Today is the day I celebrate my arrival here. It’s not my real birthday; more like my official one and this year, I want to share it with all of my friends on the social network. Since last March, I have had my own Facebook and Twitter accounts and I have so many friends! We talk to each other most days and share our thoughts. Some of my friends are other animals and some are people – it doesn’t matter, I love them all. There is the great Twitter herd of horses, the Border Terrier Posse, my people, not to mention all of the good charity officers I got to know when I was an RSPCA chap. We are all very sociable and we all care – if someone is in bother or lost, we can help with our sharing and retweeting. I am hoping that a lot of my friends will post photos of themselves today, so we can all be together for my special day.

 On this day in 2007, things were not going well for me. I had undergone a journey in a car boot, with all of my legs lashed together. None of your posey 4×4’s by the way; this was a modest saloon car and I shared the boot with a tool kit and some other rubbish. It was lucky for me that someone saw me being unloaded, and made a report to the RSPCA. I was just nibbling some grass at the side of the road when the brave Inspectors Richard and Nic came for me. She came with them, in Wilf the horse box. Once she had parked him up, I could smell other horses; I spoke but the box was empty. My people were not around, so she and the Inspectors encouraged me to go into the horse box. They had to help quite a bit because I was feeling pretty poorly, but once I was in there, I found a lovely straw bed and I could still smell horse.

 The journey was short and she went very slowly. We were soon back at this yard, where she helped me down the ramp into what is now my home. It was warm and cosy and there were little bits of yummy food. She spent a lot of time with me that night and we soon got used to each other. I slept and slept on that comfy bed, sometimes with my head on her lap – she didn’t seem to mind and it was good to have company.

 The following day, the vet came. It was all very scarey, because quite a lot of me was hurting. I had a collapsed back leg and a huge abscess on one of my fronts as well. What with that and the lice and not much condition to speak of, I was a bit of a mess. When I had some injections, I felt much better!

 There was more stuff over the next few days. There was delousing, worming (yeuch), cleaning the abscess (double yeuch) and x-rays, which luckily said that my back leg wasn’t broken. Funny, but she started to look a lot more cheerful after that. The vet thought that I must have been tethered by that leg for most of my life (I was three) and the tendon had become all slack and useless. My feet had never been trimmed either, which added to the problem. The farrier tidied them up and I could hobble a bit better.

 The vet then had a Good Idea. You know when you break your arm and they put a cast on it? When the cast comes off, the tendons have shortened up? Well, he made me a little plaster cast for my leg, which she could take off every so often to check there was nothing bad going on underneath. After a while, my leg started to behave much like a normal leg? It will never be brilliant, so I can never be a working pony, but it’s pretty good I can tell you! Clever vet!

 Tell you what. I will show you my movie – you’ll see what I mean.

 When I blow out the candle on my cake today, I shall wish that all horses and ponies will be valued and cared for like I am.

Well, a pony can dream.