All gone!

Shh, listen…. Seriously, SSSSHHHHH!… Hear that? It’s the sound of silence.

If I go out into the garden I can’t hear any whinnying or neighing. I can’t even hear CC2 constantly going in and out of the back door with whatever stuff she takes with her to do horse stroking, and I definitely can’t hear the sound of wet turf being trampled on, whatever that sounds like.

Because the horse is no longer. It has moved on to a better place. It’s not dead, I’d like to clarify, I just mean it’s literally gone to a better place. An actual, bona fide, licensed (are they licensed?) horse hotel. Somewhere with concrete and buckets and hosepipes and all that hotel shit they have. Probably even parking.

I’ve no idea about the details because I’ve not had the ‘pleasure’ yet of going, but CCs 1 and 2 have been doing the rounds as usual with their clipboards and hardhats and have selected a suitable hotel that’s, presumably, reassuringly expensive and serves bottles of the best Eau de Nag ’98 and freshly-steamed hay twice-hourly in the horse sauna.

If you’ve been following this sorry tale on this sorry blog, you’ll know that there wasn’t just the actual nag staying at Chez Skint Towers for the last thousand years, but its two mini minders too. Yes, the nag had staff in the shape of two little Breyer shitlands. Slightly smaller than our dog, they were apparently seconded to act as security detail to keep wolves and bears away, and also as company. Which was ironic as they hated each other.

But, these equine interlopers have also passed on and gone to live on a farm. They’re not dead either, just to clarify, they’ve gone home to their farm. Which all means that my garden is now 100% horse-free which, like a Tesco’s Value burger, is exactly as it’s supposed to be.

Apart from one small issue of course. Have you ever seen those photos from Glastonbury the day after it ends, with acres of rubbish and abandoned tents and stuff everywhere? Well, it’s all a bit like that around here. The first thing to notice is the enormous pile of gently steaming shit that’s stacked up on one side of the garden. Even Glastonbury doesn’t sink that low. And so, as I’ve had to do all summer, I have to mow a little zig-zag path around the manure mountain. Which sort of emphasises it even more, if anything, like I’m tending to a monument of some kind as the groundskeeper.

This will apparently go on to flower beds come the spring, but as our flower beds are currently 3-foot deep in weeds I’m not sure that that’ll really help anything, apart from the weeds. But until then, no matter how ‘natural’ and ‘rich in nutrients’ CC1 keeps telling me it is, it’s just a big pile of shit at the end of the day.

And then there’s everything else — empty plastic sacks blowing across the garden like modern tumbleweeds, shovels and forks, wheelbarrows and bags of rubbish. And a light covering of hay absolutely everywhere, like an equine version of snow.

And has my garage been cleared out of all the nag junk that was being stored there while the horse stayed over? Has it fuck. It’s still piled up in there. Boxes of horse stuff with horse things leaning against them and other, assorted horse items everywhere. I don’t know what they are and I don’t wish to know. I just know I don’t like them, in all their annoying pinkness. Still, at least there’s no actual living horse in there as there was recently when CC2 decided to groom it out of the rain.

So hopefully that particular chapter has come to a close. It was supposed to be very temporary when it started. A chapter in a short story, or even a page in a pamphlet. But it ended up like a chapter in a Dostoevsky novel; much longer that I’d hoped, full of misery and poverty and ultimately, pretty hard going. And all in a completely foreign language that I didn’t understand.

So let this be a lesson to you. I believe I’ve said it a few times before, but clearly not everyone was listening. CC1 for starters. Do. Not. Let. A. Horse. Onto. Your. Property.

I think I’m going to have to do some work to protect my garden now that it’s actually moved out, like a landlord who’s finally evicted an unwelcome and non-paying tenant and changes the locks. Can you buy attractive barbed wire perhaps? Maybe stuff that’s designed to look like ivy or something? If not then I might invent it and secure the perimeter. This place is on lockdown from now on, you mark my words!