It wasn’t love at first sight.<\/p>\n
She didn’t look unpleasant<\/em> as such.<\/p>\n Just not my type.<\/p>\n A bit on the small side.<\/p>\n Skinny too,\u00a0painfully thin.<\/p>\n And a funny shape.<\/p>\n Not weird, just not completely normal; big bum, head slightly too large for her body, big bum, dumpy legs, big bum.<\/p>\n And she had a big bum.<\/p>\n But she looked at the world through\u00a0the sweetest, gentlest, most trusting pools of soft brown eyes that I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n Hypnotic eyes.<\/p>\n Trusting eyes.<\/p>\n Intelligent eyes.<\/p>\n With a lot of pain behind them.<\/p>\n We spent half an hour together.<\/p>\n And I decided to give things a go.<\/p>\n For the next six months Taal and I worked together.<\/p>\n I altered her diet, gave her a fitness and exercise plan and got a specialist remedial farrier to see to her poor, poor feet.<\/p>\n The first time I met Taal she had chronic laminitis in both front feet; was 100% lame.<\/p>\n Almost a year later we’d graduated from\u00a0walking\u00a0out in hand to lightly hacking around the Somerset countryside, frightening the living daylights out of motorists.<\/p>\n Eight months after that and we were taking part in fun rides and leaping over small fences.<\/p>\n We\u00a0became well-known on the local show scene;\u00a0that loony bloke and his equally mental mare<\/em>.<\/p>\n We were together for six years, my Taaly and me; six tremendously fun-filled years.<\/p>\n Five years ago this summer she just stopped having fun.<\/p>\n A week later she was gone.<\/p>\n But the photos show her doing what she did best…<\/p>\n Having fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It wasn’t love at first sight. She didn’t look unpleasant as such. Just not my type. A bit on the small side. Skinny too,\u00a0painfully thin.<\/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-31","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\/31","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=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}