Dear Diary

Thank you to all of you who sent love and vibes to me last week – not for the healing of my foot, but more for me surviving mother’s wrath; clearly many of you recognise the very real strain that living with her causes. Thinking about it I haven’t tried ulcers so maybe that could be my next trick?!

For any of you not up to speed on the ongoing saga of my soggy sole, it started the other week when Cool New Shoes Man (CNSM) came to shoe me following a superb progress report from Herman the German Needle Man, who was thrilled with the results of my stem cell injections: he’s finally finished the swimming pool (tiled with my face at the bottom) and still has funds for a new jacuzzi…

Anyway CNSM had discovered I had a “spongy” patch on the stem cell-injected foot at the site of the supposedly healed “hole of Hovis”, which gave rise to some mild hysterics (mostly mother), some muted swearing (mostly CNSM) and a LOT of gaffer tape being wrapped around my foot as I was packed back into a poultice faster than a defecting MP crosses the floor of the House of Commons.

In a pretty similar vein to Boris Johnson’s current plans, nothing much came out from the poultice over the weekend, so Herman and CNSM liaised before ringing mother with their cunning plan. Bless them, they were so proud of their plan, a plan in their minds so cunning you could have put a tail on it and called it a weasel, a plan as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University, a plan with complexity and huge amounts of technical depth…

Yep, they agreed to take my shoes off…

Mother’s suggestion that the words “cunning plan” had marched with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of the conversation, accompanied by the steady drip of sarcasm, seemed to roll off their backs like water off my derriere and so CNSM was dispatched as minister of cunning plan execution. My feet were trimmed, tarted and tickled before, for the first time in many many years, being left bereft of shoes like Cinders after midnight.

To be clear I haven’t had shoes on my back feet for like forever, but I have always been shod on the front so there has been concern expressed (mainly by mother) that I might find being shoeless rather hard and thus be more “foot sore” than a nudist at a pebble beach. I was, however, told in no uncertain terms I was going to have to “deal with it” as mother has no more body parts of saleable quality and thus a repeat of the “foot fiasco of February 2019” would lead to a one-way date with some goodnight juice and the greatest loss to the British Equestrian World since Shergar.

I think to be fair mum underestimates herself – I’m sure her breasticles if sold on a by weight basis for meat would a) feed a small family of four for a month and b) would fund the north extension on Herman Towers from at least foundation to finish…

Anyway, mother was clearly concerned about my ability to function without formal footwear and as such I felt she should be reassured. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. Considerate. Thus, when she entered my field the following day I treated her to a demonstration of my soundness by running at full tilt towards her (and my food bucket to be fair) with the focused speed and intensity of the line up in the mothers’ race at sport day. Which was all fine until I realised that her look of delight at my soundness had turned in slow motion to a look of discernible horror as it became evident that my shoulder and her aforementioned breasticles were on a collision course.

Now in my defence, as I was speeding toward her like Usain Bolt on a promise my attention was momentarily distracted by the sight of a tractor of terror coming out of the field opposite and thus I might possibly have misjudged my stopping distance. Just a tad. What I will say is that on occasion science can be proved wrong and while mother is not exactly aerodynamic, she can travel at one hell of a clip – her zero to 50 acceleration was seriously impressive. It was like the movie Speed, only slightly less buses and slightly more boobage.

She was so overcome with emotion that she needed to have a very ladylike lie down; I’m pretty sure that her inability to speak came from the emotion of seeing how sound I was and that the tears were those of joy. I can also happily report that my feed bucket survived the impact intact and miraculously upright, so I did what all good horses do and gave mother some time to compose herself whilst I ate my dinner.

She was grateful I could tell; what with the gasping and what sounded like prayers. What I will say is mum needs to think about her hypocrisy as she limped out of my field looking more than 3/5ths lame and clearly extremely foot sore – those in glass houses mother, those in glass houses…

Laters,
Hovis