#3 The power of a good pony profile

#3         The power of a good pony profile




If you were the kind of child who enjoyed a damn good list, who got excited about a fresh page in a notepad and new gel pens in a spectrum of colours, then you might also have enjoyed creating a few pony profiles in your time.

For the lucky kids who had a real live pony, this activity would’ve been quite a useful exercise in ensuring you knew every last detail about your four-legged friend. For those of us who didn’t, it was just good fun: the beginning of a brand new game with a brand new air-horse, and an exercise in imagination.

Here, you could have all the 16.2hh Thoroughbreds, KWPNs and sport horses you wanted; not just 12.2hh Bongo, who spent most of your weekly lessons trying to shake you off or refusing to move at all.

The first pony profile I saw was in one of the hundreds of magazines I used to collect, which means it was probably in Horse and Pony, the home of gobby little chestnut mascot of the ‘YRC Club’, Freddie. Or, it could possibly have been Horse Sense, the slightly more upmarket and collectable magazine of the 90s. Remember this one? It was even advertised on TV and came with a classy, dark green, collectors’ edition ringbinder – perfect for us pony lovers who relished a bit of organised fun.

Freddie

Horse Sense magazine's classy ringbinder

If I remember rightly, a typical pony profile went something like this:

Name:

Stable name:

Age:

DOB:

Sex:

Colour:

Height:

Breed:

Markings:

Temperament:

… and so on and so on.

What you may not have done, however, was go to the lengths of having in excess of 40+ profiles at any one time for all of the racehorses you had stabled in your Grandad’s back garden, shed and greenhouse.

But this would have been because you weren’t the proprietor of Cleveland Flat Training and Racing Centre, and didn’t spend your Sunday mornings buying ex-Grand National winners at auctions. This means that you also didn’t get into your Grandad’s car and fake-drive all over the country (and over to Ireland sometimes, obviously), just to collect horses like Seagram, Party Politics and Mr Frisk.

Or maybe you did.

And if you did, we definitely, definitely should have been friends.