It has been a busy week, with haircuts for all the horses, a trip out for their Christmas presents and Baby’s startling encounter with an umbrella.

On Wednesday, “Auntie” Wendy arrived bright and early with two pairs of sharpened clippers. Daniel slunk to the back of his box, but Baby craned his head in eager anticipation of his hunter clip. Perhaps he had heard Paige, our young friend from the yard, calling him “a woolly ginger football.”

It was tipping down with rain as Wendy determinedly unwound the extension lead into Mrs Horse’s stable. The black mare’s clip transformed her. Jack, astonished by the dramatic change, said her shaved head made her look like a thug.

Daniel, who dreads haircuts, refused to go into Mrs Horse’s stable where the clipping equipment was set up. “I shunt be goin’ in ’er bedroom,” he said, digging in his toes on the end of his lead rope. He was chased in with a yard brush and soon emerged with a smart new look.

Baby walked into the stable quite happily but refused to come out, alarmed by a torrent of water pouring from overflowing guttering immediately above his head. He was eventually persuaded out with a bucket of food.

Baby’s shorn ginger locks left him looking disconcertingly like a steeplechaser. The image was bolstered when Jenny rode him down the lane in a smart, striped, Newmarket exercise blanket to keep his back warm. Jenny was wary of Baby after he threw a tantrum the previous day, bucking out of the yard with Jack. The wind was rising and the light fading as the pair rounded the bend towards the cross-country field.

Baby stopped suddenly, mad amber eyes staring in wonder at a discarded broken umbrella. “Cripes! What are you?” he said as it skittered towards him, flapping like a grounded pterodactyl.

On Saturday, Steve took Jenny and Sophie to the Ride-Away shop on the other side of York. Steve had to keep the ladies firmly to their shopping lists as they lost themselves in an Aladdin’s Cave of fluffy, spotty and striped things for horses and people. Daniel was bought a brown leather bridle and Baby a chocolate and cream exercise blanket and a fluffy brown and cream numnah.

The ladies chose a basketful of soft and colourful Joules socks and scarves and Steve was treated to jodhpurs and a cross-country competition shirt.

Baby was so excited by the prospect of his presents he pooed in the Boss’s new horse showers. His brother, on his best behaviour in the hope of “sacks o’ grub” for Christmas, looked on in dismay.

“Sum folk don’t deserve nowt from Santa,” he said.