Coughing Clyde

Clyde has a cough. He’s had it all summer and now I come to think of it, he had it last year too before we bought him. It’s a dry-sounding sneeze rather than a tubercular-sounding hawkup, but it’s very persistent once it takes a hold. Pat thinks it’s an allergy and he has haylage or soaked hay when the stablegirls remember, which is, erm, every time they see us coming through the barn at haying time. He seems fit as a fiddle, but it’s something to worry about because it’s starting to affect his performance. There are cough supplements available but these are mostly ‘natural’ ones, which, I feel, will be as much use as me chanting words of power while dancing naked on a hair from his tail, and very much more costly.

The cough seems to affect him most when he has to do something he doesn’t like – dressage for example - or as a seemingly automatic response when he enters the school and has to trudge around in a circle - can ponies get ‘psychological’ coughs, we wonder? It’s amazing how fast it clears up when he’s allowed to canter around at full pelt over jumps.

Obviously the main concern is for our boy’s health so we didn’t care (too much) about his low dressage score on Sunday at Blade's Hill when he coughed pathetically all round the arena, and we spent a lot of time fussing the afflicted one, whose big sad brown eyes informed us urgently that only copious apple-rations could ease the tickling in his stout pony chest. On the way out we passed Lucinda Trophy-Tophat on her mobile phone rapturously broadcasting her delight at her own performance: “Oh! Yah! Ohhhhh! It cantered! It flowed! It was engaged! It was absolootly soopah!! Yah, 72%! Oh, easily 10% clear of the little people! It’s going to be first, first, FIRST all the way!” You will think I have invented Lucinda, but she is for real.

We can but hope this cough sorts itself out before October 2nd, which is the day of the next Nags’r’us Dressage Gala. This very same event in May was PG and Clyde’s first ever competition, in which they came second and third in Prelims 4 and 10, endured a two-honk penalty for forgetting the test – twice - crawled out in shame and finished in second place for Nags’R’Us Junior Champion behind Moppet and Poppet, a hard-to-beat team of small, perfect child on small perfect pony. It will be Pony-girl’s last chance to enter the Junior Section (I seem to remember that Jill never won Chatton Show U-16 Jumping, either) so to go out as Junior Champion would be a bit of a coup! but it’s certainly not ‘in the bag’. Clyde still won’t go on the bit, though he has developed his own variation on this known as ‘pretending to go on the bit while actually leaning on the hand’, which he does so strenuously that should PG relax the reins for the merest second, down shoots his head and he bangs his silly nose on the floor. So entrenched is this problem that we actually bought a Waterford bit, glowingly said to be the bit upon which no horse in the history of horsemanship has ever been able to lean. That was until Clyde tried it of course and it became ‘the bit which one in a million ponies will be able to use as an effective leaning aid.’ That's our boy!