PENNY’S PLACE

Down on Penny Newbold’s farm you’ll find her family and animals, and of course, horses…

Christmas A Horse by Any Other Name… Penny looks back at a lifetime of naming (or misnaming) her beloved ‘Gifts’

equine companions.

T’was the night before

Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” - CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE

But maybe a horse. Or two. Funny how horses always seem to find the most inconvenient times to undertake wild adventures. Why not midnight? On Christmas Eve? What better time could there be to scare our owners out of their wits? On the Christmas Eve in question, my two equine companions decided to bust their gate hinges and, leaping to freedom, galloped merrily down the road. (As any horse owner knows, there is nothing quite like the terror that follows being woken in the middle of the night by the sound of galloping shod hooves clattering on bitumen. Nothing.). Fortunately, being a quiet country back road, the road in question did not tend to be heavily trafficked at midnight on Christmas Eve, apart from the odd Christmas reveller on their way home from (overly exuberant) Christmas celebrations. So, having successfully made their escape, and while I was frantically finding pants and boots in the dark, trying not to wake the entire household, I should imagine their dilemma was, where to go next? It was a dilemma easily solved by the sight of the neighbours immaculately manicured garden. So in my horses went, digging up the neighbours lawn, eating their prize-winning roses and leaving their somewhat overly natural Christmas ‘gifts’ in strategic locations. (Well, they do say it’s good for roses.) Now, these neighbours were not horsey ‘types’, if you know what I mean. They maintained their carefully planned and (expensively) designed garden with research and precision. Not

a blade of grass was out of place, not a leaf permitted to remain on the ground for long enough to mark the immaculate carpet of manicured lawn. I was surprised their kids were even brave enough to walk on the lawn with their shoes on, so much like pristine carpet it appeared. Funnily enough, the fact that the horses did decide to make their break for freedom on Christmas Eve, probably saved me from meeting my fate in the neighbours mulching machine. Despite the damage – and it took my teenage self quite some time to repay the cost of the repair work, it did give my neighbours HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE a lovely story to tell their small children about the time when they got up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning only to find hoof-prints and manure in their yard. (Only moments 42 after I’d removed my wayward four-legged friends from their Christmas Eve playground.) My neighbours at least had a lovely Christmas story for their children. Where on earth could the damage have come from? Why, Santa’s reindeer of course! By the time the kids were up and about and exploring the reindeer’s hoof-prints, the actual culprits were well and truly back in their (repaired) paddock when they met me at breakfast time a couple of hours later - with far more joyful enthusiasm than I felt they were entitled to.

The naming of horses (mine that is) has always been a challenge. Once I’d passed the obligatory ‘Star’, ‘Princess’, ‘Snowflake’ and ‘Blackie’ phase and moved on to the more exotic titles (like ‘Regal Dimples’ - it pains me to admit!) coming up with a show name became an artistic science. And something that I was convinced could ultimately determine the long-term future success or failure of my equine superstar. Things got trickier when I started to incorporate the all-important, (for my ego at least) breeding and parentage references. After I’d made the discovery of how important particular bloodlines were to my riding peers, it didn’t matter how distant the relation was, if it was there – even five generations back – it was relevant! The fact that I had very little

Penny on Mullendorf - otherwise known as Mully. (none if I’m brutally honest) clue about how genetics even really worked in horses, didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. My theory, founded entirely in my imagination, was simple - if their name reflected a distant genetic connection to a superstar,