Real life | 17 January 2019

Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier.

Why is the farrier more capricious than a rock star? Why does he hardly ever turn up on the day, much less time, he says he is coming? Why does he not keep a diary? Why does he never return calls? Why does he find it impossible to reply to a text, claiming all manner of bizarre contingencies including that his texts get automatically sent to his iPad, which he only checks at night? And anyway his iPad isn’t working so he didn’t see my 15 messages begging him to come and telling him that for the past two weeks I have been ringing him 75 times a day on average.

I may as well try to get George Clooney on the phone as my farrier. I would have more luck persuading Tom Cruise to visit my horses’ field than get a blacksmith there.

I don’t understand it. It’s not as though the equestrian world is full of sensible people queuing up to shoe horses. The barefoot craze is growing by the day as hippy-dippies decide it’s cruel (and expensive) to nail steel on to their horses’ hooves and much kinder (and cheaper) to force them to walk unsupported on rock-hard roads.

I’ve just totted up all my different farriers over the years and I reckon I’ve reluctantly, kicking and screaming, tried half a dozen. But it’s always the same.

Make no mistake, they were all really excellent at their job. I have no complaints about the quality of their work. Leaving each of them was like a painful divorce from someone you love but can’t live with. I begged and cried and asked if we couldn’t just work out our differences, but in the end it always came down to the same premise: if I didn’t leave and swap to another one, they couldn’t see or hear me any more.