Horse(shoe)play

I spoke about wishbones a couple of days ago (see here) and a book I once wrote about luck that will never be published. 

And it got me thinking ... it seems a shame to waste all that content. So why not share some of it on this blog? During the course of my research I met lots of interesting folk and visited some great places. Much of the content was to do with British traditions so it feels sort-of on message. 

So we'll start today with a post about Andy Springham, a traditional farrier, who I met in 2008.

I'd arranged to visit him at a farm near Tring in Hertfordshire where he was in the process of shoeing several very large horses. What appeared to be a pack of wolves were sprawled and panting on the stable floor and the place was filled with the not wholly unpleasant smell of burning hooves. Two of the dogs turned out to be long-haired German Shepherds that belonged to the farm. The third, smaller animal was Andy's own dog which looked the wolfiest of all - perhaps because it actually was quarter wolf. 

That explains why it kept looking at me in a 'you look like you've got some rich meat on you, Fat Boy' kind of way. 

To my delight, Andy had just removed several shoes and handed one to me, fresh from the hoof. I now had my 'lucky' horseshoe.

Horseshoes have long been considered lucky. Traditionally, for maximum luck, you should find one that's been cast off by a horse. But that doesn't happen too often these days as the kinds of people who own horses tend to have the money to keep their horses' footwear in tip top condition. 

But why are they lucky? No one is totally sure but the most likely explanation is because they used to be made of iron, a material that was believed to ward off the Devil and evil spirits. Anyone who could work with iron, and tame the elemental power of fire, was seen as someone special. Blacksmiths were once believed to have special powers and many people believed that they could even heal the sick. A marriage conducted by, or blessed by, a blacksmith would be a long and happy one. 

The tradition acquired a Christian twist when the 10th century St Dunstan, a blacksmith, was supposedly asked by the Devil to shoe his horse. Dunstan pretended not to recognise him and agreed to the request but, rather than nailing the shoe to the horse's hoof, he nailed it to the Devil's own foot, causing him great pain. Dunstan eventually agreed to remove the shoe, but only after extracting a promise that the Devil would never enter a household with a horseshoe nailed to the door.

To make them extra lucky, horseshoes were held in place with seven nails - seven being considered a sacred or blessed lucky number.* But I noticed that the horseshoe Andy had given me had eight nail holes. 

'Ah, that’s just to give us a choice,' he explained. 'The traditional way is to use seven nails – four on the outside of the hoof and three inside. But sometimes the hoof is damaged or has a crumbling edge and you may need to add an extra nail or use one less or change the formation.' 

You don't see too many blacksmiths these days. or farriers for that matter. I asked Andy if there was enough work for him.

'I turn it away every day,' he said. 'There are more horses in this country now than at any time since The War.' 

So did he have any children to follow in the family footsteps? 

'I have a daughter,' he explained. 'But she wants to be a nurse. I'd like an apprentice to pass the skills onto but they never last. This is hard work, see. And as soon as the young lads or lasses realise that, they're off. That, or when the cold weather sets in. It's sad. These skills will be lost.' 

But in respect of his chosen career, Andy is one of the happiest people I've ever met. 

'I love being outside and travelling from farm to farm,', he explained. 'And I love being around animals. I always did. I grew up in West London but I always took jobs that kept me close to animals. I trained as an engineer after leaving school but I soon realised that it wasn't for me. So I retrained as a farrier and I've never looked back. Best job in the world.' 

After my meeting I told a few friends on social media about the encounter and the fact that I now had a 'lucky' horseshoe. 

'Hmf. Good luck with that,' said one of my Twitter friends. '‘I have a horseshoe - we found it last year and when my daughter and I got home we hung it above the shed. Since then (no fibs) my mum died, my dad died, my job ended, I lost 7K per year on my salary, my marriage has broken down, I am buying a house - the survey found lots of faults, and my lover left me. So I went on holiday and I got bitten by hundreds of midges and ended up in a Polish hospital with anaphylactic shock. Other than that the horseshoe has worked out really well for us.’ 

I was going to send her one of the other lucky charms I'd collected during my research but then decided not to on the grounds that her house would probably burn down, the brakes on her car would fail and she might explode.

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*Seven is a number that crops up all the time in science and popular culture ... seven seas, seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven, Snow White and the seven dwarves etc. There are seven orifices in the human body, seven notes in a musical scale, seven planets known to the ancients (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and it's the number most likely to be thrown using two dice, making it lucky. Isaac Newton assumed that he would see seven colours when he used a prism to split light and was somewhat surprised to see only six. He therefore assumed that his eyes were at fault and added the colour of indigo to make up the numbers. Modern colour scientists typically divide the spectrum between violet and blue at about 450nm, with no indigo. And Isaac Asimov once commented, 'It is customary to list indigo as a colour lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate colour. To my eyes, it seems merely deep blue.' I suspect that this fact was known to Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of the design group Hipgnosis who got the job of designing the iconic cover for Pink Floyd's bestselling LP, Dark Side of the Moon. You'll note that there are just six colours in the image and no indigo.