How I fought the urge to panic-buy – and won

‘Get me Heygates on the phone! I need that order of pony nuts now, damn it!’ It was like a scene from a disaster movie, only at the country store. The owner’s son was yelling at staff. The car park was a seething mass of battered 4x4s. Men with walkie-talkies were corralling the panicking horse owners.

Inside the main hanger of the store, women in jodhpurs were loading up nuts and chaff like there was no tomorrow. And indeed there would be no tomorrow, for a lot of ponies, if they didn’t stop bulk-buying horse feed.

I heaved on to a trolley my usual sack of oaty mix, happily still in stock, a sack of the store’s own brand pony nuts from a dwindling pile almost at floor level, and a bag of Alfa-A. Over at the dog food, I loaded up one sack of biscuits and two cartons of wet food.