Fascination

About every five or six weeks, a farrier comes along to the club and makes new shoes for all the horses. The old shoes are taken off, the hooves cut back and flattened, and a new shoe is formed on the anvil from the nearest red-hot blank to suit the finished surface. The fascination of watching this being done never goes away, and it never ceases to amaze me how calm and collected the majority of the stable's inmates stay - especially the Thoroughbreds, who are also the best at being ferried in the big horseboxes due to their trade in their earlier life.

I would like aluminium alloy racing shoes for Jaguar (seen here), but with his constant stream of activities the way they are, he's better off with steel ones for now. As his workload reduces, perhaps I can move him over to the lighter versions, as I have no doubt that he'd feel a lot more comfortable, and the loss of weight there would go some way towards cancelling out my own substantial heft.

A little bit of trivia for our non-UK readers. If you look in an English phone book, you'll find the name 'Smith' comes up an awful lot. This was the name usually given to a blacksmith - someone that works with iron, often shoeing horses. Other names relate to trades, too, such as Thatcher (a person that makes or repairs thatched roofs on houses), while Wright is usually a wheel maker, and so on. Interesting to delve into these things...