Ok, enough is enough peoples. The woman (and it has to be a woman) upstairs is having a laugh — mainly at my expense. So last week when I wrote to you, I was roasting alive, sweating like a dog outside a Chinese restaurant, stewing in my own fermented body fluids like a Heston Blumenthal recipe. This week? This week there are otters’ pockets drier than I am. I’m expecting to be kidnapped any minute by native Cape Town residents as day zero could be avoided for at least five years by simply wringing out my feathers. My mane is limper than a 10 day-old lettuce, my ass is being used as slalom training for the British canoe team, my eye lashes require life-vests and my moustache is being used as a water slide by the local wildlife. I is wet.
On Saturday mum came to get me in from the field in rain so severe that rabbits were lining the hedge rows in pairs, awaiting Noah’s arrival. Now she’s not supposed to be leading me yet due to the hole in her back from surgery, but clearly she had taken the view if she didn’t then she might be discovering how good a seahorse I would make. The problem to be fair was that in order to get my bridle on (I have possibly been a tad frisky coming in and out of the field of late — my bad), I had to turn around from the defensive position I had assumed — i.e. butt to the wind and head between my legs. It is also fair to suggest I wasn’t keen on this idea. So, I might have leapt about quite a bit, backed up into the electric fence, zapped my substantial and very wet buttocks and then flattened mum on my affronted jump forwards. I can only apologise to all the rabbits quietly queuing for the Ark for the vast array of expletives that poured forth almost as fast as the water running off her nose.
By the time I had been persuaded that “I’m leaving you out here then you ungrateful individual of questionable parentage” (I paraphrase for the sake of parental guidance requirements) was not an idle threat, had reluctantly turned sufficiently for said bridle to be placed on and agreed to walk out the field in a fashion that mother deemed suitable, she was wet through. Her jeans were black, her hair looked like seaweed in a tsunami, her supposedly expensive waterproof coat was demonstrating that waterproof didn’t mean monsoon proof, and she genuinely looked like a tissue rescued from a washing machine. The fact I followed behind her all the way to the yard tucked in so tightly that I might as well have got into her coat with her, using her as a rain break did not enamour me to her any further. On the plus side, at least I didn’t commit the faux pas that the inane maned one did and spook violently at the new bins followed by rearing at dad when he suggested that he was a large black and white buffoon: although to be fair, wiping the rain water off my face using mother as a towel was possibly ill-advised.
The only positive to this sudden change in the ambient conditions from Saharan to soggy is that the school flooded under the onslaught and thus I enjoyed a few days off from operation fightback, which appears have been a covert operation to make me do stressage without calling it stressage. If I’d have done circles in the depth of water that lay in there for a few days, then local villages would have been lost forever under the tidal wave; I’m not called the Destroyer for nothing, it would have been like the QE2 doing manoeuvres in a bath…
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Anyway, I’m off to judge the yard wet rug contest which is one of the joys of suddenly being outnumbered in the men to sadly moralled mares ratio.
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.
