Once upon a time I thought that all people who were interested in horsey pursuits must be intelligent, kind or courageous, or all three, like John Manly in Black Beauty. I know better now. Kind? possibly. Courageous? often. Intelligent? rarely.

It’s my years of reading Internet forums and writing newsletters for our carriage driving club that have disillusioned me. First of all, horsemen and women do not read. You can send them all the newsletters you like, but they’ll still call you in the week before an event, asking for the phone number of the organiser, or for a starting time, both of which were plainly written four or five weeks ago. Secretaries are the one exception: anyone who deals with organising shows has to be efficient, no matter how busy. They seldom have time, though, to actually ride or drive their equines; maybe that’s the clue.

Horsemen and women as a whole are not all that brilliant at negotiating the Internet. I know one or two who think mouse driving is a pursuit sport and find it hard to retrieve the pointer from out of the top corner of the screen; and while I don’t believe the QWERTY keyboard is the most ergonomically sound piece of engineering I’ve ever met, despite their complaints I do know that an ABCDEF keyboard isn’t very helpful either.

Furthermore, many horsey people who use the internet not only can’t read, but can’t write. I don’t mean that they should be of the calibre of a Booker prize winner, but that they can’t write what they intend. Sometimes this is merely odd, like “Hardy Congradulations”.  I asked a friend whether it was a local dialect. She replied, “No, the woman just can’t spell.” They’re not all women either: Here are some male samples: “Mrs X is on the right tract but all horses push not pull, yielding is when they are resisting …”  On the topic of payment: “How do you won't me to send you the money.” And on the topic of advice: “there is way to much of people telling us what to do with are horses. I for one don't care who people train there horses or how they drive than.”

I cannot even begin to outline the impossible bitchiness of horse-show forums. But there are mindblowing weirdnesses in describing family trees. For some reason, the genealogical tradition of placing the male line at the top of the tree and female lines below has escaped many of our horsey USA colleagues who do it the other way around and also describe a horse as being “by” a mare instead of “out of” her.  Even more confusing was the statement that: “So and So is sired by our imported stallion, Thingumty, and he's out of the imported stallion, Whatsisname.” Truly an unusual animal …

Much funnier than the ignorant, the confused and the inarticulate are those who try to use smart phrases without really knowing what they mean. My favourite is still the lady who wanted to praise a friend for taking the trouble to turn up at a much-publicised, but poorly attended, show. The friend’s mediocre pony had duly been awarded something like fifth place. The lady knew there was a pat-on-the-back, foreign kind of word, “kudos”, which she couldn’t either pronounce or spell; however, she apparently believed it meant more than one, as in “one kudo”, “two kudos”. She went onto the Internet forum that she and her friend both frequented, and joyously she wrote, “Coodoos for all your hard work!”

Many are the aspirants in the horse world who deserve a Pigeon Poop Award.