Every day in every way we are paying for more and more. I realise this increasingly. Things we took for granted as free are added inexorably to the list of things we are charged for. And now we have rural parking charges, by which I don’t mean we are going to be charged for parking
After sanding floorboards for two days I became even more demented than usual. The hand sander was the exact right size to make it horribly arduous but just about possible to do the entire downstairs floor this way, and so I persisted even when I should have given up and hired a large machine. By
Dear customer, we are invading your privacy and sending you this unsolicited email in order to tell you that you are entitled to not get any unsolicited emails from us under new data privacy laws. Here at Easi-Equine (…or fill in name of company you have never contacted and never wanted to have anything to
Now I know how the Karate Kid felt. Two hours after I began oiling the newly laid deck in my garden, I could barely move my arms. Wax on, wax off, I kept repeating. I knelt until I had rib marks in my knees so deep they looked as though they might never come out.
‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the women’s powder room of a Mayfair hotel. I get this a lot. I want to talk about where I have wintered, or summered, or springed, because although I am poor I am lucky enough to
Laminitis is a lot like alcoholism. Once you cross the line you can’t go back. ‘My name’s Gracie and I’m a grassoholic,’ is what the skewbald pony should be saying at least three times a week to other grassoholics like herself. She hit rock bottom a few months ago at the start of the spring
The first time I saw a woman leading a horse down the lane on a lead, both she and it dressed from head to foot in high viz, she in a crash helmet and safety vest, I thought nothing of it. But that was a good year ago now, and since then the increasing number
Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined a tennis club. In fact, I haven’t joined a tennis club so much as joined a group of women with a tennis coach who meet once a week for instruction at a court in Surbiton.
‘You’ve got your essay on your back, then?’ said the stable yard owner as I headed out with Darcy on our morning hack. I have taken to wearing a hi-visibility vest even though I swore I would never join the Day-Glo brigade: large women on fat cobs plodding very slowly down the road in so
‘If this madness goes on, I will not be able to leave my house without downloading the app,’ I told my friend, who had been exhorting me to download the app for something. In fact, I had been trying to book a fun ride. Every year, my horsey friends and I go on these cross
‘How could you forget to get on the train?’ asked the keeper. ‘I can understand how you forgot to get off the train, but how were you standing on the platform waiting for another train to go back the other way, and the train came but you forgot to get on it?’ I had been
The broken mirror lay in hundreds of shattered pieces on my bathroom floor, having fallen off the wall while I was out. I had hung it with one of those ‘easy fix’ sticky-back hooks that don’t require drilling or screws. You know the ones. They don’t damage your walls or your tiles. And they don’t
The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed. I looked at my watch, blinking in the gloom of the energy-saving bulb as it grudgingly dribbled out a slither of light. It was 3 a.m. and there was a strangled wheezing sound in my bedroom. I’m
‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ I screamed through the window of the car while driving down Cobham High Street. ‘Are you aware,’ my saner self said to me, ‘that you are driving down Cobham High Street screaming a slogan from a film?’ ‘Yes,’ I said to my
We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just
‘I bet Brian May isn’t lying on his back in a field shelter wondering how long it’s going to take for the snow to cover him and whether the horses will just poo right on top of his frozen head,’ I thought. Then, groaning in agony, another annoying thought surfaced in the annals of my
‘Good afternoon, my name is Bradley, and how may I be of help to you today?’ After you’ve spent ten minutes negotiating an automated system that quite clearly aims to frustrate you from ever getting through to a human being, when you do get through to one, through dint of your own bloody-minded refusal to
Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations… I didn’t want any of them. Back in 1981, I did want a CB radio and I nearly got one too, but then my mother found out that lorry drivers were on them and the
After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense, but as virtual reality is more important than physical reality nowadays, this is pretty heavy stuff. Specifically, I want to cease to exist on Facebook, Twitter and all other social networking platforms, where I barely
Why do people find it so hard to believe that a horse can be a psychopath? Not an obvious, screaming mad psychopath either. A brooding, deceptively quiet sort of psychopath who turns on a sixpence. I arrived at Tara’s field the other day to find one of the girls with a horse in the neighbouring
