Equine Champneys

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.