Real life: I always regress to a three-year-old when my horses aren’t well

‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised sole.

According to Horse Scene, a bruised sole can happen as quickly as stepping on a stone. (I imagine that a bruised soul can happen just as easily, but that is where my knowledge of the matter begins and ends, because there are no magazines on the shelves of Farrants newsagents in Cobham with articles on bruised souls, so far as I can see, which is a shame.)

Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, has a bruised sole precisely because she stepped on a stone. She felt a bit funny when I was riding her, and then when I turned her out in her field afterwards she didn’t look right at all.