Kurt spends his time trotting the world seeking the finest. He’s a respected reviewer with over 20 years experience, so knows a thing or two about it and isn’t shy to give his opinion – Ed.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of writing about you and your Island. Yesterday, thanks to a joyous something I ran into here, I thought I might slip in just a little about me and mine.
Most of you, naturally, don’t know whatever about me, except that I write rather a lot.
I say ‘most’, because a certain Councillor S****s of Ventnor, doubtless hoping to find a skeleton in my closet, investigated my life history on W***pedia, and dropped my jaw by turning up to Pimms and pasta on Sunday knowing more about me than I sometimes do myself.
Out of the closet
Anyway, I’ll come out of said closet and admit I have a vice. It’s not a big secret in New Zealand, because I write about it there all the time.
It’s horse-racing. Or, more accurately, racing horses. Trotting horses.
I started out by buying just one young gelding, a dozen years ago, and now I’m afraid I have … quite a few.
There are Seppl and Fritzl, Agnes and Elena, Lucie and D’Arcy, Duchess, Livia, Rosy, Ténor and … You can see, it’s a serious vice.
I also learned to drive, took part in races, and bought 35 acres for my ‘children’ to graze and train on, so when I am in New Zealand, I live surrounded by my racing stock, my broodmares and my foals.
Leaving the children behind
When I come away, I can follow my babes’ racing progress on the Internet — Seppl actually won his first race since I have been on the Island! (see picture above) — but I have otherwise, like a parent with absent children, to make do with ‘other peoples’. Other people’s trotting horses?
This is not easy in Britain, where harness racing, for some inexplicable reason, has never really taken root. So, imagine my surprise and joy when – as I was showing brother John around the delights of Newtown — a beautiful big dark feller, in full harness, nice brown blinkers, and almost a racing sulky, trotted up the street towards me.
Thank you!
I was so carried away, that in spite of chatting my head off to the gentleman for 10 good minutes, not only did I not beg for a drive, I didn’t even ask his name. The horse’s. Or the gentleman’s. But if they read this, ‘thank you’, you made one old horse-sick foreigner’s day!
Dammit, I need that crown again. Perhaps the Island could become Britain’s Bastion of Trot “¦ sigh, then you would never get rid of me!
