Tales from a Young Vet: Part 3 of 3: Mad cows, crazy kittens, and all creatures big and small. Jo Hardy
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      Certain details in this book, including names, places and dates, have been changed.

      HarperElement

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperElement 2015

      FIRST EDITION

      © Jo Hardy and Caro Handley 2015

      A catalogue record of this book is

      available from the British Library

      Cover images © Sarah Tanat-Jones (animal illustrations); Johnny Ring (photograph)

      Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Jo Hardy asserts the moral right to be

      identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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      Source ISBN: 9780008142483

      Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008154325

      Version: 2015-09-24

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

      

      

       Chapter Thirteen: ‘Happy Christmas, Clunky’

       Chapter Fourteen: Grumpy Lizards and Misty-eyed Gorillas

       Chapter Fifteen: Stella the Heifer

       Chapter Sixteen: Man’s Best Friend

       Chapter Seventeen: Horse Sense

       Chapter Eighteen: Luca the Great Dane

       Chapter Nineteen: The End in Sight

      

      

       Acknowledgements

      

      

       Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

       About the Publisher

       ‘Happy Christmas, Clunky’

      Home for Christmas, and I couldn’t wait. A whole two weeks off, without having to think about textbooks, diagnoses and beady-eyed clinicians. Time to relax with the family, which meant food, games, walks and riding my horses. And best of all, Jacques was coming over from South Africa to spend the holiday with us.

      He was due in a couple of days, but before that the film crew had decided they wanted to come and film me and Ross decorating our Christmas tree. Only one small problem there – we didn’t have a tree yet. Ross and I rushed out to get one, but it was the Saturday before Christmas and all the trees had gone except for the ones nobody wanted, with crooked trunks, spindly branches and a bare stalk sticking up at the top. We picked the least sad of the bunch, were still charged an extortionate amount, and loaded it into the back of the car. Once we got it home we spent a hilarious hour trying to get it to stand upright. It had a distinct tilt, so Ross spun it round and propped things under the side of the tree-holder while I stood across the room, hands on hips, saying, ‘No, up a bit, down a bit, to the right, round that way,’ until he threw a cushion at me and said, ‘That’s it, I give up.’ Tosca was excited by all the commotion and the smell of something different in the house, but moving the furniture to fit in the tree didn’t do her any favours. Trying to get to grips with the new layout of the room she ended up knocking the tree so that it tilted again, at which point we realised we were fighting a losing battle trying to keep it upright.

      When Amy and Ash arrived they stared at the tree aghast, but there wasn’t much choice at that point. Ross and I set to, chattering happily and covering its spindly little branches with shiny baubles as they tried to film us from clever angles to make it look less unfortunate. In the Hardy household we had a wonderful box of Christmas decorations, which, the minute it emerged each year, reduced me and Ross to eight-year-olds again. It was full of red wooden characters and trains, tinsel, beautiful shiny baubles in all sorts of shapes, and a long coil of red fairy lights, half of which now didn’t work. We had to try to wind the lights round the tree so that all the broken ones were at the back, a feat that took time and advanced contortion skills.

      Once we’d done our best with the tree and had propped a drunken-looking fairy at a precarious angle on the top, Amy and Ash, hoping for something a little more impressive, decided to come with me to see the horses. I was delighted, as it was a chance to show off Tammy and Elli and put them through their paces for the cameras. But predictably, Tammy, who can be a darling or a devil, chose СКАЧАТЬ