us equines decide whether we wish to stay with them or be shipped off to live on a hillside somewhere away from the insane people and the little voices in their heads. Seriously. I know that some of our human passport holders are advancing in years (and in mother’s case waist line), but I really don’t see why we should have to put up with it without some sort of legislative protection (are you impressed with my vocabulary here people? Not bad for an Irish bogtrotter with dodgy parentage eh? Ok, so I admit it, I used a Theostrawus for help).
Anyway, stepping away from my already successful campaign for prime minster/presidency/world domination for a second and coming back to mother.
I shall say one word.
Poles.
Lots of poles.
That’s what my weekend consisted of. I don’t mean Polish people, who I’m sure are very lovely as a race, no here I mean poles. Of the wooden variety. The type that lie there on the arena surface, all benign and inert before transforming into evil beings with the power to make even sleek free-moving athletes like myself turn into flailing fat guys on rollerblades with feet going all over the place like a centipede doing the Charleston.
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I get the concept of poles – when they are attached to jump wings and suspended up in the air like flies stuck in a spider’s web. Like that they are harmless and indeed form an enjoyable pastime hither to known as showjumping – something I have been known to be fairly good at.
Suspended poles are good, ground work poles are a thing of pointless pathological perversion, which is probably why mum spent an hour at the weekend making me walk over them, then trot over them, then weave in and out of them and generally lose what is left of my street cred as I was forced to resemble the love child of the two hideous pastimes of crochet and line dancing.
Her yelling “pick your feet up, you clown!!” at the top of her voice alerted most of Lincolnshire to what I was doing and I swear I saw an entrepreneurial mouse selling tickets to the elite rabbit militia. If any of them had a video camera for the moment I misjudged the first pole so stood on every one of them, leading to me looking like a hairy lumberjack in a log rolling demonstration, then I’d like a cut of the £250. A boy can buy a lot of treats with that, which I totally deserve after being subjected to such a humiliating experience.
I understand poles being used for the young and inexperienced equines of the world – I was once such a creature myself – but to a (marginally) older statesman like myself, who has seen much of the world and indeed played steed to some of the most talented riders of our time (and to be clear I definitely don’t mean mother) then it’s frankly insulting. Being lunged over poles like some sort of novice so wet behind the ears you could grow cress on them is not the way a star like myself should be treated.
I get I am coming back from near career-ending injuries and that my recent fall might have been due to me not entirely picking my feet up as I transitioned between trot and canter, but I don’t think being treated as though I have lost every brain cell is helpful. I thus formally record this as yet another complaint against my treatment by she-who-must-be-obeyed-because-she-is-wieding-a-very-long-lunge-whip.
Which is why I am determined to take forward my campaign onto a more serious footing. So, I am on the hunt for a campaign manager, a PR expert and some attractive totty to stand next to me and look both adoring and admiring in press photo calls. I would ask for a spin doctor, but that sounds like something that Herman the German Needle Man would like to do and as I’ve not had the pleasure of his company for a while I’d rather not entice him back out of the woodwork…
All applications to be made via my Facebook pages, or by contacting mother directly. I look forward to choosing my campaign dream team. #neighoneshouldsuffer #Geldingforgovernment #Mane-ifesto
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.
