Rule number one for horse-owners: every accident that happens to a horse is a freak accident

Every accident that happens to a horse is a freak accident. Rule number one. Once you grasp that as a horse-owner you are on your way to understanding the nature of the bind you are in.

When Gracie went suddenly lame on a routine hack a few years ago, you may remember, it turned out she had trodden on a piece of old animal bone, which pierced the soft part of her foot. The bone fragment travelled upwards, turned right and sliced into her flexor tendon. The head surgeon at Liphook equine hospital emerged from his operating theatre that night to declare that the chance of an injury like that was ‘many hundreds of millions to one’. Holding the two-inch-long piece of bone fragment in a test tube, he declared himself well and truly impressed.

Seven weeks and many thousands of pounds later she was almost completely better, and a miracle was declared by the experts. Rule number 2: all recoveries are miracles. As such, no reassurance whatsoever may be given about a horse’s condition by any expert until the moment that the animal is completely and demonstrably better, by which point you don’t need any reassurance.

Almost as soon as I brought home Darcy, the thoroughbred yearling, she staged her first freak accident by deciding to climb a very high fence out of her field. She became stuck, all but impaled herself on a post and was barely able to walk for days. But after a haematoma the size of a watermelon on her chest subsided, she was back to normal. ‘Behold! It’s a miracle!’ everyone declared.

Aside from a runny nose and a cough that mimicked strangles but wasn’t strangles — rule number 3, subsection 2: all horse illnesses are never quite any definable illness in particular, but bear a vague resemblance to a condition the vet sort of thinks it might have, although it really isn’t like any form of it he has ever seen before — she has been no trouble for pretty much three years.