EQUESTRIANS Parts I & II

One of the reasons Bloggiana and I are friends is our shared love of the equine. This is a shameful confession. Some day soon, I hope to be cured. Some day soon, my secret, lusty, under-the-covers encounters with tack catalogues, pony manuals, Horse & Hound magazine and Dressage competition calendars will be a thing of the past. In that blissful future, I will be able to look at my Top Hat box without going shakey at the knees. I will wake up on a Saturday morning at 8am and not feel guilty that I have not already polished my pitchfork. I will go to the supermarket and not have large pieces of straw dangling from my person and that sweet but unmistakeable aroma of haylage emanating from my hands like steam. Some day soon, I will have cash for shoes. And the only septic tank clearance I will require will be the colonic irrigation I will be able to treat myself to, twice a week at least.

In the meantime, Bloggiana and I continue to love our ponies. They are our counsellors and our confidantes. They know our weaknesses intimately and they are too kind and sweet to make us suffer anything more than passing waves of shame.

For twelve years now, we have kept our beasts at the same livery yard. The yard is not particularly big and generally speaking, our co-tenants are a friendly lot. We exchange dates for hacks, first aid advice, tales from the competition frontline. Sometimes, I run my hand over a horse’s hock and suck in my breath knowledgeably. Or someone does the same for me and mine and we roll our eyes in frenzied fearful cash-poor anticipation because the only people out there who make a real profit from this business are the vets (of which more anon). Injuries, falls, run-ins with local farmers make us go ooo on a weekly basis. We rush off in posses to hear German riders tell us how it should be done. We come back and try and force our poor forgiving friends to replicate it, knowing full well that nothing is ever going to change except perhaps the sheen on our velvet topped safety helmets which sure as eggs does not enjoy the rain.

Last year our yard was thrown into a bit of a frenzy when for the first time in living memory, there arrived in the owners’ midst a man. Not only are men an endangered species on the middle-of-the-road livery landscape. But those few that do exist are often quite special. So into our lives came Stud. He said he had been a sniper at Goose Green and before that, had trained for MI5. He had shot in Belfast he said and in other foreign postings. His he said had been a brilliant career and at this, he would her-herm modestly, giving all comers a few moments to digest. Now, said Stud, owing to a series of unfortunate events, he was working as a long-distance lorry driver, living when he was not on the road in a rented one-bedroom flat in Barrow-in-Furness (cost probably £5 per week). All of which meant Stud had to keep his horse on full livery (cost around £90 per week) and could only turn up on Tuesdays.

Stud’s horse was called Mary Quant. She was a tall white plank on stilts with a head like a starter’s flag and a brain to match. Mary Quant was dangerous and anyone delegated to leading her out to the field often ended up in the local cottage hospital with contusions. Once in the field, Mary Quant would walk a small circle – possibly no more than 3 metres in diameter. Stud said she would settle down if you sat in the field alongside her – and he would do so, for hours at a time, on Tuesdays. For the rest of the week, she had to content herself with spinning like a top, unloved.

When Stud was not driving his trucks or sitting with Mary Quant in the field, or pulling up his britches which were extremely tight and anatomically really quite revealing, he would tell you his dreams. One day, he said, he would put Mary Quant in foal. He thought if she had a filly, he would call it Coco Chanel. And if she had a colt, perhaps Karl Lagerfeld. Or even Alexander McQueen, he would muse wistfully.

On Tuesdays, Stud liked to arrive well before anyone else. He would bring a bag of carrots and spend those first few hours before Mary Quant went into the field grating them lovingly. Sometimes at the end of the day, he would take Mary Quant for a walk – if you asked him why he did not ride her, he would become tongue-tied. Something about the horse bolting along a trunk road into the path of oncoming lorries. Something about her not having much of a mouth or much of a sense of self-preservation or very good balance when going at full tilt along traffic-ironed tarmac. If you pressed him, you could persuade Stud to confess that he did not so much as own a saddle. If you pressed him still further, you could persuade him to admit that in fact over the three years of their partnership, he had ridden Mary Quant just twice. (And after Mary Quant had put leader-outer number three into the first aid post with multiple abrasions, we began to see that perhaps his no-ride policy made sense.)

Finally Stud and Mary Quant were given their marching orders from our yard. They had lasted about three months, which is a relatively short tenure in livery terms. When I spoke to our yard owner about what had tipped the balance, she said it was not one thing but several. Firstly, she said, she had received an anonymous phone call alleging that Stud had enjoyed ‘inappropriate relations’ with his horse some time in the past. The livery yard owner said she gave absolutely no credence to the claim. But secondly, she said, she had always been worried by those britches. Thirdly, she said, Stud had got rather testy with her when she had refused to grate Mary Quant’s carrots. But finally, she said, there was the small matter of fear. She said over the years, she had dealt with some dangerous horses but MQ took the biscuit. She thought the horse sooner or later would kill. And she for one did not want to be there when it happened.

On the day of his departure, we waved Stud and Mary off and up the ramp into their future. It turned out he had stayed longer with us than with any of the previous fourteen yards they had sampled. And as he left, he was heard to say rather ruefully that it was the first time the horse had been the one expelled and not him.