Hovis’ Friday diary: we cannot un-see the sights we were subjected to

Dear diary,

It’s day please-god-I-will-sacrifice-barbie-boy-to-make-it-all-stop of the human strangles epidemic. After a year of being locked down with increasingly feral humans obsessed with using us as the only reason they leave the house, I didn’t think ANYTHING could make it worse. I was wrong. For this week, mother nature proved she is indeed the most evil of women as she put that lesser seen shining orb into the sky.

And the humans started taking their clothes off.

It was like watching a Green Peace video on saving beached walruses, combined with some sort of David Attenborough piece on a lesser known maggot larvae pupating. I have never been so grateful in my life to now be blind in one eye — at least I could turn away — as across the land, masses of flabby flesh came out from under the frankly forgiving camouflage concealment of lounge pants and dressing gowns. It was like a remake of dawn of the dead. Only the dead are skinnier. As fellow horses across the country watched in horror, their owners turned from flabby pale to flabby red faster than an embarrassed polar bear: there is not enough therapy in the world that can help many of us un-see the sights we were subjected to…

Thankfully it was still quite cold when Cool New Shoes Man came on Friday because I’m not sure I could have coped with him and mother both semi-naked — it’s bad enough as it is. As it was, we also had the company of one of Herman the German Needle Man’s more glamorous assistants to take yet more pictures of Herman’s most favourite body part (and I’m sorry Mrs Herman, but it is my foot) so that Cool New Shoes Man could be sure my foot was now a lot more balanced than mother’s mental faculties, before he slapped on shoes whose design and price tag would have made Imelda Marco weep with envy.

The good news is that occasionally one can see (with one eye admittedly) why CNSM won the Horse & Hound NAF Farrier of the Year award and the X-rays showed my foot to be looking a lot healthier than mother’s bank balance. I am now much more balanced, and everything looks to be almost normal (well, normal for me, which would be cause for much alarm in lesser horses — you know, like thoroughbreds).

Happy now with the foot fetish imagery, CNSM then slapped some handmade aluminium shoes onto my feet, which had themselves been millimetrically filed and balanced to support the tiny nuances in my talented tootsies. While mother swooned as to how something so light in kilos could weigh so heavily on her bank balance, I got used to the idea of walking in shoes again having been a barefoot warrior for nearly six months. It’s fair to say it took me a couple of days, but baby I am so back! Walking on stones no longer hurts and I am striding forth like a ginger-in-the-wrong-light feathered Naomi Campbell after a £1m pay-check. If we could not talk about the photos Cool New Shoes Man posted all over my Facebook pages of him lounging at my feet like some of page free girl that would be great…

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Now the downside to this is that today is D-Day. The day mother thought would never ever come again and now it’s here is semi-wishing she hadn’t sold what was left of soul to achieve, yep that’s right — today she gets back into the ejector seat piloting Hoverine Airlines. Now admittedly, it’s going to be a very very short flight, to the extent the pre-flight checks will take longer than the actual time in the air, but it’s a start.

So, wish me luck — there’s been no exercise in months, long periods of box rest and muscles that have grown slack with lack of use. And that’s just the mothership…

I’m off to start my taxi, check thrustors and prepare for take off.

Laters,

Hovis

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