Poor old Paddy. He woke up on Monday morning with what can at best be classed as terrible constipation. Horses are trickle feeders, and their gut relies on a small steady intake of food to keep everything moving. Colic, usually down to impactions or eating something that has decided to disagree with them, is never a good thing in horses and ponies, and down the years we’ve lost one or two to such things. Hence when it appeared that Paddy had spent a whole night rolling around his stable in discomfort, we called up Sean the vet immediately.

Now Sean and Paddy have some history, as Paddy’s previous encounter was with Sean as the Terrible Castrator, and to be honest, Paddy has had better days than that, but he was feeling so awful that he let Sean poke around. A line was apparently drawn when Sean produced a shoulder length glove, so Paddy got sedated and had his second worst day.

By the evening things hadn’t improved, and we were tired of watching for signs of poor old pony having a poo, so Sean duly arrived again and once again sedated, Paddy had his third worst encounter, and a tube up his nose, closely followed by a quantity of liquid paraffin. We then spend an evening walking round the paddock in the dark to see if movement would follow movement.

The next morning we waited for bated breath to see if there were any signs of the liquid paraffin, but no, and so several cups of dissolved epsom salts later, and a certain amount of wresting, and Paddy and I settled back down to hoping that something resembling horse shit would appear.

Finally, at lunch time, Paddy produced the goods, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief, and I am pleased to say that by this evening all seemed back to normal. Pony is thankful that people have stopped poking tubes and arms into him, and we’re just happy that he’s well again.

And its only tuesday.