Continued caresses
I keep thinking today must be Sunday, because I had a bell rope in my hands early in the day. Of course I had a horse in my hands even earlier in the day, which is a proper Saturday thing.* Speaking of caresses. There’s nothing nicer than a silky horse (except possibly a silky hellhound**). And I’ve realized Connie positively likes having her ears mauled. I think she stands on her head secretly in the field at midnight*** so she can come in in the morning with disgraceful ears. But today I was scrubbing away and discovered that her head, eyelids and bottom lip were all drooping lower . . . and lower . . . I put her away with very clean ears.
Ringing a wedding at my Wednesday tower is weirdly hermetic. At my home tower we have, you know, windows. That you can see out of. And we have them on three sides of the tower, including one that looks inside the church, so you can see what the bride is wearing and whether she was into torturing her bridesmaids. This is very useful; we can see at once when we need to leap to our ropes.† At towers without convenient windows you have to post a scout. At my Wednesday tower the only window is ten feet overhead, which you don’t think about during evening practice, and the scout has rather a way to come, so we’re poised for the sound of feet thundering up the stair. I suppose the locals are used to it but it makes me nervous. I also miss seeing what everybody is wearing.††
However. Enough of the chat. Here’s what you all have been waiting for.††† Elspeth is wasted on the literature-chopping industry. If she has a holiday in England I hope I can at least meet her for a cup of tea so we can fulminate together. Peter can come along if he wants to, but he’s really too mild-mannered to fulminate properly. Maybe it’s an American gene.
Subj: “Caress”
From: Elspeth.Winkle@Pancake.com
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Mr. Dickinson,
Thank you for your kind email! Nothing would please me more than to have a list of no-no words. However, this is an unwritten list and very fickle to say the least.
Each State Department of Education assembles various committees (during the test development period) that will consist of various types of people, cutting across the layers of their populace. Various educational levels, variations in financial status, religion, color and creed. Every single member of the committees has the right to reject words (or complete stories) that are offensive to the individuals and the community which they represent. The final decisions do not always include all the craziness that is suggested, but it does get pretty “funny” some times. One wonders what kind of world these people live in, or have they been around children lately.
As far as the testing industry is concerned
children are never hungry,
they do not get lost or hurt,
they are not exposed to any abuse,
they never fight or are witness to any fights,
they love everyone and everyone loves them,
no one ever passes away,
or is very ill,
there are no floods,
hurricanes,
tornados
or fires…………….ever.
Children also will only be able to concentrate during specific word count numbers, or else.
I am most likely forgetting several other disasters that are not allowed, but I have to stop, because I am getting very depressed thinking of all this bad stuff. There are times where Alzheimer’s comes in handy.
Depending on the state, the passages may be found by teachers, contracted passage finders complying with specific state standards and grade levels, and also by the development team here and at the state level. Between what is available in the public library or can be found on the internet, the world is their oyster.
I hope that this will not prompt you to drink too much wine………or maybe it should. In any case, keep on writing.
Thank you for your understanding!
Best to you!
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
* * *
* ‘Early’ is of course relative. I did not get to bed ‘early’ last night.
** Yes, yes, and silky cats, ferrets, rabbits–are birds silky? I wouldn’t really have characterized Angel as silky–and various other caressable creatures.
*** Since midnight is early evening to me, I should go have a stroll that way some time,^ and check.
^ Do not take hellhounds, they will see it as a precedent.
† Unless you are on one of the back bells and very gymnastic with it^ you can’t see out the window over the front door while you’re ringing but you can usually hear the tumult of a wedding ebbing away from you, even through the noise of the bells. We have at least one window open pretty much year round: eight people pulling briskly on ropes in a small room, it gets pretty sultry in there. And bell tower windows tend to be first cousins to arrow slits.
^ Which would not be I
†† Note there were a second pair of Converse All Stars ringing the wedding this afternoon.
††† And yes I did ask her if it was all right if I posted her email on my blog.
Do you have any pets?
I am still sweating away on the FAQ for the web site. Some of you may have noticed the site’s new opening page*; it also says the new site will be up by the end of this month. Blog/sitemom keeps saying patiently, just choose a few crucial bits and deal with those; the nice thing about a web site is that it’s never finished. But the FAQ is, to me, obsessive that I am, the FAQ. Must. Get. It. Done. Great swathes of it can remain pretty much the same; other swathes . . . cannot.**
Some of this you’ll have seen before (I have only the one life, and less than one memory; repetition is inevitable), but some of it you haven’t.
Q: Do you have any pets?
RMcK: Oh my. How life moves on, leaving tyre tracks over tender portions of your anatomy as it goes. After I sold my horse–because I couldn’t afford him: it had been a gamble, and I knew it, and I lost–which must be close to ten years ago, I updated the answer to that question like this:
Three whippets and a 1965 cream-coloured MGB convertible. The whippets lie around in graceful, anatomically incredible heaps and assist in the Doing of Literature. They know the system, and if we aren’t at our desks by 9 am they come round and stare at us accusingly. It’s astonishing, the force of accusation beaming from the eyes of a creature that barely comes up to your knee. I seem to have had to give up horses for the moment so the MG is my horse equivalent: exhilarating and temperamental. With your eyes half-closed — especially if you privately think the old classic MGs are the most beautiful cars ever made — she actually quite begins to resemble the perfect, cream-coloured ponies of your distant childhood fantasies, the ones who might secretly be unicorns.
Those three whippets–Holly, Hazel and Rowan, to whom DRAGONHAVEN is dedicated–have all gone on to that big squashy sofa in the Elysian Fields, and very happy they are there too because the silly rule that they can’t get on it till a human sits on it first and invites them has been dismissed forever. There isn’t a day that goes by, however, down here in mundane reality, that I don’t think of each of them in her turn; most of my favourite walks are ones I first discovered in their company; and the current canine generation often strikingly remind me of who has gone before–or strikingly remind me how different they are.
There are only two of them this time around, because I have only two arms for holding two long extending leads–I feel that leads are a necessity with sighthounds in this landscape, which is riddled with roads and barbed wire, when they can be over the county border after a rabbit before you’ve drawn breath to call them. (Whippets are, pound for pound, the fastest dog on the planet. Greyhounds are only a little bit faster, and a lot bigger.) And Peter at over 80 years old no longer feels like racing over the countryside the way the five of us used to.
Chaos and Darkness [there will be a link to hellhound photo gallery], AKA the hellhounds, are litter brothers, just two years old as I write this in August 08, seven-eighths whippet and one-eighth deerhound. Our whippets were all little–Hazel never quite made twenty pounds, the other two were a pound or two over: but they were long-legged and whipcord-muscled and you’d never mistake them for small dogs–so these boys at a pound or two over forty pounds (Darkness) and a pound or two under (Chaos) each seems enormous in comparison (especially when I have to heave them over dog-impassable stiles). I was also not prepared for dogs who can lay their heads on the kitchen table, or your desk. The whippets were all the right size for putting their heads on your knee and looking at you beseechingly about one thing or another, probably involving a lap or a sofa: when a hellhound wants a lap, he just throws his front half into yours, and when only the three of us want to watch TV together we need a camp bed in front of the sofa for extra leg room. (It’s an old horsehair sofa with a camber, and it’s remarkably easy to slide off of.) I find it very difficult to negotiate the concept of air space with a dog, although they’ve (mostly) learnt that objects on tables and desks are forbidden.
The main shock to the system about the hellhounds however is that they’re boys. I don’t do boys. (Male dogs pee all the time! Male dogs pee every five feet when they’re out on walks! And they pee on everything! I put them on short lead and frog march them past the antique shop, which usually has a few chairs out on the pavement, to lure in passersby.) The majority of the dogs I’ve ever had much to do with, with one notable exception, have been girls; even back in my house- and pet-sitting days the critters I bonded with tended to be girls. But when I saw the ad in the local paper for ‘whippet lurcher puppies’ it was a year since my last whippet had died, and the first local ad for any sort of sighthound that I’d seen. (Note that they aren’t really lurchers, they’re longdogs. Lurchers are any sighthound crossbred with anything that isn’t a sighthound; longdogs are any sighthound crossbred with any other sighthound. Whippets and deerhounds are both sighthounds. But people generally know the word lurcher, and generally don’t know longdog.) I had begun subscribing to a country-sports newspaper for the puppy ads in the back–I wanted a working dog family rather than a show dog one–but the whippets all seemed to be in Yorkshire or Wales, and I wanted to meet the little furry thing before I bought it. So I was instead in the process of deciding to adopt an ex-racing greyhound (or two), and had half an appointment–if one can have half an appointment–to visit a greyhound rescue not hugely far from here.
And then this ad. And I made a little hole in the floor getting to the phone fast enough. The woman sounded very nice, but after saying there were eight puppies and four were available, she asked cautiously if I was looking for a dog or a bitch? And I said, oh, a bitch (or two), I’ve only ever really had girls. And she said that there were only two bitches in the litter and they were both already spoken for. This stopped me about two thirds of a second–hey, I was seriously whippet-deprived by that time–and I said, fine, boys are fine, when can I come see the litter?
The rest is history. Much of it to be found in the blog. Although have I ever told the story of how I finally made up my mind to have two of them? Karma, it’s all karma.
But good karma for my MG has run out. She’s for sale. I don’t want to sell her, but I don’t really have a choice; I haven’t had her out of the garage now in two years–since I brought the hellhounds home. When it was undersized whippets, I was always going to figure out a way to put some kind of mesh roof over the slender fillet of space that passes for a back seat in an old MGB, because the whippets would have fit. The hellhounds won’t. And in my MG’s heyday I was using her to commute to ring bells–my home tower was twenty minutes away, and my most regular second weekly practise slightly farther yet. My home tower now is a two minute walk away (or a one minute bolt on Sunday mornings to not be late to ring service) and my second weekly practise is too far to walk but too close to recharge the battery.
She’s not only a car to me. I hope she goes to a good home.
I also want to mention my poor budgie. That was during the eighteen months I was really flattened by the first full onslaught of the ME. I wasn’t walking dogs; I couldn’t. I suppose I wanted something that would keep me company while Peter was out with the dogs and I was home alone with the several hundred rose bushes I was too feeble to take care of either, and the several thousand books I was too braindead to read. And I’d always rather fancied one of the small talking birds. Because of puppy farms I was chary of pet shops for any purpose; I found a (relatively) local breeder who had huge open aviaries and obviously adored their birds. They bred show birds, which appears to mean large bulgy feathery foreheads which look very strange to me, and they were happy to sell me a young bird who was insufficiently bulgy. I picked him out because he was so beautiful: I can’t remember now what you call the colour, but if you start with the standard budgie turquoise and take it down to something near opal, that was what Angel looked like. He was a young bird, but he was still past the age where he’d be easy to teach to talk, and I didn’t. He’d perch on my finger though–astonishingly warm, those tiny claws–and he made nice friendly bird noises.
He only lived a year. When he began growing listless I found a specialist bird vet who went off on a rant about overbred show birds: wild parakeets live thirty years, he said. You’re lucky if a show bird lasts five. He could do nothing; and one morning Angel glided down to the bottom of his cage . . . and stayed there.
I’m just not good about things dying. I was so traumatised by Angel’s early death that I haven’t tried again with a bird, although I still think about it. The specialist bird vet says that in the case of budgies, you’re better off with a pet shop bird. Those bulgy foreheads on show birds, by the way, are for some reason known as buffy. I named him Angel because I named him Angel, but it was Peter who said, ah ha! He’s Angel because he isn’t Buffy!
I do have a horse to ride again, although she’s not mine. (Calling a horse a pet is always a trifle ludicrous. But who with animals in their lives ever calls them pets? They’re the animals in your life. The word pet was devised by someone who didn’t have any: and my Oxford dictionary calls its derivation ‘unknown’.) I’ve had horses to ride several times since I sold Impi (registered name Impala II. His previous owner had called him Impy, ugggggh, and with a misspent childhood reading H Rider Haggard I had no trouble immediately changing it to Impi) but this is a particularly nice one. She’s even a pretty mare with a lovely face, although I have to say she’s grey, not cream, and I really doubt there are any unicorns very close in her ancestry. But I feel a great rise of spirits when I walk down the stable row toward her, especially when she puts her head over the door and whinnies.
* * *
* Isn’t it pretty? Hint: if you don’t think so, don’t tell me about it.
** You know there are lots of people, even lots of people who write words for a living who, when faced with a question like ‘Do you have any pets?’ would say, yes, two hell- I mean, two whippet crosses, litter brothers, named Darkness and Chaos. Next question?’
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. . . .
* * *
* 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.
* * *
* 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
Whinny
Connie WHINNIED at me today.*
Jenny’s own horses live in their own little row of stables at the furthest end of the yard, and Connie is at the further end of that row (next to the chickens).** I don’t know what her normal schedule is, but she may be used to clattery leather riding bootsteps coming through the main barn toward her in the mornings being for her. But she came to the front of her stall, put her head over the door, pointed her ears at me–there wasn’t anybody else around to choose from–and whinnied. It wasn’t a ohmigod-there-was-a-tiger-just-through-here-a-minute-ago-come-and-protect-me whinny, nor a I’m-hungry-and-they’ve-shortchanged-me-again-and-a-grass-belly-is-quite-attractive-in-a-mare-of-my-mature-years whinny. It was a hi-how-are-ya whinny, and it might even have been a hi-are-we-going-to-Do-Stuff? whinny. I admit I’m not perfectly sure that she’s learnt yet that I’m the Mean One and she only gets carrots after the ride with me . . . but she did hang around to be petted and put her head through the halter without being bribed.
One of her not so negligible virtues is that she likes being groomed and fussed over. For those of us who like horses better than we like riding***, a horse who does not enjoy being fussed over is tragic, although my experience is that usually these poor sad creatures have merely been fussed over wrong and you need to figure out what they like.† Thoroughbreds are notoriously thin-skinned but a soft brush–or even a chamois–and a light touch usually go a long way. (They have to go a long way, because it takes you forever to clean one of these animals.) Connie is much more relaxed and tolerant than this, but over the weeks, while she’s been perfectly polite from the beginning, she’s obviously settling more and more comfortably into the particular fuss I make. I’m always very careful to let her know where I am when I’m working on her†† but if I look forward her ears are always watching me.††† She puts her head right down so you can get all the itchy places where the bridle straps run‡ and you can do anything to her ears. Most horses in my experience, even the ones who love a fuss so much they almost lie down and present their bellies to be rubbed, will limit the mauling of their ears.
Connie seems to have found a particularly satisfying dust bath in her paddock. Mud is easier to get off; once it dries, it brushes straight out. Dust works its way into the hair and then sets so an ordinary mud-removing brush skates right off again. She goes out in a fly sheet, so the damage is limited, but her ears are available. About a fortnight ago I noticed that the ears at the end of the neck I was learning to know and love were remarkably grimy which aside from questions of proper horse care and stable management was ruining my view. But I forgot once I was on the ground again. Last Saturday I had my first serious go at an ear–the grimier one–with a well-wrung out sponge. But dirt, as I say, is adhesive, and after a minute or two of delicate daubing I found myself with the ear flattened against the palm of one hand while I scrubbed it like it was a floor with the other. And Connie was still standing there with her head down for easy reach, and one hind leg slack. Okay, last Saturday she might have been suffering general collapse as a result of a (hot) two and a half hour hack, but today I did the other ear and she still stood there with a faint smile on her face of ‘well this one at least cares about the complete picture.‘
Now if we could only do something about our canter transitions.
* * *
* I am so in love. This is cute in a 9 year old. I’m not sure it works in a 56 year old.^
^ And if anyone is counting, no, I’m not quite 56 yet. But I always start calling myself the next year early so that by the time the birthday arrives I’m used to it and can luxuriate and enjoy myself. I don’t do parties, but I do fabulous food and fabulous presents and Peter would hear about it if they were not forthcoming.
** The chickens are also friendly. They burble at you if you come near their fence. I have been thinking that they just equate two-legged moving upright = food, and are ever hopeful, but I saw Jenny’s husband bringing them a big gardening basket of freshly-cut grass and they went mental. I asked Jenny and she said oh, yes, they’re just friendly, as if I’d just asked if horses are good to ride. Oh. I know there are pet chickens–I have a friend who has three layers, and one of them has made herself a pet with a well-judged charm offensive–and Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hen-Chicken-Maintenance-Martin-Gurdon/dp/1843304147
is entirely friendly and funny and adorable, but I’m still not expecting companionable burbling from chickens I’ve never been properly introduced to.
I had this exchange with Jenny while Clover had done her fling-and-upend trick at me and I was rubbing her belly and murmuring, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, to go with her–I’m not sure what you call it in a dog: it’s sort of halfway between purring and squeaking–and Jenny said, half-disgustedly, You soft dog. You’re supposed to be patrolling the yard and being fierce and upholding the honour of the Jack Russell. –Oh thank the gods you’re not, say I.
*** This is a comment on HOW MUCH I LIKE HORSES, you know, not a casual remark about my indifference to riding.^
^ Indifference to riding?!!???!?
† A pocketful of carrots is usually a good beginning.
†† If there’s a way to be perfectly safe working around a horse, I don’t know what it is. And there’s no good way to deal with the insides of the hind legs except by leaning across the other one. So you stay as close as possible, so any accidental kick doesn’t have space to develop any momentum, and I try to have a hand or a shoulder or something in contact with the side I’m on as I reach across. And I don’t deal with tricky horses. Life is short and I like my limbs in their present configuration.
††† You know what I mean
‡ And because of the grass belly–and a tendency to colic–she has to be turned out in a Hannibal-Lector contraption so she can’t eat much, so that’s more straps