Tales of the country: Waiting for a delivery

Toward the end of May, my wife and children will be spending a week in a Sardinian villa without me. In an act of near-martyrdom – and to save the holiday allowance so generously conferred upon me by The Independent for our traditional August fortnight in an M5 traffic jam – I will instead be staying in Docklow, writing hard and looking after the animals.

Actually, looking after the animals may be a full-time job on its own, since to Milo (dog), Tess (cat), Babs, Ginger, Marigold, Amber (chickens), Henry and George (goldfish), we have just added Zoe (miniature Shetland pony). And Zoe is pregnant, due to foal, hilariously enough, toward the end of May.

I sometimes feel as though I've wandered into a Sunday-night television serial or, at any rate, somebody else's life. This time a year ago, we were living in London: garden dimensions, 30ft by 30ft; pet count, nil. And now I find myself contemplating a spot of midwifery, in our orchard, to a Shetland pony. If only I'd paid more attention during all those soapy-arm-up-orifice moments in All Creatures Great and Small.

Still, the vet, the blessedly calm and reassuring Mike Devoy, came out from Leominster last Friday to see Zoe and explained that the birth of her foal should be a straightforward, albeit dramatic, affair. The word he used, in fact, was "violent". Zoe, he said, would fire out her foal rather like a cannonball. I laughed, weakly. And asked, nervously, whether the big event would require any direct input from me, meaning "direct input" in an all-too-literal sense.

"Not unless there appear to be complications, which is unlikely," the vet said.

I smiled the smile of a first-time skydiver who has just been told that his parachute is 95 per cent certain to work. "And how will I know if there are complications?" I asked.

"Oh, it will be pretty obvious," he said. "And it wouldn't be a bad idea to spread out the placenta afterwards and check it for tears, just to make sure there's none still in there."

That was the point at which Jane got the giggles, picturing me inspecting a Shetland pony's placenta just as I was picturing her tucking into a tasty pasta dish in a Sardinian seaside restaurant. I don't know whether labour can be induced in expectant ponies as it supposedly can in expectant mothers, by the eating of spicy food, but there's every chance that, two or three days before Jane and the children are due to leave for Cagliari, I will have to sneak out to the orchard in the dead of night with a lamb rogan josh. After all, the kids will want to be here for the new arrival, and it will be nice to have some help with that placenta.

I'm still a little dizzy, frankly, at the recent turn of events, Shetland-pony-wise. We first considered buying a pony a couple of weeks ago on a Tuesday, found her on the internet on the Wednesday, bought her on the Thursday and took delivery on the Saturday. We may live in the country but we don't let the grass grow under our feet. Which is just as well, because we have been warned that if Zoe eats too much spring grass, she will contract laminitis.

When we mentioned laminitis to our friend Kim, who works in education in the London borough of Haringey, she said that it sounds like something she might develop, brought on by an excess of laminating. We guffawed, but actually laminitis is no laughing matter. It is an inflammation of the laminae in the hoof, and desperately painful. It won't be easy to stop Zoe eating lots of grass, as that is what ponies do, but stop her we must.

We have already had to fence off the yew hedge, having discovered that yew is toxic to quadrupeds. Chew yew and you're glue, seems to be the alarming message.

Party poppers

We were visited last weekend by Kim and Will, friends from our old life in Crouch End, and their sons Tom and Ned. Tom is 12 and one heck of a dude. I asked him what the hip words were in north-London skateboarding circles. He told me that "sick" and "buff" were two words currently meaning "ace" or "brill", which were the expressions of approval when I was 12, back around the time of the early Plantagenets.

I'm not sure about "sick", but I quite like "buff". It's certainly good news for our Buff Rock bantams, which suddenly can be considered the coolest of chickens. My own children are still using "wicked", which is obviously so yesterday, even in prepubescent metropolitan circles.

Still, we have London friends to stay most weekends, as well during the school holidays, so that should keep our kids up to speed with street argot. It will also be interesting to see whether, with his city mates, our middle child, Joseph, continues with his self-consciously determined pronunciation of "half" with a long "a" – "haalf" – in the manner of his Herefordshire friends. There will be several of each at his eighth birthday party this afternoon; the poor kid will be torn in half/haalf.

After much consideration of the options, Joseph eventually decided that he wanted to have his party here. Hosting children's birthday parties at home was always a prospect that filled us with dread in London, but here we have plenty of space. And I'm glad he rejected the admittedly lukewarm proposal of paintballing near Market Drayton. My sister-in-law Jackie took a group of girls paintballing recently for her daughter Hannah's 11th birthday. She said it was a nightmare, not least because they were up against a group of teenage boys and a dad, who were clearly veterans and refused to withdraw even when they were spattered, as is apparently decreed by the laws of paintballing.

When Jackie complained about it to the dad, who was behaving at least as aggressively as any of his charges, he said, with a wolfish grin, "Truth is the first casualty of war." And "pillock" is the first word that comes to mind. So, I'm happy to report that, a few minutes later, my magnificent niece Hannah scored a direct hit on his testicles.

Inn transition

The King's Head has been sold! Roger and Jean, after weeks of denying the growing rumours, have finally admitted that they are moving on, probably to a bigger pub in the Cotswolds. In a tiny place such as Docklow, a change of pub-ownership counts as seismic news. After all, there is nothing else, not even a shop, that we can walk to in less than half a day. So we await the new owners – who are due to arrive on 1 May – with bated breath.