The politics of horse muck

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message.

The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off.

Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse muck out of the fields at the country estate where he has been grazing his two cobs until we can move them to be with my two horses at the new stable yard we have just taken a lease on.

This mania for ‘poo picking’ is all very well if you are talking about paddock maintenance. I’m out there with a shovel every day in the small private paddocks where we now keep my thoroughbred and pony.

But when your horses are turned away in a herd with a dozen others in the vast parkland of an English country house it is a different system.