Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of course, when someone comes calling for either Fox or Stripe it's going to be beautifully
straightforward just handing them over, isn't it? That won't upset the boys at all, will it? That
won't scar them for life or anything. Years from now, as Samuel pours his heart out in ther-
apy, he'll be asked what his abiding childhood memory is. 'When I was nine my daddy took
away my little kitten, she was called Fox, and he gave her to a stranger. It has consumed my
every waking moment since. That is why I hit him with a shovel.'
All of this became apparent immediately on my arrival home and there was no point fighting
it. Check mate, Natalie, you diabolical, evil genius.
Resistance is utterly futile. I may under French law be laughably termed the 'head of the
household', but I am a constitutional monarch - I have no real executive power at all; I'm just
wheeled out occasionally for ceremonial purposes and I'm useful at testing electric fences.
I shrieked again as the testing continued.
If you were to define the word 'stubborn' at a level that everyone understands then 'adjective:
behave like a French horse' would pretty much nail it in my opinion. We had owned Junior
for about two years and he was still as truculent as the day we got him: wilful, moody, almost
unrideable and seemingly determined to escape at any given opportunity. Our relationship is
on the cool side; we are not close.
He was welcomed with optimism on my part. Since we'd moved in I'd been mowing the
land on a
tondeuse
(a sit-down mower) which is every boy's dream, until you actually use
one. They are, in practice, bone-shakingly awful things that throw you about so much that by
the time you've finished, in my case four hours later, you feel like you've been in a cocktail
shaker in the hands of a jittery barman on a kicking bull. When the
tondeuse
, due to a lack of
upkeep and maintenance from me, finally gave up it seemed the 'green' thing to do: give over
most of the land to a horse, then sit back on the
terrasse
and watch Mother Nature mow the
lawn.
The first time I met him I knew there would be trouble. He bit my arm.
'He bit my arm!' I squealed.
'He's just being friendly,' Natalie said.
'But, he bit my arm!'
'You probably upset him.'
'How? By having arms?'
I knew then that whatever this creature did, whatever damage he wrought, whatever may-
hem he caused, he was staying. In Natalie's eyes he could do no wrong.
I built him a stable and he ate the grass - that was the deal. But he never relented in eating
the grass. Then he ran out of grass and wanted the grass on the other side of the fence. Then
he demolished two apple trees and a walnut tree. He just would not stop eating. Nothing
seemed to satisfy his hunger, and he couldn't be exercised because he didn't want to interrupt
his constant eating. And he was always getting out of his paddock; he learnt that if he rolled
