In which Connie blots her copybook
Jenny is away for twelve days so I rang up Other Rider and we negotiated for extra Connie days. My first out of order day was Friday* and as I was tacking up Connie, so was Susanna, two stable doors down, saddling Jenny’s gorgeous old retired show jumper Drambuie.** I hadn’t met Susanna before and haven’t seen Drambuie stripped and ready for action since I’ve been back at Jenny’s yard: usually when I come in for Connie he’s hanging over his stall door with his ears flopping and his lower lip hanging, trying to look old and sleepy. He doesn’t do it very well.
I was feeling short of time (when am I ever not feeling short of time) so I’d been planning to school Connie–you can inflict the same amount of exercise in about half the time in a schooling ring. But Liz, who I’ve been out hacking with several times, just the two of us, said that Susanna and Drambuie and she and Caprice and Beth and Rocket–who is much too small for her, but he’s one of those members-of-the-family ponies–were going out, and would I like to come along? I am still learning good horse-trails around here–I have trouble readjusting from my knowledge of hellhound walks; you can cover more ground on a horse, but you can’t lift one over an impassable stile–and it would be nice to get to know a few more members of Jane’s yard.*** So I said yes, thank you.
Susanna is the local geography expert; she knows the horse trails like I know the dog trails. She naturally went in front–and Drambuie has a ground-devouring walk, although Connie is no slouch. I need to emphasise here that I was not expecting trouble. And when Drambuie took violent exception to a bicycle lying by the side of the road† I offered a lead, having a well-established faith in my horse’s manners. (At this point the man belonging to the bicycle turned up and removed the offending object. Connie, who, as I’ve said, does shy, shied at the place the bicycle had been. She’d obviously been paying attention.)
She was a little on the alert as we followed Drambuie up the hill to the ridge, where we could speed up a bit, but she often goes into power mode out on a hack and I still wasn’t expecting trouble. I wasn’t expecting trouble when we got to the top of the ridge and trotted, and she was trying to lug my arms out of my shoulder joints. At that point we were still narrowly in control.
Then we went through a gate and out into a big field.†† It’s harvest already–how did it get so late in the year so early?–and we’re into one of those brief, exhilarating spoilt-for-choice seasons of cross country galloping. And this year I have a horse to ride. This field had been recently cut, and seemed, as you sat your prancing steed, to reach out forever in all directions. At that point ‘forever’ still looked like fun. Drambuie set off obediently at the trot, while Connie surged into canter immediately, but I don’t always make a fuss about this; horses are allowed to get excited so long as they remain, you know, responsive to rider’s aids. . . .
But when Drambuie slid smoothly into the long, countryside-devouring canter you’d expect both from his walk and his conformation, I found myself aboard a raving lunatic. Her canter turned into a mad frothing flaming-eyed gallop, and she was going to go in front, she was not going to hang around looking at anybody’s heels. Gods almighty. My perfect horse. Whoops.
Well, she did not go in front, and we continued at Drambuie’s heels–actually we crept up to his stirrup leathers once, and I glanced across at him lolloping along on the lightest contact, and tried not to grind my teeth–but that’s a several-minute-length field and it was a very long several minutes. I simply wasn’t having any, and Connie, I think, couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to get her own way: after this was all over, Liz said that Other Rider can’t hold her when she gets like this and that Liz has had some extremely rapid hacks in her company when Connie has decided (sometimes, evidently, without the aggravation of a pair of heels in front of her) that galloping is the order of the day. I’ve wondered about this–I’ve never had trouble stopping her (before) but her assumption that we were going to gallop has occasionally been a trifle suspicious.
Meanwhile . . . we’re maybe halfway down a very long field at what might politely be called a bounding canter and my horse is beginning to notice that I’m still arguing with her. Frenzy. At this point the bounding becomes more of a pogo stick effect because she’s now bucking every damn stride. Note that this is the horse Jenny guaranteed did not buck.††† And no, I did not have her in a stranglehold; I’ve been genuinely bolted with–which this wasn’t, quite–and that only makes it worse. You let the wretched animal have as much rein as you dare, and try to remind it of its responsibilities. To give Connie what credit she is due, she wasn’t trying to get her head down to buck me off, she was just Expressing Frustration. And every time she came down she came down on a different lead–I had never realised there are sixteen available leads, four per leg–and on a few notable occasions she came down one lead in front and another one behind. That’s a particularly comfortable gait. As it was by the time we reached the other end of the field I was probably two inches shorter, from having had my spine compressed and driven up some way into my skull. Arrrrrrgh.
Liz and Beth had evidently been much entertained by our performance. Liz also knew that Connie was a guaranteed buck-free zone and since her Caprice is, well, capricious, she may have been enjoying it very much indeed. Susanna was horrified–I should have shouted at her to slow down–I don’t want to be the wet blanket! But we didn’t canter again after that–sigh. The next big field we came to, we trotted. Which is to say Drambuie, Caprice and Rocket trotted, and Connie and I got farther and farther and farther behind because every time I asked her to trot she went instantly into canter. No. Walk. Now we’ll try that again. She was finally beginning to listen to me by the end of that field–which is to say she’s still the Connie we know and love, she’s just been allowed to err into wicked ways. Another horse suffering this level of unexpected frustration could have gone into meltdown, and equine meltdown is the thing that makes me want to take up knitting. But Other Rider needs to learn to ring bells so she can negotiate gaits with Connie a little more effectively. Even Susanna, who is a very good and experienced rider, says that Connie does get ‘very strong’.
She still wanted her carrots when we got back to the barn. Trollop. And I rode her again today–in the school this time!–and in fact we had rather a good time; I’ve been talking to a horsy friend about engagement and the maintenance of right-lead canter, which is our bugbear, and mainly what I’m learning is what most riders learn, which is that it’s all their fault. The horse will do what you arrange for it to do, so if it doesn’t do it, you’re arranging wrong. Most of today was kind of . . . messy, but we had a few moments of probably the best right-lead canter we’ve ever had. But we didn’t have any heels in front of us either. And I can’t wait for Jenny to come home, so I can tell her about her fabulous bucking mare. . . .
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* which was possible because Oisin is on holiday too–my piano lessons are Friday afternoons. I started out being a good girl and working on what I should be working on . . . and then two days ago I got tired of being a good girl and I’m now resetting The Battle Hymn of the Republic as, say, Charles Ives might have done it. On a bad day. Hee hee hee hee. If I have the blog written in time I might get to the interpolation of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean tonight. Which I’m going to have to transpose first. Ick. But I’m probably feeling the need to cheer up the American side of me: McCain is way too close to Obama in the polls. For pity’s sake, after sixty-seven years of that pickled moron, the Democrats ought to have the next presidency on a plate. But that’s not how it’s going. A discordant American Battle Hymn is probably what I need right now.
** He really is gorgeous–I’ve told you about him before–chestnut thoroughbred^–sixteen and a half hands high and a depth and breadth of chest and bum that you look at twice because you think you’re imagining it. And one of those fine majestic thoroughbred heads that almost make you weep. He’s something like eighteen years old and looks half that; Jenny only retired him two or so years ago while he was still at the top of his game, because he was starting to have some arthritis in one hock and unless you are a liver fluke in human form you don’t make a top-class horse break his heart. And thoroughbreds are your original kill-yourself-trying horse.^^
^ Anyone who is paying more attention than they should to this blog will remember hearing/reading me drivelling on about my serious weakness for thoroughbreds before.
^^ I’m told they aren’t the original: they got it from their Arabian forebears. But the Arabs I’ve known have been mostly little space cases.
*** Especially one who rides Drambuie. Ahem.
† Ah, thoroughbreds. They have their little ways.
†† The rhinoceros field, to be exact. So called–by Peter and me–because it’s one of those with very misleading topography. You think it’s nearly flat, and that you can see any hazards. Wrong. That gentle little fold ahead of you can hide an entire herd of rhinoceroses, which will emerge just as you and accompanying domestic fauna move too far from the gate to make a run for it.
††† Never trust any guarantee about any horse.
October in August
It’s another cold wet October day . . . except for the fact that it’s August.* And a day or three ago we were sweltering and I was whingeing about being tired of watering. You have more potted plants in a dry spell, it’s one of those laws of the universe, like bread falling buttered side down. Especially you have more little pots, especially little, porous terra cotta ones that dry out again in about two hours. As soon as it starts raining, all seven hundred and forty-four of these morph into half a dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots. If** the weather dries out again, the half dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots start producing small terra cotta pots, like gladiola bulbs developing bulblets, and just as prolific. It’s rained so much in the last two or three days that my some-people’s-houses-are-smaller-than-this ecologically correct renewable timber water butt at Third House is full again, despite the fact that Third House’s gutters are mostly blocked.
When I was riding Connie yesterday I couldn’t see through my glasses. Fortunately she’s very capable of minding her own feet. And I could still see Large Pale Blurs that were the fences, I mean the kind that you jump over. The risk there is that Connie likes jumping, so when you’re working her around fences she’s always hoping you’ll ask her to change direction slightly and pop over one. Or two. Have I said this before? She started her career as an open jumper, so she has all these neat clever habits that a good show jumper needs, like being able to clear a fence from almost any angle, including the ridiculous. I was working her around the in-and-out*** a few weeks ago when I was still getting used to the idea that I had a really good horse to ride, and coming between the two fences like we were drawing the diagonal line in the middle of a capital letter ‘N’ and Connie was still waiting alertly for me to say ‘Yes, now’ and hook a left over the fence. A horse like this, when your glasses are running with rain, you want to squint really hard to make sure you’re directing her toward the empty side of the uprights.
I was distracted from meteorological effects yesterday by the presence of a friend, here just for the day† but today it’s back to business. Plink plonk splash. Here’s a controversial subject. And I hate it when nasty clichés appear to be true. We’ve had a group of ‘travellers’ as they’re called here–itinerants who live in trailers and mobile homes and occasionally proper gypsy carts, although real gypsies are rare. They’re allowed to camp on verges and common land and on footpaths when there’s room. This particular group have been around off and on most of this year. I’ve gotten to kind of know quite a few of them–all male and mostly young–because they like my hellhounds. Travellers and lurchers are another cliché–lurchers were ‘the poacher’s dog’ originally. I avoid travellers’ encampments on principle because of the likelihood of unfriendly loose dogs and . . . I’m a little bit twitchy about being a not very large or intimidating middle aged woman wandering around in the (comparative) middle of nowhere with no more protection than two spectacularly over-friendly 50-pound hellhounds (and perhaps a minor turn of speed). Most of the mythology about travellers is the scary kind. But I see these guys in town and the truth is that I’ll talk to anyone who likes my hellhounds. And furthermore . . . I like them. They make me laugh. They talk to me as if I am one of them, because I have longdogs. They are such hustlers, and the ones I talk to are very open and good natured about it–with that faint edge of defensiveness that the young and on the make often have anyway, especially the male of the species, but in this case heightened by their obvious awareness that they are officially personae non grata. A couple of them, their faces positively light up when I recognise them and say hi. This would automatically make me defend them.
But . . . the farmer that owns the land adjoining the bit of verge that has been their favourite encampment goes round with his fork lift after they’ve gone, to clear up after them. The last time he did this he took two farm-size trailerloads of rubbish away. The honour-system farm shop has been ripped off so often they’re thinking about closing down. Other things have disappeared. A woman who rides out from Jenny’s yard swears they tried to steal the whippet who accompanies her and there’s a rumour she left the yard because of it. There’s quite a bit of more of this kind of thing that I can’t personally vouch for . . . but this is enough. Meanwhile they’ve moved again, from the edge of my standard hellhound-hurtling and hacking out on Connie range to right bang in the middle of it. Everybody is warning everybody else not to walk that way, and kids with ponies are being forbidden to go out without at least one grown up. I walked that way this morning–but hellhounds and I stayed on the top of the ridge and didn’t turn down our usual path.
I’m middle-aged and middle-class and the only time I ever lived on anything remotely resembling an edge it was more or less my choice.†† And I know culture collision can be harrowing. I want to defend their right to live in a way that doesn’t appeal to me in the least, and I’ll even go with the idea that they have a right to live in a way that middle-aged middle-class folk find annoying. But I can’t condone stealing–that farm shop is a little object like a very large nest box by the side of the road because the family who runs it doesn’t have the money or the staff to run a full size one–or trashing the landscape. When I thought they were doing their own cleaning up–and I saw (from the relative safety of my car) what their campsite looked like when they were living in it: two farm trailers of rubbish is about right, and it would still have to be a large trailer–I could think, oh, well, at least they tried. But the land is bald where they were, as if it’s been sowed with salt. And now they’re stripping another piece of our beautiful landscape, as well as wrecking their involuntary neighbours’ peace of mind. I even wonder if their carbon footprint is smaller than the average middle class working stiff with a house and a gas boiler. And in my middle-class way I feel that I get to say ‘this is wrong’ about a culture one of whose tenets is explicit disrespect of the cultures it lives among. I know the my tribe/your tribe thing has been a human problem since we first climbed down out of the trees/walked up out of the ocean, but we’re into the globalisation era and if we’re going to survive we have got to learn to get along.
It’s all so depressing.
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* I’m just back from ringing handbells^ with Niall and Clio. Clio was wearing shorts. It’s August, she said grimly.
^ For anyone late to the party, we ring methods–change ringing–on our handbells, like in the tower only quadruply horrible because you’ve got two bells to keep track of, and it’s an exponential kind of thing. In fact, what’s after ‘exponential’? Clio fell down and broke her elbow ice skating two months ago+ so handbells have languished rather till Clio got out of plaster again. Niall travels for his handbell fix, but Clio and I are out of practise. Poor Clio, who is the least experienced of us, said darkly, as we lurched through bob minor, I remember now why I broke my elbow.
+Yo, Blackbear, should we let her into the Spaz Club?
** I say if
*** which is, as you might expect, two fences quite close together. In my cough cough cough open jumper days, which were a very long time ago, the standard in and out had one stride between; you can also have two or even three–or a ‘bounce’ where you haven’t got a stride at all.
† I was late meeting her train because of riding Connie^ and late getting her back to her train because of a late-running wedding for which I was ringing.^^ Hmm. I was very glad to see her. I hope she comes again.
^ In spite of getting out of bed tragically early so I could both hurtle hellhounds and ride Connie first
^^ She said bell ringing looks daunting. Oh good. I’m always afraid it looks rather stately and simple-minded till you actually get on a bell rope.
†† Although this kind of thing does tend to develop a dangerous momentum
Hacking and hewing
I went on a TWO AND A HALF HOUR hack with Connie today and . . . lived. I know two and a half hours in the saddle isn’t a lot for a proper horsewoman, or for a professional (Jenny, who runs the yard and teaches riding, may also be schooling horses for three hours a day), but it’s a lot for me. Toward the end, when we approached the gate with the half-fallen tree hanging over it which took some of the top of my shoulder off last Saturday*, the woman I’ve been going out with this week and last got off her horse and walked him through. But then her horse is a trifle more temperamental than Connie, and I also thought it quite possible that if I got off I wouldn’t be able to get back on again. (She generously pointed out that her horse is shorter than mine. True. But not that much shorter.) So I hung down beside Connie’s neck like the cowboy act in the circus and made the famous riding-101 bridge with the reins and held onto her mane and she went through like a star and didn’t even gallop off down the slope on the far side, which she could have because I was in no position to stop her. She is such a nice horse. Have I mentioned this lately? Like in the last fifteen minutes? I try not to raven on about her every time I ride her because I realise that not everyone who reads this blog is still nine years old and horse mad at heart. But it’s difficult not to. She’s one of those horses that other people like going out with because you know she’ll always give you a lead if you need one.** Today we did a very pretty bit of opening and shutting a gate and when my companion complimented me on it I said, Nothing to do with me! That’s all Connie! –She knows what a gate is and she suddenly gets totally alert to your legs, so you can move her around like a chess piece.
It’s very hot and dry here and I’m conservative about horse legs anyway, and she’s ten years old and her background is open jumping which means a lot of stress on the joints and she’s not my horse, but we did manage to have one canter, on one of those stretches of ground locally known as ‘the gallops’.*** As we approached the end, a little group of three women emerged from behind the hedgerow and stood watching us. As a pedestrian with no horse access who has not infrequently wistfully contemplated horses thundering up and down the gallops I wondered what they were thinking: ‘Ooooooh’, or, ‘Better them than me’.
And when we did get back to the barn, and I did slide off, I kept a very firm grip on the pommel and her mane, which is a good thing because she broke training enough to start walking toward home, hay, carrots, and some cool water on her hot back, and for the first half dozen steps I was dangling by my bell-ringing shoulders while I sent frantic messages to my lower limbs about, you know, walking. . . .
And for those of you who are not nine years old and horse mad, here’s a new FAQ answer soon to appear on the renovated web site:
What does nuraddin, the web site’s email address, mean?
The Nur-ad-Din room is in the Islamic art wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/09/wae/ho_1970.170.htm
According to the web site it was a gift in 1970 which I assume means when they put it up. I saw it for the first time a few years later (in New York City alone for the first time, having been living in Maine for several years and feeling very much the country girl, both thrilled and overwhelmed) and have been making pilgrimages there ever since. It was immediately recognisable as a place where stories lived. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that you go through a little door from the museum hall into the room itself, but there’s only a tiny space roped off where you can stand and look–and listen: one of its charms is the small fountain a little way in front of your feet, which is off the bottom border of this photo–but even stopped at the gate like that I’ve always found the atmosphere very powerful. The door is slightly narrower than the roped-off area, so you can lean against the wall inside and let your mind drift. I’ve stood there half an hour sometimes (wishing all these tourists would go look at something else and stop disturbing me) in a very nearly out-of-body experience. THE BLUE SWORD was born there, I think, even though Damar is more India–specifically Kipling’s India–than Syria. Someone who has read more of my web site than is good for them may remember that I wrote BEAUTY, my first published novel, as a break from what would become Damar and BLUE SWORD and THE HERO AND THE CROWN. The Nur-ad-Din room is one of the places where all that fuzzy stuff just out of imaginative reach came together with a bang and a clatter and a dazzling flash of light that illuminated the Damarian landscape perfectly just before it blinded me, and said, Yes, I am a story, I am your story. Write me. Go on, I dare you.
They closed the Islamic Wing a few years ago for renovations. I haven’t seen it since it reopened. I hope they haven’t messed with the Nur-ad-Din room.
* * *
* Which shoulder is a beautiful melange of yellow and purple and itches like crazy
** Or if you’re out with someone prone to seeing tigers in the shrubbery and feeling that the only safe haven is BACK THERE SOMEWHERE! I THINK IT’S IN CORNWALL! –and the best thing to do is to go there now, what you might call an anti-lead. As previously observed, Connie has quite a shy on her, but she keeps going forward.
*** Although the ratbag farmer has ploughed up half of it and put it down to some stupid crop this summer. Where’s his sense of priorities?
Rainbow landscape lV
. . . And at this point my memory card declared itself full. (Note to self: kill Computer Man, who promised that there was space for twice as many photos on this card.) I was trying for bee photos; the little beggars move around and I was hoping for a shot of several bees in the same frame. The entire field was not merely humming but roaring with bees, and there were a good half dozen distinct kinds, big fat ones and delicate slender ones and ones that looked nervous-makingly like wasps–noticeably different even to a bee know-nothing like me. (Mirasol of CHALICE would have had more to say.) And after I got a shot of several different kinds of bee all companionably going about their business on adjacent flowers I wanted to get a shot of the long row of bee houses set by the side of the field. But I couldn’t. So you’ll have to imagine that part.
Rainbow landscape, lll
But I’m not sure I’d believe it if I weren’t the one who took the photos. The bit I’m leaving out is that we had to go back, because the first day I didn’t have the camera with me. This is a walk out beyond the old house, and I don’t ordinarily get that far all that often. But this was so extraordinary that I had to come back with the camera. Hellhounds thought it was a good idea too.