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I’m off again tomorrow, to Bath, as part of some coursework I’m doing. The ‘flying’ in flying changes is carrying quite a lot of the weight, lately. But! I’ve got some free time and me being me, found an equestrian centre and am going on a trek on Tuesday. !
Hopefully, I’ll be well recovered from having had to wake up at 4.30 am to get to the airport…
Right. It was Thursday, and it was time to Tango. Read the rest of this entry »
Once again, a threshold crossed with no warning.
The weather has cleared up to the extent that the sun comes out towards the end of the day. The summer is waning — it’s getting that bit darker, again, earlier — and out we go on a ride out to take advantage of the grudging seasonability.
The horses like it. Delilah picks up her feet, and trots briskly down the lane, and despite the swarms of midges and, God help us, flying ants, she’s having a good time. It’s nice for them, to canter/gallop in the fields —
Unless you’re Spike, and you’d rather be dining on the thistles and who knows what. We’d all pelted around one of the smaller fields, only to see he’d dumped his rider in favour of the long grasses. Twice.
That put paid to anything more strenuous, but no one was complaining — we were heading for the upper arena. Read the rest of this entry »
I keep seeing it: over the double, and there’s that fence. Just sitting there. The number five in black on the red placard. There it is, and there we go, Delilah and I, right past it as opposed to over it.
I tell myself I felt a hesitation in her stride. Well? What are we doing? And I think that’s true: she didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t telling her.
It occurs to me that I finally understand what my role is in this whole horseriding thing. Read the rest of this entry »
So, I’ve become complacent, I know that. In light of trying not to be lazy, I took Tango for my private lesson. Read the rest of this entry »
It feels so different, to get on Delilah. I sit there, relaxed, the reins in good grasp, but in the waiting to go: nothing.
Not nothing, exactly, but the absence of doubt; perturbation; anxiety.
I know as well as anyone that what you bring to the horse is communicated to the horse. It was the first thing I knew, even before I got up on one. It’s only lately that this has truly been brought home.
I sit on Delilah and know that she’ll listen to me. I know she’ll canter when I ask for the canter, I know that she’s not going to buck under any circumstances. Okay, I know that she won’t always accept the canter aid on a circle, nobody’s perfect, and I know that she shortens her stride about fifty per cent of the time before a fence [annoying, but I'm not falling, literally, for that anymore], and on Saturday she just wasn’t bothered, no matter how I tickled her bum with the long stick… but I trust her.
I trust her. And in trusting her, I just get on with it. She’s not going to do anything that requires I worry in advance. And in not borrowing trouble, I have no trouble. I keep good contact, I have found my seat in her bouncy gait, and I look up, ahead, not trying to read her mind through the back of her head.
It’s liberating. I simply adore her. But I can’t help but get that niggly feeling… It’s too easy…
OR LOOSE BOX, RATHER I was running late on Tuesday, stupid second bus blew right by and I had to wait another fifteen minutes for the next one to take me across the river, to Nassau Street, to the walk to the LUAS, further delay caused by some poxy tourist buying tram tickets one by one with a credit card — I felt a wave of the same kind of crazy that caused me to lose The Amazing and Magical Stick of Wonder; I gripped my whip tightly and breathed in through the nose, out through the mouth…
Well, I got there. I always do. Read the rest of this entry »
I seem to be back up — a faulty broadband modem, a faulty connection, further faulty connection as regards delivery of new broadband modem, etc, etc — and a busy ass week had precluded the bloggin’.
If the internets die, well, I don’t want to think about it.
Let’s see how this new black box works, though, and hope for the best…
Apologies to anyone who’d googled Saussure, Charles Demuth, or William Carlos Williams, and found themselves here.
I was as nervous as I was way back in September of 2006. A friend messaged me yesterday to meet up, and I replied, in textese, that I couldn’t as I was going up to the yard to jump. In the league. Or whatever it’s called. I was going showjumping.
Was I? Really? I had my eye on the sky all day, waiting for the promised deluge, hoping for it. I rang to see if it was still on, and evoked distress in the woman who answered the phone. Why wouldn’t it be on? Indeed. It was just, I was going to go all the way up there, and the jumping is in the upper outdoor arena, and if it rained, I’d have gone all the way out there, when I could have been sinking a few jars and not being jumping, jumping a course I’d never seen before, in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know.
My body ignored my nattering mind and walked me out the door at ten to four. Read the rest of this entry »
The yard was dead. Very unusual for a Saturday. One of the Livery Lasses was lingering in front of the barn, and told me that the polocrossers were off in South Africa, at some tournament or other. Ah. Only one class was going on, ’summer’ hours in place, the intermediate ladies on a ride out, and I slogged up to the upper arena — still rather mucky about the place — and stopped dead.
The course, from Friday’s showjumping league, was still up. Read the rest of this entry »
