30th May 2008

Sorry, no photos of this event! No time to grab the camera.

Anyway, never ever trust your pony. It is not a good thing.

We decided, in our naive stupidity, to move the herd up to the fields surrounding my house. On paper, it is an easy enough task (about 1/2 mile away) and one that we have done many times. My house is next to open hill which is basically a 25 mile square field.

So, we positioned my neighbour by her garden with a pitchfork (78 years old and not afraid to use it!) and Robert (Jo's lad) on the cattle grid. My Landrover across the road to block it and Jo opened the gates and pushed the ponies up the road with her van.

They went at a steady speed and trotted happily up, ignoring my neighbour brandishing pitchfork, the cattlegrid and turned right down my track, breaking into a canter. I jumped into my Landrover and followed keeping the pressure up for them to go forwards and go home. The gate was open, two Shetlands in the home field calling them, and to a man, they all swerved right into the hill giggling, bucking and farting, leaving their two Shetland friends irate in their field.

We ran after them for miles while they ignored us and kept going, onwards and upwards. Eventually, about 30 minutes later, they saw their "friends" and headed for the field. So, we opened the gate and everyone piled into the field except FOR TWO PONIES (Ljosfaxi and Charlot) who thought it would be more fun to play together and keep going.

Try as we might, we could not get them into the field. They were wild, uncatchable and stupid, egging each other on. Deciding that they could never go through the gate, while we meanwhile tried to herd them through and stop the others coming out again, we let them canter back to the original gate (the one they had swerved past), whereupon they turned in and someone let them into the field.

Bloody, bloody ponies!!!! This whole debacle took 1 hour of running and swearing.

So, we are splitting up Ljosfaxi and Charlot (the two wanderers) as they are very bad for each other. Ljosfaxi is a known mad horse and he is difficult to catch and handle with many issues. His ideas are rubbing off on Charlot and doing him no favours. The decision has been made!