Pony Club Camp-ing it up.

My brother has been at Pony Club camp this week. Quite how a fifteen year old lad plans to entertain himself in a camp dominated by hysterical eleven year old girls is questionable, but that was his problem. Or at least that was his problem until it dawned on me that he would be taking the Irish Cob with him.

The Wayward Child demonstrated his disgust by breaking out of his stable only hours after the Irish Cob left and performing Wild West bronco bucking up and down the track. He then made a rush for the poor dog who was just minding her own business, wandering around in the yard. She was suddenly confronted by a very large pair of brown gnashing teeth, and has been traumatised ever since. When we finally managed to round up the Wayward Child, he paced up and down in the stable sweating and screaming for his friend, which led us in desperation to do a mad, mad thing - we borrowed a pony.

Borrowing a pony is always far more risky than you can imagine when you breezily accept the offer from a concerned friend. For a start, however well the field may be proofed against a large-ish cob and a 16.2hh TB, a cheeky 11hh Welshie can escape within minutes. We found this out the hard way, when the Welshie appeared outside the sitting room window, having totally demolished the garden first, of course. And then there is the problem of Who Is Boss. Who Is Boss can turn even the meekest, mildest mannered horse into a devil creature, and the Wayward Child, at first concerned only with turning the Welshie into a firm friend, soon had his teeth out again. The biggest problem, however, of borrowing a pony is not what the pony itself does, but rather what you, as the borrower, do. The pressure is immense - you convince yourself as you lie in bed each night that the pony has escaped and is running free down the busy main road, or that some horrific poisonous plant has suddenly grown overnight, or that the pony has gorged itself on your lush, barely eaten grass and will refuse to come in the next morning with a horrible Laminitis case. In our case, all this pressure was pretty pointless, partly because there was nothing to worry about - none of these things happened - but also because we needn't have borrowed the pony in the first place, for all the good it did. The Wayward Child remained a nightmare all week, and as much as I schooled, lunged and flat-out-galloped him, he refused to stop pacing and yelling.

However, the stress was worth it to see the reunion between the Wayward Child and the Irish Cob. It was like a Hollywood Movie scene - they dragged us along on the end of our leadropes to touch noses, and the moment we let them loose in the field they did circuits at top speed. Despite the fact that the Wayward Child refused to tire when he ought to have done, he can barely move now.