Pastor Iuventus

or The Curate's Egg
Young Winston
o sooner have I ceased waxing lyrical, or what you will, about how it's all
back to routine than I am asked to bless my first polo pony. That is to say, I bless a polo pony for the first, and for all I know, the last time.
A very well-spoken young woman telephoned me and asked me with great charm if I would come and bless her polo pony. She wasn't a parishioner, and on inquiring why I had been chosen for this honour she said matter-of-factly-that she drove past our church on the way to the polo club and had taken the Humber down.
I duly turned up at the polo club some six miles distant on Tuesday morning with a sense of slight unreality and a nagging doubt as to whether I needed the permission of the parish priest to bless a pony within his boundaries. I drove down a long driveway and came to a large flat, dusty field. The stripped goal posts and rectangular divisions proclaimed even to my unpractised eye that this must
be where they played polo. There were some rather ramshackle looking sheds round about and a sort of marquee affair, so I drove on looking for a club house or something more substantial by way of evidence of human habitation. All I found was another, similar field so I drove back to where I came in, stirring up huge clouds of dust as I went. There waiting for me was the young lady. I stopped the car and we introduced ourselves at the side of the enormous polo field. She told me she would tell the groom to fetch the ponies, plural.
It transpired that Winston was the only one to be blessed, but he had a stable-mate and it seems they did everything together, so the other, whose name I have forgotten because it was more exotic than Winston, had to come and watch though he was already blessed. "By the way," she added, "do you speak Spanish or Italian? You see, the grooms are all from the Argentine and don't understand English" (Most polo ponies, I discovered, are from the Aigen
tine too, but from the way she later spoke to Winston it seems they pick English up faster).
In a few minutes the ponies appeared, coming out of the sun, the Argentinean groom riding one bareback and leading the other on a rope attached to his head collar. As they stirred up the dust it was reminiscent of a scene from High Chaparral; well perhaps High Chaparral meets Brideshead Revisited and Monsignor Quixote. They were truly noble creatures. Polo ponies are thoroughbred racehorses crossed with smaller animals to produce a beast which is capable of great speed but can also stop suddenly and turn on a sixpence. These were sleek and muscled, but with the gentleness that comes from great strength tamed.
I put on a stole and began the blessing. The groom and the young lady crossed themselves and stood heads bowed in prayer. I had the pocket ritual with me which contained a blessing for flocks and herds that with some grammatical changes could be adapted to the
blessing of a polo pony. I had given some thought as to an appropriate piece of scripture, and sifted through the psalms. After rejecting "Some put their trust in horses, but we in the name of the Lord," and "Be not like horse and mule, unintelligent, needing bkidle and bit," both of which seemed a bit pointed, I settled for "The eyes of all creatures look to you 0 Lord and you give them their food in due season," which turned out to be nothing if not prophetic. I blessed the pony with some holy water at which he shied slightly, but our ceremony was soon over.
The young lady was very pleased and felt, she told me, so much happier now Winston was blessed. She dashed to her car and came back with a camera, a present wrapped and beribboned, a card and a bottle of pink champagne. I was on the point of saying, "Oh, you really shouldn't have!" when she presented all three to Winston for inspection. It seems they were for him. The card she opened; it felicitated him on the occasion of his bles.rig. The box contained Belgian chocolates which Winston generously shared with us, as he did the champagne. We drank out of plastic cups, the ponies snorted it out of plastic bowls. Luckily they didn't like pink champagne as much as the ordinary kind so there was more for us. After this I was given a tour of the stables and a standing invitation to watch polo any time I liked. I left totally charmed by the whole experience. I can't wait to see the photographs in Taller!