It’s day one hundred and 75 billion of the human strangles epidemic, but new hope draws closer for us equines who have to shoulder the burden of bored box-rested humans, bringing with it new found optimism of once again living a life that does not involve online stressage competitions and “pole club” (and yes that is a thing — but be careful what you Google, I’m pretty sure what I saw wasn’t ground work). For, after 100 dark long days of being used like a four-legged babysitter for locked down laminitic layabouts, there is new hope, and peoples, this hope has a name and let that name be the answer to our prayers… all hail the reopening of the PUB!
Which, to be honest, isn’t going to help any of you whose parents are tee-total, so sorry there, but for those of us who use the word “lush” to describe our mothers and don’t mean a) she’s rather lovely or b) she wafts an overpowering smell of soap when she moves, this is like the second coming of the hay lorry.
Despite my joking, to be honest there is part of me that hopes mother abstains, because frankly, she’s suffering a lack of brain cells as it is and killing a few more via the medium of a several sneaky shandies would take her from Dory to dangerous. Last weekend yet again being a case in point.
Thankfully the ever mercurial mother nature cranking the gas mark up to horse frying temperatures had at least put pay to a groundhog style week of being made to carry my own head while being screamed at by a seven-year-old short-arse stressage sergeant with delusions of dressage dictatorship. One day, mini-mother will have to realise that Aunty Em and I are less finesse and more freestyle in our approach, and one girl’s egg is another man’s eggcellent…
But by Sunday morning, the wind was howling and the temperature had dropped faster than the price of jumpers in a heat wave, which of course was cue for my mother to decide that going for a hack was the best idea since Take That reformed. Even Bob looked as enthusiastic as Nemo at a sushi joint as we headed out down the back tracks with our tails being blown up unmentionables like wind up the M1.
To be fair, we went into the woods of mystery and the wind dropped slightly, allowing for mother and Aunty C to loudly commiserate over the difficulty of riding strong-minded mounts. At one point, as we rode past the pond, Aunty C shouted back to the mothership “duck, duck”, eliciting the response of “carnard” from mother. I wouldn’t mind, but she didn’t even try…
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So, other than mother being a potty-mouthed parent, we were doing ok in the spook department, mainly because I couldn’t really be bothered rather than mother’s toddler-esque tactics of turning my blind eye to anything that her irrational mind thought might bother me. I do occasionally want to point out that my million-pound bionic left eye gives me full range of vision, but bless her, it lets her think she’s “in charge”.
Anyway, the dense duo decided that we would go up the side of the potato fields to get home rather than back up the way we had come. Which is fine. Apart from the fact neither of them had spotted the danger lurking ahead. Now, with hindsight, the really long metal pipes and the wet ground (like duh, it hadn’t rained) should probably have been a clue but then you’re talking about a human that spends 10 minutes looking for the glasses she’s wearing, so we had no hope. So yet again it fell to me, Hoverine the Superhorse to save the day. On hearing the whooshing hiss of the sizeable spraying snake, my lightening ninja-like reflexes kicked in and I jumped sideways like a frog evading a Frenchman’s fork. Mother, once again displaying the survival instincts of a dodo, put her right leg on with the strength of Trump’s toupée glue and turned us to face the fearsome advancing fountain, thus leaving me with no choice but to piaffe past like Michael Flatley at a rave. I genuinely regret the loss of life, but let it be said that there are worse ways for a potato to pass than being pummelled by a passage; I did shed pomme de tears for the crisps they could have been…
After we rapidly exited the killing fields, it became apparent that we had angered the forces of farming as a large tractor bore down upon us like the mechanical manifestation of malevolence, and I was once again forced to showcase the survival skills of “spook, spin and scarper”, leaving Bob looking as confused as a hedgehog on a cactus farm. By the time we had made it the last few hundred metres down the drive, mother was wearing my bit rings as bracelets and my tempi’s were registering on the Richter scale. I know how hard it is for mum to express herself, but honestly if she’d just unlock her jaw and perhaps un-grit her teeth the words “thank you” would be so much clearer…
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.
