Winter Doldrums

A few dark clouds have drifted ominously across the bright blue sky of pony-dream-land. First, pony-girl’s ashen-faced arrival at the tackroom door where I was struggling with a huge saddle: “Clyde’s got a nosebleed!”
Seeing the quivering lip, I heard myself answering calmly ‘He has probably given it a little bump, silly girl.” subdural haematoma – sub-cranial haemorrhage – low platelets – leukaemia’ - ?
There was the nose in question, poking perkily enough over Clyde’s stable gate, but from one enormous nostril there did indeed flow a trickle of blood . Plummeting hearts sent us off in a trice for a stablegirl who calmly diagnosed ‘little burst blood vessel – nothing to worry about’.

I’m glad to say he is fine, the old fraud. Pony-girl is not so great, however, having unaccountably lost her nerve for jumping. She has worked out that even Clyde, the best and most experienced pony-jumper at the stables, will get his striding wrong one time in three, this is apparently a mathematical certainty. Thus, her logic goes, if he clears one jump perfectly it can only go downhill from there, so that’s it for the day and back he goes to the stable. This sort of preparation, I fear, will get us nowhere at Sudeley Show.

I am arming myself up with books on nervous riders and regaining lost confidence but the latest tome to appear on pony-girl’s birthday, What Horses Think, is little help. Its author has given a questionnaire (A questionaire. Riiighhht) to a big sample of horses, who all replied. They replied telepathically, obviously, and apparently one horse designed his own shoes, telepathically coming up with a neat idea for a cork layer between hoof and iron. This is pretty impressive stuff! You want to know more, I know, so here goes: All you have to do is be around your horse, giving unconditional love. Think your question, eg ‘what do you like about being ridden?’ and your horse will reply. I tried this out. Standing at Clyde’s shoulder, giving unconditional love, I thought: “Are you happy with your striding, Clyde? are J’s fears unfounded?” and awaited his telepathic reply with baited breath, but all I got was a warm blast of apple-y breath in my ear and an untelepathic nudge at my carrot pocket.

The other night Pat was pushed for time and asked us to lock up the ponybarn for the night; I would have been dead chuffed with this unusual show of confidence in her most hapless and hopeless pony-people, had the responsibility not weighed on us so heavily that every time we arrived at the last stall to check for a loose headcollar we felt we had to begin again at the first one. Rugs were going on and off all over the place as we kept changing our minds over whom to rug with what, as fast as we filled waterbuckets they slurped it down, and the final task was closing and securing the huge barn door, which is the size of an entire house, has to be levered up with a plank and secured with a woggle in a flange-sprocket ten feet up a ladder by the light of the moon. I got no sleep that night, so fearful was I of returning to the stables next morning to find three ponies hanging by their headcollars, two expired from thirst and the rest escaped down the ladder, which we might have forgotten to remove.