{"id":1879,"date":"2009-08-02T22:46:46","date_gmt":"2009-08-02T21:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=1879"},"modified":"2009-08-02T23:05:31","modified_gmt":"2009-08-02T22:05:31","slug":"i-am-not-doing-that-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=1879","title":{"rendered":"I am not doing that again"},"content":{"rendered":"

which is a silly fucking statement to make because i made it several weeks ago, but somehow i got talked in to doing it by sammi…<\/em><\/p>\n

Buying horses is a tortuous process at the best of times, but we have (‘we’ being horse-buyers) the potential within us to make it a thousandfold worse than the painful, heartbreaking hell that it already is.<\/p>\n

How do we do this?<\/p>\n

We travel.<\/p>\n

‘I am not travelling hundreds of miles to see a bunch of prospects who won’t measure up when I get to their stables,’ I said, some weeks ago.<\/p>\n

‘I’ve done that and had my heart broken a thousand times, I’m not doing it again,’ I continued.<\/p>\n

Should have stuck to my guns.<\/p>\n

Today I drove a four hundred mile round-trip to look at two horses.<\/p>\n

Both lovely chaps; enticingly worded in the adverts and yes, I should have STUCK TO MY FUCKING GUNS.<\/p>\n

But no, Sammi applied pressure because she has the female shopping gene except in her genetic makeup her shopping gene is larger than my house.<\/p>\n

So I went.<\/p>\n

Horse 1, the dark bay warmblood; was an absolute poppet, a real sweetie. But it all adds up, when one arrives on the scene and is able to query the vendor in some detail.<\/p>\n

Yes, it all adds up, the ligament operation, the box rest, the stopping on the cross country course, the virus, and is that two sarcoids I can see tucked away low on his chest?<\/p>\n

None of these things, I should emphasise, is his fault. But with that many questions one just doesn’t proceed so I was straight with them and left the poor owner probably feeling like shit, though I did my best to make her see it wasn’t his fault.<\/p>\n

Horse 2, the registered Irish Sport Horse, had a very fetching air about him. He was huge, slightly larger than the 17-hands he’d been advertised at but quite fine in a TBx kind of way. Clean-limbed, good-footed, gentle, willing; straight-moving through his back, and very well-balanced on the concrete, he did a lovely couple of trot-ups.<\/p>\n

The owner tacked him up while I changed in to suitable clothes and I watched her work in. After 10 minutes I sat on.<\/p>\n

Twenty minutes later I dismounted, gently told her why I wasn’t going to be proceeding, got in the car and began the painfully long drive home from darkest Lincolnshire.<\/p>\n

Part-way back, the girl at the yard who had borrowed my lorry called to say she’d had a lovely day, thanked me warmly and then said that she couldn’t restart it to put it back in its bay.<\/p>\n

From the description it sounds like a stuck starter motor.<\/p>\n

By the time I got back to our Oxfordshire hideaway it was after 22.00.<\/p>\n

So much for an early night on a Sunday.<\/p>\n

But I’ll tell you one thing my friends.<\/p>\n

I am not doing that again.<\/p>\n

Travelling hundreds of miles to see horses?<\/p>\n

No way, I’m done with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

which is a silly fucking statement to make because i made it several weeks ago, but somehow i got talked in to doing it by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}