The foal is out of hospital and back home. To recap: the foal cost £600 and her first veterinary bill, sustained when she threw herself on top of a fence post, cost £768. That’s fine. I know horse owning makes no sense. I’m coming to the conclusion that life in general makes no sense.
What I’m slightly less sanguine about is the fact that no sooner had we put little Darcy in her stable and shut the door than one of the others started limping.
Gracie, the skewbald sports pony, came out of her box lame for no apparent reason, though when we examined her it seemed more than likely she had an abscess brewing in her right forefoot owing to the slimy weather. So we bandaged her up and put her back in the stable next to the foal.
The two of them are bored senseless being on box rest but try to keep each other amused by sticking their heads over the partition and biting each other’s faces. I suppose this is no worse than what goes on in most NHS wards.
Grace, who is on a shavings bed, has also taken to stealing mouthfuls of Darcy’s straw. With too much time on her hands, she has come rather neurotically to the conclusion that the service she is receiving is less salubrious than that afforded Darcy, even though shavings are more expensive. Every time I walk into the block, Gracie looks at me accusingly as if I am deliberately running a two-tier system.
When I pet Darcy, Grace, who has never before shown the slightest sign of aggression, lunges at the partition and tries to take a chunk out of her. When I say, ‘Hello, Darcy’, Gracie neighs hysterically as if to say, ‘What about me? What about meeeeeeeee!’
The only way to pacify her is to totally ignore the yearling until I have stuffed Gracie’s stable full of hay and petted her for ten minutes. Normally, she hates being petted. Now she laps it up. All the while I’m scratching her neck, she gives Darcy smug glances out of the corner of her eye.
I don’t know how parents of actual human children cope with this. The one blessing is that Tara, the 22-year-old hunter, doesn’t mind at all because she is as wise as an old owl and has worked out that the more horses silly mummy buys, the more she gets to stand idle in a field eating grass.
But truth be told, I am struggling with being a mother-of-three. Even before Gracie and Darcy went lame, I was starting to look like one of those harassed housewives who puts her children’s clothes on back to front.
My riding friends, who are all sensible enough to limit themselves to one horse, groom their mounts for hours before we hack out, while I run between stables seeing to three horses, pulling a spaniel on the end of a lead.
While the ‘only’ horses are brushed and pampered until they gleam, their hooves painted and their manes combed, Gracie has been ridden out with her bridle askew, her mane standing on end and shavings in her tail.
I had only just got on top of this situation — honing my routine to a finely tuned military operation designed to ensure all three horses receive precisely one third of me each day — when Darcy threw a spanner in the works by impaling herself on a fence.
So now my routine is even more high maintenance. I spend my day ministering to various lumps, bumps, dressings and bandages.
And like a new mother who can only discuss the contents of her children’s nappies or how long they are sleeping at night, I have only two topics of conversation: the size of Darcy’s hematoma — it is now the size of a galia melon, whereas it was more of a guava last week — or the progress of Gracie’s abscess. Neither of these topics do particularly well at dinner parties.
I am also obsessed with the idea that they will sustain yet more injuries if they go on squabbling.
I therefore got the builder boyfriend to go over both stables with a hammer and pliers making safe every slightly proud protuberance so that there are no sharp edges.
As I watched him work, it crossed my mind that it might be an idea to line the boxes with some sort of padded cell material. But that would be silly and paranoid, I thought. Then I heard myself saying, ‘How about we line the walls with padded cell material?’
The boyfriend banged in a tiny nail that I was eyeing neurotically.
‘How about I put you in a padded cell?’ He was only half smiling.
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