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HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Jo Hardy and Caro Handley 2015
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Cover images © Sarah Tanat-Jones (animal illustrations); Johnny Ring (photograph)
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Jo Hardy asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008142483
Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008154325
Version: 2015-09-24
Contents
Chapter Thirteen: ‘Happy Christmas, Clunky’
Chapter Fourteen: Grumpy Lizards and Misty-eyed Gorillas
Chapter Fifteen: Stella the Heifer
Chapter Sixteen: Man’s Best Friend
Chapter Seventeen: Horse Sense
Chapter Eighteen: Luca the Great Dane
Chapter Nineteen: The End in Sight
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Home for Christmas, and I couldn’t wait. A whole two weeks off, without having to think about textbooks, diagnoses and beady-eyed clinicians. Time to relax with the family, which meant food, games, walks and riding my horses. And best of all, Jacques was coming over from South Africa to spend the holiday with us.
He was due in a couple of days, but before that the film crew had decided they wanted to come and film me and Ross decorating our Christmas tree. Only one small problem there – we didn’t have a tree yet. Ross and I rushed out to get one, but it was the Saturday before Christmas and all the trees had gone except for the ones nobody wanted, with crooked trunks, spindly branches and a bare stalk sticking up at the top. We picked the least sad of the bunch, were still charged an extortionate amount, and loaded it into the back of the car. Once we got it home we spent a hilarious hour trying to get it to stand upright. It had a distinct tilt, so Ross spun it round and propped things under the side of the tree-holder while I stood across the room, hands on hips, saying, ‘No, up a bit, down a bit, to the right, round that way,’ until he threw a cushion at me and said, ‘That’s it, I give up.’ Tosca was excited by all the commotion and the smell of something different in the house, but moving the furniture to fit in the tree didn’t do her any favours. Trying to get to grips with the new layout of the room she ended up knocking the tree so that it tilted again, at which point we realised we were fighting a losing battle trying to keep it upright.
When Amy and Ash arrived they stared at the tree aghast, but there wasn’t much choice at that point. Ross and I set to, chattering happily and covering its spindly little branches with shiny baubles as they tried to film us from clever angles to make it look less unfortunate. In the Hardy household we had a wonderful box of Christmas decorations, which, the minute it emerged each year, reduced me and Ross to eight-year-olds again. It was full of red wooden characters and trains, tinsel, beautiful shiny baubles in all sorts of shapes, and a long coil of red fairy lights, half of which now didn’t work. We had to try to wind the lights round the tree so that all the broken ones were at the back, a feat that took time and advanced contortion skills.
Once we’d done our best with the tree and had propped a drunken-looking fairy at a precarious angle on the top, Amy and Ash, hoping for something a little more impressive, decided to come with me to see the horses. I was delighted, as it was a chance to show off Tammy and Elli and put them through their paces for the cameras. But predictably, Tammy, who can be a darling or a devil, chose
