Ponydream Days

A phone call and subsequent email about the 14.2 Perfect-Pony which lives too far away. Apparently the woman ‘never checks her emails’ which always strikes me as odd coming from people who advertise online giving an email address for contact, but there you go. Paxo is his name, which is an odd name for a pony, tho perhaps worse were he a turkey. He can only be sold to a ‘competitive home’ as anything else would stifle his potential, he 'won everything this year’, and has only to hear the bell ring in a jump-off and ‘poof! – he’s gone’. He sounds pretty good though despite the show-ring bolting habit and he’s undeniably the right colour, but I’m holding off for the moment, if only because I feel we’ll be turned down on the grounds that the Sudeley Clear Round jumping will be deemed insufficient to further his Olympiac ambitions.

In the meantime Pat and her husband (a sweet man who came to our rescue by driving Whisper home) have found a nice skewbald cob they think we should go to see, and by scouring the small ads I found today a local pony dealer who has at present 2 almost-suitable ponies in. (‘Almost’ seems to be about as good as it gets) One is a dun (mmmmmm) Connemara, but only 5 years old, though she assures me he’s ‘very quiet’; the second is, well, a skewbald cob. We've made arrangements to view on Saturday morning.

We’ve been looking now for three months - much longer and J will have entered the next stage of teenage-girlhood - you know, the one where they emerge but rarely from their darkened music-pounded room, to scowl at their hateful parents and raid the fridge. Oh, how pure and sweet will seem the ponydream days then!