Currently, my horse is staying at the most expensive livery
yard in the country.
I’ve never kept a horse at livery before and I am stunned by
the amount of time that I now have on my hands. When I get up in the morning, I
can put on my office clothes, scribble on my eyebrows and I am ready for work.
There’s none of this putting on my jodhpurs for horse duties and having to
shower and change 45 minutes later, in fact on Tuesday I was actually sitting
at my desk at home ready to add up and take away by 9.15am which is nothing
short of a miracle.
I don’t mean to boast about this new found freedom and the
decadence of being the owner of a horse at a livery yard as it certainly isn’t
something that I have done to raise my status within the local community. You
see, despite the fact that I am adoring not having to muck out and that all my
fleece jackets have no horse hair stuck to them, the cost of this wonderful
equine equivalent of Champneys is now causing me to lose sleep.
This is because this luxurious livery yard of which I write is
actually my Veterinary Surgeon’s Equine Clinic.
Thanks to storm Ali, a small particle of something foreign landed
in Wet Dishcloth Horse’s eye and caused an ulcer. Despite playing Florence
Nightingale for a week and a half, the lesion the size of my little fingernail refused
to heal and so a week past Monday I had him admitted to Janey Herriot’s
fabulous facility near the town of Morpeth .
So at the moment someone else is responsible for administering medication,
feeding, grooming and taking care of him and I am driving 60 miles a day to go
and see him.
Despite Wet Dishcloth Horse having a very sweet nature, he has
a strenuous aversion to the Vet and is what they call “needle shy” which is a gracious
way of saying that he will attempt to kill everyone present when the Vet starts
feeling for a vein. In addition to that Wet Dishcloth Horse is also nervous of
strangers, phobic of men and in short is the worst and most unhelpful patient the
equine world has ever seen.
The team at the Equine Clinic at Fairmoor are Saints. All of
them have shimmering halos and I can hear the sound of angels singing whenever
I am near them. They are so holy that I wipe my feet prior to entering the
Horse Hospital and wear a tunic of sackcloth and ashes to apologise at how shit
I am at looking after my very own horse in the comfort of my own home.
The team at the Equine Clinic are currently trying their
very best to get my pony’s eye mended so that he can return home but I am now
beginning to think that perhaps I should have offered to sleep in my car, muck
the damn horse out myself, do the accounts for the Veterinary Practice, all the grocery shopping for everyone employed and flick the hoover around their homes on a Friday; in the hope of getting a
discount.
Due to the level of care that Janey Herriot’s army are
dishing out at their clinic, it costs £89,372 a day to have your horse at their
Horsepital. The equine patients eat spun gold instead of hay, are fed shredded £50
notes by hand and lie on a 10 inch bed of rose petals sprinkled with a glitter that
is derived from platinum.
Okay, so I may be slightly exaggerating with the platinum
glitter. It’s actually just ordinary glitter than is colour coded to enhance
the horse’s coat, dust extracted and is produced by a family in Switzerland who
supply the same stuff to Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum for his staff to
scatter on his carpets when he’s expecting a Royal visitor.
I was so in-awe of this incredible equine Champneys that on
the day that I decided that I was going to have to admit my pony to Horsepital
I realised that I could not stand the shame of taking him there looking like an
unkempt horse from an allotment; so I hastily washed the rug that he wears every
night in his stable. This rug came free of charge with my previous horse who I
bought in 2001 and it certainly wasn’t new then. The Aigle Welly Wearer mended
this rug with a piece of her husband’s jeans and a sock back in 2003 and I was
dismayed to find that once the spin cycle had ended and the sound of clattering
buckles against the washing machine door had ceased, the patch that she had sewn
on had come off. And due to this shoddy attempt at repairing my rug, I’m afraid
I cannot recommend her as a seamstress of any kind.
The other small problem with laundering the rug myself, was
that when I removed it from the washing machine I discovered that there was
another hole in it which had been secretly storing wood shavings from my
horse’s bed like some kind of wood-ingesting ogre, for what must have been
literally years. This meant that as I removed it from the appliance and ran to
the door to hang it on the washing line, I left a trail of wood chips across my
kitchen that would fooled you into thinking you were on a forestry track.
At that point in the day I did not only have a horse with
only one eye open, Britney (not her real name) upstairs in bed with suspected
tonsillitis, Other Half at the Dentist having an emergency repair job on a
broken tooth, a kitchen that resembled a woodland cycle track at Centre Parcs
but also a pair of Ugg boots that looked as though they were the result of a
violent encounter with a wood chipper and a wind tunnel.
Despite my best efforts with my vintage stable rug, the
staff at Champneys must have taken one look at it and called the RSPCA for I
have not once visited my horse and seen him wearing it. He is always dressed in
the finest of clothing and although I made a mental note to take him some more outfits,
much in the way that you would take clothes to a relative in hospital, I have
not dared do so for fear that the saintly equine doctors and nurses get such a
shock that their halos slip down and choke them.
So in a nutshell Wet Dishcloth Horse is at the very best
place to make him better but I have told him, he needs to try much, much harder.
This is because and I am shocked to admit it; I miss him a lot.
This is astonishing as I previously thought that I didn’t
like him very much, which just goes to show that you never fully appreciate
what you have until it is taken away even if the thing you have lost has only
disappeared for a short length of time.
If you could spare a thought for my orange-white-legged pony
I would be most grateful and I dearly hope that I will be bringing him home
with 2 working and yet strangely coloured eyes in the near future.
I had considered cancelling my horse’s insurance many times
over the past few years and I thank the Saints at Equine Champneys that I never
got around to doing it. I have to confess that I am seriously looking into insuring
the shit cat that I own as well because you just never know what is around the
corner.