Real life: I always regress to a three-year-old when my horses aren’t well

‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised sole.

According to Horse Scene, a bruised sole can happen as quickly as stepping on a stone. (I imagine that a bruised soul can happen just as easily, but that is where my knowledge of the matter begins and ends, because there are no magazines on the shelves of Farrants newsagents in Cobham with articles on bruised souls, so far as I can see, which is a shame.)

Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, has a bruised sole precisely because she stepped on a stone. She felt a bit funny when I was riding her, and then when I turned her out in her field afterwards she didn’t look right at all. When I came back a few hours later to check on her, she was standing still, not eating, her head drooping to the ground.

She could barely walk. I had to pull her back to the yard. In a panic, I rang my friend Lieve, who knows everything about horses: ‘I’ve broken my pony,’ I said, close to tears. I always regress to a three-year-old when my horses are not well.

‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t broken her. I’m on my way.’ Lieve is my fourth emergency service. She is like the AA, only for things with four legs, not four wheels.

Every horse-owner needs a Lieve because you cannot just call the vet any more. The vet will order X-rays, thermal imaging, biopsies, blood tests and psychiatric assessments as soon as look at a horse.