The Grim Reaper

Three years ago today, my beloved little Arab horse chose to gallop off with a buck and a kick into the next world. He was getting old and despite being spritely and fit I was all too aware that his time was coming. Not through anything that had happened to him, just because nothing and no-one lasts forever.

Little Arab lay down and made it clear that he was in immense pain and could I call the Vet as soon as bloody possible. And despite the best equine Vet in the country working her hardest, it was obvious that he was not going to get better and I made the decision that we should put him to sleep. It wouldn’t have been fair to have put him through an operation and I certainly didn’t have the funds to do it. So instead we took him quietly up to his field and I fed him carrots and pieces of Mars Bar as the lethal liquid was injected. In seconds, my glossy bay Arab created by Allah, horse of fire, was still and silent on the grass, out of pain and in the next life, pieces of chocolate still in his mouth.

Now this horse had not lived his life aiming to please those who are faint of heart. He was what you would call a 1000% horse as he was either running with his engine on maximum revs or he was asleep. He was very kind to my daughter but only after I’d reprimanded him for snapping at her ponytail with his huge teeth as she cycled her plastic tricycle past his stable door. In one of the last dressage competitions I took him to the judge wrote on my score sheet that he was “a very nice little horse, could do a very good test if you can get him to settle more to the job”. I felt like writing back to her, telling her that I’d been trying for over twelve years to get him to settle more to the bloody job. But that was him in a nutshell. If he found something a bit dull he would provide his own entertainment to liven things up. He was terrified of anything on the public highway that weighed more than 3 tonnes. This was a bit of an issue during the harvest when every damn thing on the road is a tractor. (I won’t even mention the day when we met the combine harvester – I had to lie in a darkened room for four hours after that one.) So in the way the horse lived, it was fitting that he chose to fatally colic on a Bank holiday weekend meaning that I had to pay the Vet and Out of Hours call out fee. The Arab would have loved that.

I chose to have his life ended by an injection instead of a gun for my sake and this meant than when my four year old daughter asked to see him, I didn’t hesitate and took her by the hand up to the field. Each to their own and some people will think this is wrong, but I wanted her to understand that sometimes it is kinder to stop an animal suffering with death rather than prolong the agony and that death is not always a horrible thing. She helped to cover the body with a tarpaulin and gave him a pat, a stroke and tried to close his eyes. The next day she saw the carcass being removed by a JCB and delivered into a hole in the ground and she came with me to scatter grass seed on the bald earth a few days later. He was a very special little horse and if educating a child about death was in main purpose in life then I’m delighted to have known him. The rosettes were obviously just a bonus.

Misery Under Canvas

I’ve been on holiday. No really, I have. I left home at 4.30pm on Saturday drove to the Scottish Borders, slept in a tent and was home again by 2.30pm on Sunday afternoon. This is how people in the countryside go on holiday using the “Cram-in-as-much-as-you-can-in-one-night-and-rush-home-again” technique. It saves on pet sitters and it doesn’t leave enough time for the Other Half to become suicidal because the daughter is feeding tadpoles to the cat.

The reason that I went to the Scottish Borders and slept in a tent is because it has become a sort of tradition. It’s also the only chance I have to meet up with some Scottish friends of mine. I use the term “friends” only in case they actually end up reading this because I don’t really like them very much. When I arrived at the tent, I mentioned that I had thought of bringing a bottle of Prosecco as a gift but I was worried as to how it would behave after an hour long car journey. My tall friend then produced a bottle of Prosecco that was so large it took two of us and a sack barrow to transport it outside into the sun. People even stopped by to admire the enormous bottle with its glittery hologram of a label, assuming that it was some kind of monument or visitor attraction. Supper is always a miserable affair as The Tall One assumes that everyone has been working down the Coalmine all day. When she serves my supper I am often forced to enquire if the portion is meant to feed all the inhabitants of the local town as well. No, it isn’t. And often there is pudding served in one gigantic bowl with 4 spoons, hotly pursued by cheese and crackers. I swear that The Tall One just throws food at me all evening. Another thing which I bloody hate about these “friends” is that they can actually eat everything that The Tall One serves up. Even The Feisty One, who is about the same size as me can pack it away as though she hasn’t seen food for weeks. As if this experience isn’t bad enough, once you have consumed as much as The Tall One deems fit, you become terrified to leave your seat at the table. This is because upon your return you will find that the empty glass that you left at your place setting has been refilled. The Tall One doesn’t know what it is to fall out with the top of the glass and often you will be forced to lower your mouth to your drink; because any attempt to lift it will result in huge gin and tonic trauma all over your hoodie. The sleeping arrangements are also somewhat suspect. Me and The Sensible One sleep in a tent whereas The Tall One and The Feisty One sleep in a shed on wheels. I’m not all that certain that this is reasonable but to be fair, for some reason I usually end up removing my contact lenses and no items of clothing before zipping myself into my sleeping bag. Something else I can’t fathom is that I always wake up drowsy and have a bit of a headache. I have checked the tent from top to bottom and can find no faulty gas fire. Therefore I can only assume that The Feisty One is slipping something into my drink(s). Perhaps it was lucky for all of concerned that my phone went flat so I couldn’t take any photographs. They would have been just too boring.

Bring Back The Woolly Mammoth

A few year ago, Scientists analysing the fossils of the Woolly Mammoth, came to the conclusion that the rising temperatures at the end of the ice age may have been the reason that the animal became extinct and not (as previously thought) due to human intervention. Now, there has been talk of “de-extinction” for some time now. The process of certain creatures that are no longer with us being brought back to life. Now, I can kind of see the point in bringing back the poor old Dodo as we, the human killed it off, but the Woolly Mammoth?? The Plains of North America now have roads, crops and people on them, so what would he eat? And it’s not just as though you can ask him to live just anywhere, he’d be sweating like a fat lass in a disco if you made him live in Spain. Crikey, even I can think of better things to bring back from the dead than that. I mean Freddie Mercury for one, or even my Granny and that’s without touching on the list of famous and influential people who have passed away in the last six months. In life there are things that simply run their course and is this a good enough reason to re-create them? All this got me thinking and as horses are usually at the forefront of my mind, I started thinking about all our native horse breeds.

The Rare Breed Survival Trust states that a breed is “Critical” when there are less than 300 breeding mares; “Endangered” is less than 500, “Vulnerable”; less than 900 and “At Risk” is less than 1500. And even though these all important mares are registered, they may not be used for breeding purposes and even if they are, they may not produce a live foal. This makes some of our native breeds rarer than wild pandas. One of my favourite breeds The Hackney is on the Critical list. The Hackney was used as a carriage horse and the clue to his survival is in his name. The only Hackney Carriages we have now have an engine and are driven by someone who has knowledge of London that would rival that enormous man on The Chase. The Hackney is a beautiful creature, sleek, elegant and with an extravagant high knee action. He is eye catching to say the very least and he had brought his good blood to many other breeds of horse. Would I have one? Oh lordy, yes I would love one, but I would have to travel a long way down South to take him to a Show, as up here in the North, Hackney Ponies are more scarce than buses.

The great Clydesdale horse is on the At Risk list. This heavy horse was used to plough our fields and sow our crops until the rise of the tractor. He has also brought his bloodlines into many riding horses and over the years I have known a few horses that have been the offspring of a Clydesdale mare sent to a Thoroughbred stallion. The common sense and kindness of the heavy horse crossed with the quick thinking and energetic racehorse makes an active and generous horse to ride and deal with. Pure-bred Clydesdales with a saddle on have become very popular in recent years. I have a friend who shows her majestic elephant of a horse in ridden classes and I have to admit the first time I rode him I caught flies in my mouth. I expected this colossal beast to be a bit like a cross between a Neanderthal and an Army Tank, with the finesse of Play Doh. To my amazement he was neither. His mouth was soft on the bit and it was like sitting on an air suspension. At the slightest touch of my legs he moved forward with a lovely enthusiastic manner; he clearly loved his job and was both eager and happy to please his rider. I am 5’2” and about 9 and a half stone so he would find me something of a feather weight, but just because this horse is the size of a bungalow, should we really be asking him to carry big weights? If you look at the Clydesdale’s hind legs you will find that you would struggle to get a fag paper between his hocks, unlike our riding horses where this would be a conformation fault. This gives the heavy horse the power to drive those all important back legs into the ground and pull a huge amount of weight behind him, he is not built to carry weight on his back. And there you have it, the reason that the lovely gentle Clydesdale is at risk is because we no longer need him to be the Farmers’ Servant. How sad.

The Perils of Self Employment

I should be working. I really should be working but instead I’m writing this.

I’m self-employed and throughout the ten years of being an employee, this was my dream. The thought of being able to take a day off whenever I liked was incredibly appealing, especially when I was sitting at my desk from 9am until 5.30pm every day. Back in those days the highlight of my working week was leaving the office and finding that the Seagulls had shat all over my car. Just to liven things up, everyone in the department where I worked, used to illegally park their cars right at the front of the building. If you ever want to see a group of individuals move exceedingly quickly, get everyone’s attention, silently count to ten really slowly then announce that you’ve just seen the traffic warden. This job was bad for my health because I was also fat while I was there. Scotch pie with coffee at 10am, followed by half a pack of indigestion tablets, eat the lunch that you made at home and order pizza at 3pm because you were still starving. We should have been sponsored by Rennies.

So, no more do I have to think of an excuse to go home early, I can choose to finish work whenever I like. Actually, that’s not quite true. You see, no one told me that when you become self-employed you develop a phobia regarding having no work. Consequently, you will find yourself with the presence of mind where it is impossible to turn work away. In the days when I was an employee, I thought with glee that if I worked for myself I could take the whole of Cheltenham week off, so I could sit every afternoon and watch the racing. I hate to admit this but every Cheltenham Festival of Racing since I became self employed, I have managed to watch one afternoon of racing, ducking between my desk and the television.

I don’t mind telling you that the cost of stationery was a bit of a shocker as well. Envelopes are in fact very expensive, costing more than gold, and you have to buy your own cellotape. No more printing the addresses on your Christmas card envelopes and quietly shuffling them into the mail heap. Pens cost money too. This was a surprise as I thought that they just appeared on your desk. Printer ink isn’t cheap and therefore I don’t print half as many photographs, calendars, party invites, leaflets, labels, random pictures from the internet, fake parking tickets, newsletters or posters since I became self-employed. You have to empty your own bin. This is perhaps why my bin is so full that I’ve just had to press my foot into it to try and make some space for the bloody empty ink cartridge that my printer has just depleted. Lunch can also be problematic. I can assure you that knowing exactly what is in the fridge takes all the fun out of lunchtime. Usually, I open the fridge door stare aimlessly at the contents for half a minute before closing the door and having a Cup a Soup and a packet of crisps.

There is a comfort in going to the same office every day, knowing what time you need to get up and what time you need to leave the house. There’s the magic that happens when you stay at your desk after the Office has closed. Suddenly your hourly rate shoots up and you are earning time and a half. And then half way through the month someone deposits your salary into your bank account, without the need for you to sit down and physically prepare an invoice. Have you ever seen a Mechanic’s car? It’s usually held together with gaffer tape and you have to lie underneath it to poke something into the engine to get it to start. Well that’s a bit like an Administrator’s invoicing system. Ask me to file your invoices and I will check that you want them in alpha numerical fashion and crack on, but my own administration? Well, maybe best not to go there. I have also found that I have become a jack of all trades and master of absolutely none. When people ask me what I do for a living, I have to think for a minute and then list off some of the jobs I do in the fashion of a six year old telling you about a day trip to Lego Land.

One of the downsides to working for yourself is that if you don’t go to work, you don’t get paid. None of this holiday pay malarkey for us who strive out on our own. And that’s an arse. There is no office banter for those who choose to work alone with only the company of the radio but at least we have opportunity to churn out three loads of washing and are available to sign for that parcel that’s being delivered on Tuesday, sometime between 8am and 6pm. I wouldn’t swop my working conditions for anything and if you are considering becoming your own boss; do your research and go for it. You won’t regret it.

The Breakfast Club

Last Saturday at 8.45am I heard the Postman drive up to my house to deliver my usual collection of begging letters and demands for payment. And I was embarrassed. Why was I embarrassed? Because I was warm and toasty, gloriously snuggled beneath my duvet. I was revelling in the Saturday morning lie in as I did not have to do the school run or go to work. But I couldn’t help thinking “What does he think when he finds the house in silence with its eyes tight shut?” Of course what the employee of the Royal Mail was actually thinking was “How quickly can I ram this heap of junk mail into this fecking letterbox and get finished?”

There is a complicated kind of shame associated with a lie in when you are a country dweller. I know someone who rises every day before the first Sparrow has broken wind and sits on their patio with a warm coffee and an even warmer coat, to watch the sun cheekily peep over the horizon. It’s a lovely idea, but to do this every day you have to go to bed before Emmerdale has finished.

Aside from the idleness of the weekend, I do adore an early rise. Nothing sets you up for the day in a better fashion than a cheeky excursion around the neighbourhood on horseback when the shadows are long and the dewdrops are still garnishing the grass. You might not see a soul, or you might see the world before its wife has got to it. A year ago when out on a pre-7am ride, I almost scared to death a lovely lady who was staying in a holiday cottage nearby. She was brandishing her camera and said she had been told that there were many hares in the area and she was trying to photograph them. I told her that at that time of year I saw hares most mornings along the piece of road leading to her cottage. As I rode away from her a hare ran over the road in front of me, as I turned to see if she had seen it, I saw she was facing the opposite way. When I was returning home, two more lolloped across my path as she meandered on ahead; with her back to them. For those of us who remember the Kit Kat advert with the Pandas, it was a moment like that.

There is tranquil softness in the air before 8am and I like it.

It’s like being a Member of the Secret Club that resides behind an unmarked door in Mayfair, although there are no champagne cocktails offered on a silver platter at 6.20am. More’s the pity.