Continued
about horses, but the link is thus: like Felix my hair
often got tangled and most days Mum found it easier
to plait my hair on a morning than deal with my
whinging at night when she brushed it out. Mum has
had a lot of practice at plaiting. Little braids on Felix
were a doddle. Tail? Just like skull-plaiting. Easy. In
the end, my job was reduced to standing there looking
pretty and holding him while Mum, Jane and handy
daughter Sophie took on the braiding.
Even so, we made progress. We got his whole body
in there on the third day. We closed the door on the
fourth. On the fifth day we drove down the driveway,
a grand total of three metres. On the last day we were
so bloody busy we didn't get to put him in the float
at all and were forced, on the morning of the show, to
get him in again in the dark, in a different spot so that
we could see at least a bit of what we were doing in
the light of the barn, and then hope that he'd be okay
with rocking about in there for an hour. I'll return to
the events of that morning, but first; Friday night.
The promise of cheap plonk was enough to tempt
Neighbour Jane down from the hill to help get Felix
ready. He was bathed, an exercise in tolerance if I've
ever seen one, freshly groomed and gleaming. Some
considerable effort had gone into the disentangling of
his tail. Felix has yet to lose his curly baby tail hairs
and is often to be seen with dreadlocks as a result.
Jane arrived as the afternoon baked to a close; small
army of helpful children in tow. First to the mercy of
her grooming box was the gloriously wild hill-pony
mane. Pulled, thinned and conditioned, Felix's hair
at last fell into submission and was banded up into
little bunches. These had to be carefully counted;
Jane tells me that the knots must be an odd number.
Eventually one of us managed to get from ears to
wither without losing count and his bunches were
deemed satisfactory. Then to the plaiting.
I should mention, perhaps, that as a little girl I had
very long hair. This may seem irrelevant to a story
Braiding and
plaiting disaster
with the wrong
shade of pale
thread.
After the braids came the rosettes, and following
Jane's heartbroken discovery that her thread was the
wrong shade of pale for Felix's hair colour, we dug
out more little rubber bands. By now Felix's hair
had started to escape and stick up. Poor Sophie had
to sacrifice her hairspray in order to wrestle it back
under control.
It took nearly two hours in total. Felix is a very hairy
pony. Mum had never plaited a horse before, let alone
a horse's tail, but apparently my long hair wasn't too
much different because her first attempt was pretty
well on the mark. Neighbour Jane has