The Word Cloud

I first met George three years ago.  He arrived on a battered old horse trailer, and pottered down the ramp dressed in weird headgear, sparkly ear covers and a fly fringe not normally worn by horses travelling.  I was later to find him dressed in other weird ways, feathers are tied in his mane, he wears strange looking bunches or plaits, and unusual, non functional boots and rugs.  What George thinks of these adornments is unclear.  He doesn’t seem to notice, he’s too busy eating or scratching his enormous arse.

            George is a fourteen hand traditional cob gelding with ice blue eyes and long white feathers flowing over his feet.  For those of you non-horsey people, a hand is four inches, the width across an average man’s knuckles in fact.  Feathers are what we call the long fur that hangs down around a horses feet.  So he is not at all the ‘my little pony’ type of animal.  The adornments inflicted upon him are akin to putting Mike Tyson in a dress.

            Now I love and I hate George.  He is a clever pony who has run me ragged over the three years he has been a livery at my yard.  Perhaps the most annoying thing he did was when we were stupid enough to leave our Landrover in the field unattended for five minutes.  We arrived back to find George sitting on it, yes, literally sitting on it whilst he rubbed his huge bottom from side to side making a huge dent in the front wing of the sturdily built car.  The dent is still there, it’s too expensive to mend but every time I look at it I could strangle George.  He has broken no end of other things too, fences, gates, stable toys, and once he flooded the whole stable block by sitting on his automatic water dispenser, again to scratch his ample behind.  But despite all this, I love the pony to pieces.

            But poor George has a very sore back at present and yesterday I took him into the horse hospital for further xrays and tests.  Bear in mind that I am the owner/manager of a livery yard and normally viewed as very knowledgeable and confident.  A pillar of strength in fact to my less confident and knowledgeable clients.  I like them to think of me as able to deal with any horsey problem and handle all their horses easily and confidently.  But does George care about that?  Oh no.  George has his own agenda.  George does what George wants to do, goes where George wants to go.  I knew we may have problems loading him into the lorry and so took his owner’s Gran and one of my other clients who volunteered to drive, with me.  We loaded George up and got to the hospital in good time.  When we arrived and checked into the secure gated car park, we saw it was already full of several other lorries and trailers.  A busy time for the equine hospital.  We unloaded George without problems and tied him up to the lorry where he munched his hay contentedly.  I spotted our nice German vet coming over towards us and so untied George ready to take him for examination.  The vet had been to see George on two other occasions and had prodded and poked him and stabbed him with sharp needles, so was not one of George’s favourite people.  As soon as George heard the vet’s voice he was out of there, dragging me with him across the busy car park.  Everyone was watching, everyone saw I could not control this naughty pony.  Eventually I managed to get him under control and we took him into the ménage to lunge him for the vet to judge his soundness.  Again, for those not in the know, lunging is when you put a horse on the end of a long line and have him circle around you.  I bent down to pick up something the vet had dropped and George was off again, out of the ménage, and across the car park with me dragging helplessly behind.  As we picked up speed I was forced to drop the rope and George enjoyed a few minutes at liberty whilst I tried in vain to catch him.  To cut a long story short, it didn’t end there.  George was twitched, where you put a rope loop attached to the end of a long piece of wood around the horse’s top lip and twist it around until it is very tight.  This looks barbaric, but in fact has been used for centuries to calm horses.  Apparently it releases endorphins and acts as a natural sedative to quickly calm frightened or naughty horses.  It is the only way to get a needle near George.  Eventually the vet injected George with a proper sedative and George was sleepy.  He wobbled, he crossed his back legs and almost fell over on several occasions, but every time the vet came near him with another needle, he miraculously woke up and charged around with me looking stupid.  That was not the end.  We had to load him back on the lorry to go home.  He refused point blank to go up the ramp.  I tried everything, every trick I knew.  Nothing worked.  As is the case in horsey circles, there were plenty of ‘experts’ around to offer their advice and make you look even more stupid.  One kind man linked hands with me behind George’s enormous bottom and we tried to force him up the ramp, with another person pulling from the front end.  At that point George decided to relieve himself all over our hands as we sweated to push him up the ramp.  He looked smugly round at us as if to say ‘what d’you think of that then?’

            ‘I need a man,’ said the man helping me

            ‘What?’ I said

            ‘A man, someone strong.’

            Luckily, a strongly built man walked forwards from the gathering crowd.  They tried again, almost lifted Georges hind feet off the ground, such were their efforts, but George simply set his front feet further in front of him, and did what he did best, sat down, sending the poor unfortunate men flying over backwards onto the concrete.  They gave up.  More people came forward with their foolproof suggestions, nothing worked.  It looked like we were there for the foreseeable future.