Sarah Todd: No straight answer to why we're never happy with what we've got

It was about February last time my mane was cut and The Daughter overhead me replying "straight" on the phone to the hairdresser in answer to a question about the desired drying technique.

"I wish I had curly hair like you," she said. It's true, she does. She's even started eating the crusts on her bread because my father told her "they'll make your hair curl".

Ironically, it's her brother who has inherited the curls. At the moment, they don't really bother him but doubtless he'll soon be saying he wished he had straight hair. In a similar vein, our little girl loves everything about her pony, but she wishes he was a mare.

Yours truly loves everything about our fields but she wishes they weren't so stony. We spent the weekend of our wedding anniversary stone picking.

"Just another tractor bucket should do it," shouted out The Husband. The truth is we could collect another tractor bucket every weekend until our golden wedding anniversary and there'd probably still be more.

The limestone land is brilliant for anybody breeding horses, as it really does seem to give them plenty of bone and all-round good growth. A great many people would wish for grass grown in such a situation. But, for me, the grass would be greener on the other – less stony – side of the fence.

We have two horses too fat and one too skinny. The fat ones only have to look at the green grass at the other side of the fence and they've piled on the pounds while we were really struggling to get any weight on their lean-limbed friend.

For anybody else worrying about an older pony that can't seem to gain any weight, the following might be of interest. We'd spent a fortune on various conditioning feeds and supplements when my mother suggested good old-fashioned barley and, touch wood, it's doing the trick.

As a girl, there always seemed to be barley boiling up for horses. It was a wonderful smell. What we got for our old boy was micronized Yorkshire-grown barley – no need to boil – and at around 5.50 a bag it's about a third the price of any of the fancy foods that didn't work. Next step is to try some linseed oil to get a shine on his coat, another yesteryear favourite.

Just as with our own food, there seems over the past 20 or 30 years to have been a shift in the feeding regimes of animals. Perhaps, as is happening with humans, things will come full circle and there'll be a move away from the high-tech formulations towards natural locally-sourced ingredients.

"Don't make him too fat mummy," says The Daughter. "I like him skinny."