Well
yes, you may have guessed it, she’s bought the horse! She had him on trial for
a few days and chucked lots of things at him (not literally) and rode him doing
lots of different horsey things that she does, then she had him vetted on
Friday, and he passed (for the uninitiated amongst you a vetting is basically
checking it’s healthy and hopefully not going to drop down dead!) The vet
really liked him and said he was ‘really athletic’.
Dad,
bless him thought the vet was talking about him!
Poor
old Dad got really confused about the process of buying the horse in that the
OSO had described him as being green, forward going, and short coupled.
As
Dad said
‘Why
would you want a horse that was coloured green, only went backwards and was
like a train!’
To
be honest I never could really understand Mum’s enthusiasm for horses, it all
seems to be far too much like hard work and dangerous for that matter.
Dad
and Roger and Alistair also have a great love of a hugely complicated game;
Rugby Union, what a stupid thing to watch! Dad had always played it at school
and up at Sheffield Tigers, he loved it. Mum watched him a few times and
christened him ‘The M1’ ‘cause all the opposition players just ran over him
when he tried to tackle them!
Roger
and Alistair played at school and for Tigers and for Derbyshire, (Roger
actually captained Derbyshire) and Notts Lincs and Derby, so they were quite
good I suppose.
However,
I didn’t share their love of the game. It’s really hard to follow, it stops and
starts all the time, someone just gets going with the ball and then everyone
else just jumps on top of him and the play stops, yet again, they are only
allowed to pass the ball backwards to each other (how stupid is that, passing
it the opposite way you want to go?!!!) plus they didn’t have ‘rules’ they had ‘laws’
how up your own you know what is that?
I
found football to be a MUCH better game to follow, it is dead easy to understand
what is going on and far better to watch so I decided that this was the game
for me! Dad had always supported Sheffield United, though he hadn’t actually
been to a match for donkey’s years, but I persuaded him to take me to a match.
It
turned out that the club had a really good area for wheelchairs and they had a
fantastic attitude towards people in wheelchairs in that they didn’t stick them
in a remote area of the ground where you couldn’t see, but they put us really
close to the centre of the pitch where we could see really well and friends and
family could all sit with us wheelchair lot, unlike lots of other grounds. All in
all it was great and I went loads, rarely missing a home game. In the end all
the family got into Sheffield United, and more often than not, we all used to
go together as a family which, let me tell you, didn’t happen very often! This
enthusiasm for the game permeated beyond the Wood family, in that the Villages,
Harrisons and Sutherlands and a lot of my school friends got really into the
game, so SU’s crowd got quite a lot bigger because of me!
I
loved the game and United so much that I did my work experience there in year 10, but that, as they say, is another
story!
