Sue Millard

Happy New Year

2012-01-07T12:04:00.002Z

Hello dear reader, whoever you are (sings tune from The King and I)...

New Year's resolutions don't come easily to me but this year I seem to have several that are tapping on my skull. One is to get this damn historical novel (a) completed and (b) knocked into a readable and saleable shape. I'm sort-of telling myself that I must complete it before I start the spring tune-up of the ponies for carriage driving. (So what am I doing wasting time on here!)

Another is to play more music. I've de-bagged the guitar and shocked it into tune and am suffering with red-hot fingertips on my left hand from practising every day after years of not playing. But I am also struggling to find a comfortable playing position and so I'm waiting for the arrival of a kit harp from Backyard Music in America, who are very approachable (as though, shock horror, they really want you to buy their stuff and enjoy it) and despite the impression given by their web site's order form they do NOT charge the earth for mailing kits across the Atlantic. You just have to email them and discuss what you want them to send. So now I've joined a couple of harp forums and am wasting yet more time reading about and watching videos about how to play. How did I ever have time to go to work?

In the meantime the nags are pottering round the yard getting filthy, and the hospital appointment for my knee operation looms closer, and occasionally I do some web design and argue with precious photographers about the presentation of their posh and expensive books (Wave at me if you're buying expensive books at the moment? Can I sell you some of my cheap ones please?)

Then I waste a bit more time blogging...

Grumpy old Soul

2011-10-19T16:36:00.004+01:00

Well, I thought I’d got all my grumpyness out, but you are right, I couldn’t stay shut up after all. As October freezes gently into autumn, here it comes again - Hallowe’en.

I receive a lot of emails, and read many more, from people who live in the last bastion of history’s refugees and whingers, the Home of the Brave, the Land of the Free. In those emails, now that October has begun, I am increasingly being exhorted to “Have a Happy Hallowe’en”. From being mildly puzzled I am developing a full-on peeve about this.

There is a Northern English and also a Scottish tradition that for children and youths, this night is Mischief Night. For one gloriously silly evening, they might play pranks that on other nights would earn them a swift clip under the ear and a complaint to their parents. Door knockers might be tied together with string, black cotton stretched across streets to knock off people’s hats, one man’s bucket mysteriously appropriated and filled with the potatoes of another, a wheelbarrow run down the street until it tumbled over in the front garden of a third. Signpost arms were turned round, gates were removed from their hinges and hung from tree limbs.

Groups of silly maidens (I was one, once) sat by candlelight or by smelly turnip lanterns and told each other ghost stories. They bobbed for apples with fortunes slipped into them, and cast nutshells and applepeel over their shoulders to discover the initials of future husbands. Perhaps they also used games of patience or more esoteric layouts of cards to forecast their futures. Maybe they even surrounded a table bearing an upturned glass and each placed a finger upon it, in the unlikely belief that it would travel to letter after letter because within the glass, the spirit of a dead person was constrained to answer their whispered trivial questions.

Here’s where the evening reflects its origins, and where I begin to become uneasy.

I was brought up a Christian, albeit I am now a non-practising one in that I don’t go to church and have serious doubts about interpretations of “The Scriptures”. Hallowe’en is, strictly, for non-Christians.

It began as a pagan celebration: the feast of Samhain, the endpoint of the annual sun cycle, the “night between the years”, the end of summer and beginning of winter. In Brittany November 1st is the Day of the Dead, the opening of the Black Month. As such it was a portal to the world of the dead and a mythologically important day for magical occurrences of all kinds. The Christian Church sanitised it into a celebration of past lives as All Souls, All Saints or All Hallows; but a reactionary element continued to celebrate its older meaning. “The night before the Feast of All Hallows” gave us the more modern names, Hallowmas, All Hallows’ Eve or Hallowe’en.

From that point of view alone, Hallowe’en is emphatically not something you should wish someone to have a happy one of, unless you know them to be of the pagan persuasion. And I was frankly furious one year that my University diary, in trying to be politically correct, noted the feast of Samhain but ignored All Saints. Both or neither, please!

Tradition has it that on the Eve of All Saints, evil spirits are abroad. On such a night the good and the decent should wrap up tightly by their firesides to pray all good angels to defend them against the powers of darkness.

With that in mind, I am doubly uncomfortable when I walk through a daytime supermarket and see witches’ hats on sale, along with vampire masks, cloaks and plastic broomsticks. Why should I buy trays of chocolate witches to placate those juvenile Al Capones, the “trick-or-treaters” who will blackmail me on my own doorstep in happy ignorance of the origins of this night of licence?

Get thee hence, Commerce. Do not make mock of the oldest fear of all; the fear of the departed dead.

Pink

2011-07-25T16:15:00.001+01:00

white horses still their clattering feet
and wait for you
in shadow street their pink-plumed heads
stand straight for you
the lady at the bus-stop signs
a cross for you
the walker with the terrier dog
sighs loss for you
the traffic at the roundabout
must queue for you
the metronome of trotting hooves
beats true for you
the wagons on the carriageway
change gears for you
the rider on the cycle-path
wipes tears for you
pink rose-bay and foxgloves paint
July for you
the sunlight on the fell pours down
goodbye for you
the smiles of all who met you weave
the pall for you
that pink box in a white hearse is
too small for you
a sailing group of pink balloons
learn flight with you
and high the wings of wheeling birds
delight with you

Missing

2011-07-25T16:14:00.003+01:00

I missed you by a quarter of an hour.
I should have hurried through my morning shower,
missed eating breakfast in the sleepy sun
or read no emails, or replied to none;
denied the summery procrastination
of that prettier route to my destination.

I miss you from the house when I arrive –
everything silent that was once alive.
The nurses meet me at the stair. Their kind,
practised updating powerblasts my mind.

I miss you from that waxy, sleeplike face.
Your thin hands curl without their living grace –
no mischief – tickling doctors, climbing trees
or treating dollies for your own disease.
It's you with self subtracted. And I wail
till my throat hurts me like a swallowed nail.

I'll miss your heart, the things forever not –
the family, the life you’d yet to plot,
the cure you’ll never find – the future star
that cannot now outshine the one you are.

Requiescat Naomi
31 August 2005 – 15 July 2011

Review: "English Slacker," by Chris Morton

2011-05-14T17:40:00.006+01:00

I first read this book in draft on the Great Writing forum. It was something out of the ordinary run of amateur writing, and although at first I found it a difficult read, every time I saw a new chapter posted, I had to go and read it. And for a woman of my age to read the first-person narrative of an 18 year old youth, and then go on reading it, it must have something. I'm just not sure what.

Chambers, the narrator, has just finished college in his home town of Bracksea. The tale wanders apparently aimlessly, somewhat like Chambers' own life, through events both past and present over the ensuing summer. Although cannabis, tobacco and alcohol feature very largely in the story, Chambers is an oddly endearing lad, without much ambition or devilment in his makeup. It's laid-back and chatty and colloquial, and it's also very small-town England. There's only routine swearing, no rampant sex and almost no violence. There isn't even, apparently, much of a story. And yet...

This is really an exploration of the as-yet-undefined brain of adolescence still going along with a me-and-my-mates approach to life. Chambers, recalling his formerly joined-at-the hip friend Colin, puzzles over what is reality and what isn't - especially when his reality is constantly distorted by artificial "enhancers."

I won't spoil "English Slacker" for you by revealing what the crisis turns out to be... or how it does turn out to have a narrative after all.
ENGLISH SLACKER is written by Chris Morton, and published in softback by Punked Books. 188 pp, UK £7.99, US $15.99. ISBN 978-095331728-8

Acting by Numbers!

2011-04-30T21:37:00.008+01:00

Aargh. The scream. The Who. The cast list.

Yes, it's the Channel 5 Saturday night CSI stuff from Miami. Computers that work all the time, every time, at huge speed. Actors whose facial expressions indicate nothing more than boredom throughout. After years of watching (at least that's what it feels like) alongside my husband, I only know one or two of the characters' names. I wonder why.

The CSI series gets more and more formulaic. The boss. The geeky one. The slightly wacky (or seriously creepy) medical examiner. The square-jawed leading male. The forensic ladies who turn up for work in designer jackets and can run in high heels as fast as their male counterparts.

And then there's The Sunglasses of Justice, also known as He Who Walks On Water. On the command ONE, turn the body sideways to camera. On the command TWO, swing the head portentously to look at camera. On the command THREE, put on the sunglasses. On the command FOUR, pronounce the one-liner to start the show:

"SHOULDA GONE TO SPECSAVERS."

Ga ga

2011-03-30T15:12:00.004+01:00

So the telephone-head is coming to Carlisle. And Foo Fighters too. The BBC's Big Weekend has booked them for a musical thrash in May.

Big deal. Neither of them appear to know where Carlisle is. No surprises there though: a session musician once told me that the rock'n'roll life is not really a passport to world travel but to endless airport lounges. As the BBC have actually hired Carlisle airfield to accommodate the 5000 cars that are expected, the GG and the FF will probably leave none the wiser.

I gained this insight into the world of pop while doing some work for a client on site, in a warehouse with radio background. They've run through Radio 2 and Radio Cumbria and this week it was Radio 1. A curious choice really as there didn't appear to be any appreciation of the output. There was no singing along or shouting abuse at phone ins as there was with Radio 2 or Cumbria. I suspect they were just accepting the background noise of whatever somebody else tuned in the time before.

I hadn't heard Fearne Cotton at work before. The skill of gently drawing out guests, a la Parkinson, seems to elude her. Her "interview" with the Foo Fighters this morning consisted mainly of her talking over, down or through them with closed questions that only elicited Yes or No answers, and bragging that she had been the very first DJ to play their new single. For God's sake woman, shut up already!

Oh well, next week I shall only have to deliver a few copies of a web-based CD catalogue to the warehouse, so I won't have to spend any time with the radio. And with luck, when the Big Weekend occurs, I shall be washing my hair and quite unable to attend.

Pony Books rule!

2011-03-06T22:12:00.005Z

I was looking for something else (as I usually am) when I ran across Jane Badger's book web site here: http://www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk/ It's full of reviews of all the books you read as a kid and you wish your mother hadn't thrown away. I am delighted to find that one of mine features there - Against the Odds - with a well-written review. It even provides a glossary of all the Welsh phrases I sweated over with my Teach Yourself book.

Jane Badger's page observes: "The book itself is an excellent read: Sue Millard has alas written no more pony books ... She writes a very good blog."

My thanks for the blogging praise. My problem, reflected by the phrase "no more pony books," is that although I have in fact got 3 horsey fictions tucked away waiting for homes (agents? publishers?), I can't find anyone with the balls that J A Allen had, when they tried to revive the genre in the 1990s. When they were taken over, the junior "pony book" fiction was one of the first bits of their stable to be discarded.

Is there a prejudice against horsey backgrounds? There are times when I wonder how many gritty, single-parent inner-city stories our kids can actually take. Or swoony pre-chick lit, or kid-wizard-saves-the-world epics. "Pony books" are not necessarily about posh kids, however privileged the backgrounds of some of the mid-20th C novels may have been. It isn't even about haves vs. have-nots, or rural vs. urban. It's about valuing and caring for other living beings, even if they don't happen to be human.

Anything to do with horses and ponies demands a down to earth attitude to shovelling shit, a robust sense of humour and an awareness of the need to make choices. Do I buy a new electronic device, or a load of hay? Do I go to that party, or sit up with the foaling mare? Even, do I sell the pony because I can't afford to keep her properly? Responsibility, hard work, dedication, thinking about another living being rather than about oneself ...

Perhaps we could achieve a little more light and shade in junior fiction by reviving the "pony book" genre.

Horse Sense

2011-03-04T18:43:00.000Z

I am getting bored with Natural Horsemanship, Thinking Riding, Horse Whispering and all the other commercial titles that are being sold to us to manage horses in the 21st century.

Look at it this way.

Horses are large, herbivorous quadrupeds who like to live in herds, and are domesticated by man.
Cows are also large, herbiviorous quadrupeds, ditto ditto.

Do we see gurus setting up seven-step programmes selling tips for Cow Whispering? Hm? Why not? The difference, as I see it, lies in the human perception of the two species. In the English-speaking world, we do not eat horse meat. We ennoble the horse. We publish anthropomorphic stories – books, films, cartoons – in which horses can not only talk, but detail their biographies and contribute to human business. Nobody makes films titled Black Mooey; National Big-Ears; Cowbiscuit, or My Mate Muckytail; or advertises tuition in Natural Cowmanship or Thinking Milking … We ignore the fact that horses, like cows, don’t work the way humans do.

The difficulty for horses is that the “me-and-my-horse” approach draws people into the equine relationship who may not have had any experience of handling large, herbivorous animals. We keep them and handle them to a very large extent as pets, rather than as working animals. We also try to do things with horses which will reflect upon ourselves and our abilities. Horses are thus an extension of the human personality, a delusion which I doubt they share.

When horses don’t respond to human behaviour in the way we, their owners, expect, we seek ways to solve the “problem” by changing the bitting, saddlery, shoeing, or feeding, by sending the horse to a trainer, or by adopting a fashionable training technique. Only very occasionally do we think of changing our own attitude! A well known bitmaker once said something like, “Of twenty bits I make, nineteen are for men’s heads and one for the horse’s.” I think this could well be said of all the alternatives to traditional horse management that are being sold to the horse-owning public.

Now before you rush to your keyboard and cry, “But you can’t want me to treat my horse the way they treat cows! Darling Dobbin is too precious to be killed and eaten!” let’s not be extreme. Just because I am cynical about New Horsemanship doesn't mean I am in favour of sending ANY animal thousands of miles, alive, in a crowded wagon without water, feed or rest. I’m all for improving the lot of the third-world horse. I’m not advocating or condoning cruelty, or decrying kindness. I do, however, think that for many “pet” horses the application of a little experience, common sense and observation would often be kinder and cheaper than So-and-So’s latest salesmanship.

Even the best new methods will not turn a horse into a dog or a cat or a substitute human.

The moving letterbox

2011-03-02T16:42:00.005Z

I finally gave in to medical reminders and went for a smear test today. By my calculations, I shall only have to put up with one more before I get to the upper age limit, so that's a blessing. Another is the fact that no-one in my family (blood relatives, rather than by marriage) has ever had a cancer-related illness. I reckon as I haven't had, let alone enjoyed, a wildly promiscuous lifestyle, I am very unlikely to conk out from cervical cancer.

It is a little worrying that the nurse with the speculum seemed to have a good deal of difficulty in finding the letterbox to put it in. It took several painfully unsuccessful attempts before she adapted her approach. It seemed that the door had dropped on its hinges.

Luckily, my husband doesn't have any trouble, and he's the important one. I knew there was a reason why his legs were getting shorter.

mad as a box of frogs

2011-02-25T10:37:00.006Z

"Good morning," said my husband as I came into the kitchen. "And say good morning to your friend here."

Sleepily, I looked round for the cat. "Where?"

"There, in the corner." He pointed to the nook between the washing machine and the plinth under the kitchen cupboard. A brownish, motionless lump.

My first thought was, "How did the cat manage to crap in such a small space?" and my second was, "It's got legs. And claws. And eyes! IT'S A FROG."

"Oh my goodness. How did that get in?"

He shrugged and went on making his mug of tea. Outside, the cat paddled at the windowpane. "Let me in! It's raining! I'm hungry!"

"I'd better put the frog out, or she'll eat it." Knowing that it was likely to jump if I put a hand on it, I chose an old glass off the shelf.

"Damp the glass," suggested my husband.

So I did. I held it behind the frog, and put a finger in front of its nose. It didn't move, so I pushed it gently. It was cold, heavy, and damp. Suddenly it turned and leapt into the glass, then became immobile again.

With one hand over the top of the glass, I unlocked the back door. The cat rushed in and I went out and tipped the frog onto the grass. It sat so still and unblinking, I wondered if it had died of shock, but no, its throat pulsed with its breathing, so I left it there in the rain-swept garden. And came back indoors and fed the cat.

Of course, the question was, how can a frog get into a locked kitchen? The clue was in the washed-out glass: traces of coal dust. Froggie must have been in the coal bunker; been scooped up by my husband's shovel, and poured with the wet coke into the hod. I'd stoked the fire from that hod before I let out the cat and went to bed. I don't know how many lives a frog has, but she used up two of them last night.

Loss of Blood

2011-02-22T18:00:00.007Z

Five year old Naomi has had to travel yet again to Newcastle from Cockermouth for a blood transfusion during her chemotherapy. This, despite an "agreement" with their more local hospital that "ordinary" things like transfusions can be done there to save the family a 200-mile round trip.

Then on Facebook I see the messages:

Robert B
Thinks my wife may be about to explode. If one more thing cocks up stand well back.
about an hour ago via iPhone · LikeUnlike

Jackie ჱܓ Awww what's happened now?
about an hour ago · LikeUnlike
o
Robert B Blood results!!! Whitehaven have let us down again!
41 minutes ago · LikeUnlike
o

Some days you're the dog, some days you're the lamp post...

o
Robert B Blood transfusion is about to start!
28 minutes ago · LikeUnlike

28 minutes ago was 17:30 and they've been in Newcastle since 13:30.

HOW DOES A HOSPITAL LAB MISLAY OR MISINTERPRET BLOOD SAMPLES? Not just once ... but repeatedly? It's difficult enough for a family to live with a child who has cancer, and all the poisonous drug treatment that entails, without having to face frustrations in the system that is supposed to be caring for them.

[Jennifer B]
21:40
hospital sucks
[You]
21:40
so I gather
[Jennifer B]
21:41
I am still waiting for the iv anti sick medicines which were meant to be put up just after 7
no wonder she feels like crap
she is at least sleeping now
[You]
21:42
what is the problem with that place!!!
[Jennifer B]
21:43
i have no idea.
Naomi is getting stressed when they are setting up her line to a drip, god knows what she'll be like when she has platelets on thursday at whitehaven, she's so anxious she's making herself sick
And its because we spend so long waiting around for things to happen.
[You]
21:46
what is the worry with the drip?
[Jennifer B]
21:46
coz they put things through it so bloody fast and she can feel it in her neck, it's that that makes her sickly, she won't eat because she doesn't want to be sick, same with drinking
[You]
21:48
sooo ... who do you bug to sort it out?
[Jennifer B]
21:48
fuck knows, I have tried to talk to the consultant and it makes no difference. it's like these anti sick medicines, I went out and asked at quarter past nine if she could have them, as she was still waiting answer was "oh yes I'm just putting up this chemo." Where the flaming hell are they hanging it, timbucktoo?
nurse has just been in to say that she's coming now to do naomi's medicine
21:52
i'm nearly in tears with anger
[You]
21:52
yeah, I can tell
[Jennifer B]
21:53
a vet wouldn't treat an animal this way
the iv drip has been set up for over an hour waiting for these drugs,
I will be complaing to the poons team tomorrow about it, they have the ear of the consultants and the nurses
[You]
21:55
good
[Jennifer B]
21:55
i'm sick of it, it's not just us its everyone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notices in every hospital entrance hall announce "zero tolerance for violence towards staff". That's fair enough, but how about zero tolerance towards incompetence?

Spring has sprung

2011-02-18T11:57:00.006Z

We didn't "do" Christmas; that was partly on account of the snow, but more because our grand-daughter, aged five, spent the whole holiday period in hospital. Somehow, jollifications didn't seem in order, and the usual tidying up didn't happen either. I've been ignoring it for months. Not putting it off, simply refusing to acknowledge that my house needs re-organizing.

Suddenly, this morning, I feel compelled to pack unwanted clothes into a bag for recycling. Also, I hear the tractor start up outside. I look through the window, and there's my husband, driving the front-loader which is pushing his very very vintage Nuffield down the yard. Only two wheels out of its four are still capable of rolling - no danger of a runaway there, then. He gets down every now and again to adjust the steering so the Nuffield turns towards the workshop doors. My God, he has finally decided it's time for some restoration!

I had better get him up into the bathroom NOW. Otherwise, though Spring may have provoked us both into re-organizing and restoring, it could be summer before he gets the shower mended.

there are fairies at the bottom of my garden

2011-02-16T19:02:00.002Z

I was packing up a couple of books to post to America when a pickup parked on the front layby and someone tapped at the door.

The young man on the doorstep had a photocopied map in his hand and a very large wooden gatepost in the bed of the truck. He had been sent, he said, to repair our gate on the footpath through the hayfield. Was it dry enough to drive the pickup in? I told him it was, and away he went.

By mid afternoon he'd dug a hole, sunk the gate-post, driven the hinges, righted the three fenceposts that had been lying down, tacked-up the sheep netting and hung the gate. Complete with little sign saying "Public Footpath - please close the gate." This last is redundant since the sheep have access to all the fields, but we hope that walkers will use their common sense and leave this gate, at least, as they find it.

I can't work out how replacing a fence and a gate in a gap that was originally thirty feet wide makes it easier for walkers to traverse our field, but it hasn't cost us a penny, so thank you, whoever you are, who sent the young man along. You have restored my belief in fairies.

Wednesday - the Co-op awakes. At last.

2011-02-16T16:50:00.003Z

I emailed the Co-op on 25th January, and my email was forwarded (thank you) to Penrith Co-op. However I heard nothing back from them - not even an acknowledgement.

So I sent another, concise, enumerated email to the main customer relations department on 4th February. This time I didn't hold my breath. Today (16th) Ah! A response! The gentleman who has emailed me appears to be based locally (by his telephone number). He thanks me for my email and comments which he says "just came to his mailbox" yesterday. Eleven days for an email to arrive in his inbox? Do I hear the grinding of the mills of God?

He will take up my comments "directly with the store manager" and will let me know the outcome in due course.

It's not necessarily the store manager who is responsible for the inconvenient shop furniture, though, is it? I get the impression that the ordering is done much higher up.

Tuesday - Mud Angels

2011-02-15T12:04:00.000Z

Mr T the Fell pony is a chauvinist. If there is food, he claims it. If there is danger, he graciously lets his stablemate Ruby go first. Today, on being let out, what he most wants is to roll. He chooses the wettest part of the yard and his waterproof sheet changes from navy blue to black, leaving a mud angel when he gets up. Ruby is grabbing hay from the half-barrel by the stable door. T strolls over and scowls, and she shrinks away and goes to roll on the spot he selected. Now I have two ponies wearing matching black sheets – but they have clean bodies underneath.

I’m at the computer congratulating myself on my forethought when the cat hurls herself at the handle of the back door, which opens. She stalks in and leaps onto my knee, covering me in muddy footprints. You can’t win.

Foot in Mouth

2011-02-15T10:19:00.003Z

Monday
It’s the evening of 14th February. Valentine’s day – Orton Scribblers meeting – and I am on TV in an Inside Out documentary about Foot and Mouth Diaries. Which do I look forward to most? The writers’ group of course. Sorry darling.

We are meeting at Jackie’s house so she can pop through every now and again to look after her husband. We listen to readings from each other’s work in progress – a short story, the start of a chick-lit, the opening chapter of a historical novel. We offer comments to make our fiction more convincing. Tea and biscuits help of course!

The biggest fiction of the evening turns out to be the TV programme. My husband says it introduced me, not as a retired university lecturer, or a writer, or a web designer, even a grannie (all of which I am) but as “a retired horse trainer.” NEIGH.

Knowing how the Cumbrian grapevine works, those 20 seconds of fame will take me at least a year to live down.

Letter to the Co-op

2011-01-25T18:19:00.003Z

Letter to the Co-op

Monday morning. I drive 8 miles to the Co-operative in Shap. It is the only large food shop in the triangle from Penrith to Kirkby Stephen to Kendal, apart from the delis at the motorway services (yes, delicious, but too expensive to form the basis of everyday life!)

I have my shopping list to hand. It’s cheaper that way. Although I still sometimes forget an item or two I don’t come home with impulse buys that neither of us will actually eat.

Most of what I want is on the shelves. The moisture cream bath has been on offer and its place on the shelf is empty, but that’s OK because the price label’s still there, so it will probably be back soon. More frustrating is the persistent lack of my husband’s two favourite yogurts, of the raspberry or plain Greek varieties. I’ve always been able to buy them at Shap, pace a shortage of raspberries being acceptable in the depths of winter. The Greek yogurt is a Co-op own brand, so when I take my trolley to the newly installed tills, I ask if I can have a polite request: when will it be available?

The assistant behind the till (I won’t give her a name, to spare her embarrassment when this gets to Head Office) makes a glum face.

“I’m really sorry but we get our orders sent to us from Manchester, and we don’t have a say any more in what they send us.”

Despite the fact that it’s lunchtime, there are several empty car parking spaces outside; something that was unheard-of before the revamp.The things that “they” send seem to include upmarket nibbles and chocolates, but not lunchtime sandwiches. A connection, perhaps?

I unload the goods through the rather small space allocated on the counter, and the assistant scans them and moves them across to another small space on the other side of the till, through which I struggle to put them into bags. There’s an annoying sort of shelf thing with gums and other outers, that sticks up and gets in the way of my elbow, so I pat it gently and make a comment, and get another glum face.

“I know. People catch their sleeves on it and drop things. A lady hurt herself on it the other day.”

I survey the shelf thing and offer the observation that, if I worked there, I’d be at it with a screwdriver. She sighs and says she would like to, but it’s as much as her job’s worth to try. “Everything’s cramped. If I’m working at the till you can’t even open this door behind me.” Which, being perspex, I hadn’t noticed till she mentioned it. I sense I’m not the only customer to make comments about a lack of common sense in the refurbishment.

“Haven’t they given you permission to use the island till yet?” That’s behind me, in the middle of a big empty space. All set up with conveyor belt and ready to accept trolleys.Last time I asked – New Year’s Eve – I was told they weren’t allowed to use that till unless they were really busy. Which they were. “I don’t understand why. Does the motor burn too much electricity? Don’t tell me ‘they’ bought you a till with a belt that you can’t control.”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t know why that till is out of bounds.

To be honest, I haven’t seen the staff looking happy since the shop was refurbished. The shelving is nice and the new position of the photocopier makes a lot more sense, but the huge plastic baskets, with the pullout handles and the little granny wheels, are too heavy to carry when full, and too wide to negotiate past other customers even when empty. When you get one to the till, you have to perform endless floor-to-counter lifts with the goods to be scanned, which is not much fun if you have toddlers, a bad back or dodgy hips. And if you do happen to be muscular enough to lift the full basket onto the counter, the assistant can’t reach into the bottom of it without contortion because there is no niche to accommodate it at a reasonable height.

I used to teach computing students about the processes involved in the design of business systems. “They should send someone to observe you working with this. Then they’d realise how frustrating it is for you.”

“Yes, they should.” She looks a little less demoralised. “They'd hear what the customers have to say, too.”

“I’ll put in a complaint for you if you like,” I suggest. This time she reacts as though I’ve offered her water in the desert.

“Go to the web site,” she mutters. “There’ll be somewhere you can do it online.”

So here I am starting my one-woman campaign to improve the efficiency of Shap Co-op, following its “improvement” just before Christmas.

1. Open and use the island trolley till.
2. Replace the “new” counter, its silly perspex door and its obstructive outers shelf.
3. If the big hand baskets are to stay, the counter needs a niche to accommodate them at a convenient height for both customer and assistants.
4. Please stock the foods the customers want, not the ones you think we want.

I hope this makes her day.

Are opinions libel?

2010-11-17T18:05:00.004Z

Interesting problem. If a blogger publishes a critical opinion, having described accurately something that has happened, is s/he libelling anyone? I seriously doubt it. The defence against libel is that the facts are true.

Why then should someone ask for a blog to be "scrubbed" of recognisable names or further posts not published until they've been scrutinised and approved by that someone? Someone, I might add, who is not the blogger's employer?

I'm not the blogger involved, incidentally. The blog is probably just going to change to a private status.

But it does make me wonder.

Rubber Gloves

2010-10-31T10:17:00.004Z

Every evening when I wash up I struggle into my rubber gloves before I set to. If I don't, I get hang-nails and they make life painful, even if I resist the urge to bite them off. But every time I heave and tug at the local shop's gloves, I look at the size details and I wonder...

The pack size says, "Medium". The cuff info says, "7 - 7 1/2". I know my glove size is 8 1/2, so not too long ago I decided I'd buy the next size that was available in the shop's gloves, and bravely bought their "Large". Job sorted, I thought. No such luck. The fingers are an inch too long and the whole thing slides off if I am not careful. "Large" is marked "9 - 9 1/2"!!!

So will someone please tell me, if size 7 is Medium, and size 9 is Large, what do I need to ask for to get a size 8?

Why the French should be grateful to the English

2010-10-20T16:22:00.004+01:00

Last night I was busily working on my laptop while my husband watched a series of back to back CSI episodes on channel 5. Last of all (post midnight) was an hour with NCIS, effectively the Naval version of these. Which I enjoy for its witty interplay between the family of characters, and for the presence of that hard working and lovely actor, David McCallum - with whom I was very healthily in love, when I was 13 and he was Illya Kuryakin in The Man From UNCLE. And no, I'm not really digressing.

Wrapped up, as I was, in the piece of writing I was polishing, I was barely taking notice, although I did gather that the episode was a kind of climax to some other episodes I'd seen, because there were highly compressed and effective flashbacks to various scenes I recognised. I wasn't paying much attention though, except to note that the Director lady was obsessing about a person called Larg Ren Wee (Asian? I wondered) and she had been seen to incite Tony Dinozzo (pronounced Dee-nozo) to seduce some relation of his, called Jarn Ben Wah. I partially decoded Jarn as John but couldn't work out why Tony - a very hetero male - would agree to this, even in the line of duty. He did seem a little reluctant.

Enter David McCallum as Dr Donald "Ducky" Mallard (and as a Millard how I cringe at the dreadful puns involved there) - so I perk up - well you do, don't you, when Illya Kuryakin pops up and adds a little Britishness to the scenery. and he starts discussing these two Asian named characters, whose names Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) tends to mumble a little self consciously. And behold, the lovely Mr McCallum sayeth, in a crystal clear Parisian accent, that the man whose death they are all investigating is nicknamed "La Grenouille", the Frog, and his real surname is Benoit, and his daughter - yes a DAUGHTER, whom Tony has been very happy to seduce - is Jeanne Benoit. Not Larg Ren Wee but La Grenouille. Not Jarn Ben Wah but Jeanne Benoit.

So I humbly apologise to all French speakers for the mangled job some English speaking "actors" make of their language.

And presumably they also talk about Princess Arn, Arn of Green Gables, and Arnie Get Your Gun?

Ruby and the Idiots

2010-06-06T15:16:00.003+01:00

Normally I write about my drives out with Ruby the Magnificent in order to share the pleasure that carriage driving gives us. My driving is my recreation and I come home soothed in mind and spirit. Not so today. I’m BOILING.

I took Ruby out by herself because Mr T has had a few days off to ease a windgall on one his hind legs, and Jen didn’t want to work him hard today. So I packed up some plastic bags for “recycling” and strapped them to the cart seat before setting off towards Tebay over our big hill, Pikestoll. Since Pikey is a long hard haul, and I intended to go right round the circuit which is a distance of 8 miles, I let Ruby stroll along to warm up at a walk. I stopped at “Tom’s gateway” about a third of the way up to move the midge-repeller from the top of the collar, where it was touching Ruby’s wither as the collar moved, and clip it round the stem of the saddle terret. I don’t know if these sonic repellents actually work but when you’ve got a midgey farm and midge-sensitive horses all routes are worth trying. At any rate, the repeller (which is solar powered) didn’t give any other problems in its new position, and midges were the least of Ruby’s troubles on the drive!

It was all very peaceful over Pikey and down to Roundthwaite road end, where we paused for quite a while, waiting for a clear run out onto the A685. Ruby tends to think that once a car has passed it is time to move out, whereas I could see traffic coming from much further down the road. The traffic wasn’t actually heavy, but the cars kept coming. She was very good though and trotted straight out once the road really was clear. We kept a nice steady trot going over the motorway and railway bridges, up into Tebay and to David Trotter’s house, where I left the two bags of bags for him to reuse in his greengrocery deliveries. Then we went on our merry way through the village, through the narrows, down the hill and round the motorway roundabout. Keeping ourselves to ourselves, warning people of our presence with our flashing lights back and front.

Most people whom we meet on the road are courteous and smiling, and I smile and wave at them because I’m happy and why not share it? So it continued, until we were leaving the roundabout, when Ruby scooted because she saw a motorcyclist. But it was nothing serious, and I still managed to signal which exit I was going down. As we continued along the Orton section of the A685, however, I began to realise that there was a good deal more traffic than I’d expected; possibly leaving the motorway and heading for Appleby, where the Fair Hill gipsy gathering is coming to a close. Were they all horse people? I seriously doubt it. Horse sense was certainly not in evidence. When we approached blind summits where nobody should overtake because they can’t see if anything is coming, they overtook. When I signalled them not to overtake because, sitting higher than the cars, I could see oncoming traffic, they overtook. When a convoy of foreign registered cars came up behind me and the first one pulled out to overtake, they all did the same, as though an umbilical cord might snap if they were separated – never mind the fact that the oncoming traffic had to stop for them. I kept Ruby pounding along at a good straight trot, but her 11mph was just not fast enough for the idiots. I don’t mean that everyone who followed me was a fool, because I was aware of one car that sat politely twenty yards back from us for at least a mile; but my verbal commands along that stretch included several cries of greeting to members of the Head family [work it out], and my coachman style driving gave ample opportunity to exercise my whip hand in certain unconventional signals.

Do cyclists have these troubles? They are equally vulnerable on the road. How do they deal with them, I wonder?

Once past Orton, where we left the Appleby road, courtesy and good humour returned, and perfect strangers waved and grinned, just the way it all usually happens. And Ruby walked and cooled off from her frenetic two miles. When we passed the youngster being schooled on the lunge at Selsmire farm, and he used our passing as an excuse to squeal and buck in circles, she only flicked an ear and told him saddles weren’t that big a deal. She ignored the inquisitive Shetlands and the farm bikes, and only wanted to get back onto the yard and scream to Mr T that she hadn’t abandoned him, she still loved him and she was home.

And when I turned her out with him she squealed and told him to get lost!

If you were in your car on the A685 this summer Sunday lunchtime, heading for Appleby, and if Ruby and I held you up for a few minutes until the road was clear, then I apologise, and thank you. Nothing went wrong on the drive. We drove to the rules of the road. But I’m furious at the idiot behaviour we encountered, so come on Google, index this lot and let the idiots read the things I didn’t have the chance to say today. If they can read.

“If you risked your life and ours by overtaking on a blind brow, on a blind bend, or in the face of oncoming traffic, or if you forced me to rein in my horse as you pulled in front of me, then please tell me – what was so important, on a Sunday lunch time, that you couldn’t be patient for those few minutes?”

The Full Del Monte

2009-07-12T21:19:00.004+01:00

It's Sunday and I've given in. Sunday tea is not Sunday tea without tinned fruit for afters. Graham had produced homegrown lettuce, beetroot, spinach and new potatoes to go with the remains of the pot roast, so deprived of my usual Sunday pancake-making I retaliated with Del Monte Fruit cocktail and, well, not ice cream I admit, but Greek-style yogurt.

At least the ring pull on Del Monte is a nice smooth one, unlike the supermarket canned tomatoes whose ring pull slices bits off your finger joint. But inside, oh dear, I had forgotten the miserly attitude that prevails in the fruit cocktail world. There were four titchy bits of something pink lurking among the peach/pear/pineapple bits. I think they were once parts of a cherry. Commiserating with them were seven grapes. I imagine there is a sensor at the Del Monte canning plant, or possibly a little man in a white coat with a magnifying glass, who sets off a DNEEP DNEEP DNEEP warning bleeper if a newly filled can steams past him containing more than four quarters of synthetically coloured cherry or eight flabby pale green grapes. He probably chuckled evilly to see that my can only contained seven.

Next Sunday I'm going to have wild strawberries in my yogurt, and bugger Del Monte.

Posting letters

2009-07-02T17:15:00.003+01:00

I waited for the post lady to come this morning as i had three letters to go, but by 12 noon I thought she'd probably not got anything to deliver and would not turn up, so I went out to muck out the stable and of course, while I was shovelling, she arrived and left without my letters. So I harnessed Ruby and trotted down to Orton Post Office (a little over two and a half miles away) where the collection time is 3.40pm. I've found if I time my visits for lunch hour, I can park right outside the PO, which is also a very nice local shop and usually blocked up with parked cars. Then I can get off the carriage, not let go of the reins, and post my letters in the wall box safely.

Ruby was very sober as she trotted in the midday heat. I let her walk through some of the shadier patches along the road to cool off - luckily there were few flies or clegs about.

At Mazon Gill where last week the road had begun to collapse into the culvert over the gill, there were temporary traffic lights to control the traffic passing the large JCB digger and the roadmending wagon and the big hole with men shoulder-deep in the culvert. Ruby stood like a champ while one of the workmen jumped up and down in front of the sensor to try to get it to change the lights for us! She trotted by the wagon and digger, glanced briefly at the submerged men, and went on down to the village cool as you please. On the return journey the digger was working and when he saw us waiting again at the lights, the supervisor of the gang made throat-cutting TURNITOFF gestures to the driver. He kindly stopped the engine and we went by peacefully - however, as I thanked the supervisor I did tell him that really, Ruby has an ambition to drive a JCB. She has an engineering turn of mind and if allowed, she would probably try all the levers with her nose.

She's now out in the field in her "ghost suit" and I've spent ten minutes refilling all the spray bottles with my home-made fly repellent after I realised that during Sonny's visit we used up most of the last batch.

Ruby alone

2009-07-01T22:03:00.004+01:00

I have been vastly amused by Ruby's reaction to Sonny going home. I kept her indoors all day (mainly to save her from the heat and humidity and flies, in the nice cool stone stable) and her response to the empty box next door is to USE IT AS HER LOO - she has left a huge pile of muck in the middle of the swept floor. Her "own" box is clean.

So much for missing her darling offspring!!

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (19 and 20)

2009-06-30T11:30:00.007+01:00

Monday 29th June
Jen and I took both ponies for a quiet ride out to Scout Green, with Naomi as my passenger on the carriage. The weather was heavy and the clegs were biting, so we just wandered peacefully up to the top of Whiteholm and across the bit of open fell onto the Scout Green road, and back. Sonny was quiet and steady apart from a startle when he brushed Jen's leg against one of the flimsy "loose chippings - max 20mph" signs on the roadside, so she spent a few minutes walking him up to other signs and kicking them with her boot! Of course he just stood there and said, "whatever..." We also practised leapfrogging each other along the road; Jen would walk or trot Sonny past Ruby, then I'd do the same with Ruby passing Sonny. Both ponies were calm, to the extent that I could brush clegs off Ruby from all sorts of places with the tip of the driving whip. The only time she startled was when Jen clapped her hand over a cleg on Sonny's neck with a tremendous crack! like that of the whip a few days ago. Other than that, it was all quiet.

We washed off the ponies and then put fly rugs on them. I didn't have my camera out but the picture they both made was hysterical - Ruby in white mesh with ear caps and navy edges, Sonny all in lilac with red leg straps. They didn't fuss about their strange attire until they were loose in the paddock, when Sonny took one look at Ruby and exclaimed, "Oh my God it's a ghost!" and Ruby dashed off saying, "Where, where!" The two of them then hightailed it round the paddock, stepping and snorting at each other and generally being silly for a good five minutes before the lure of the grass settled them down. We gave them an hour and then put them back indoors with their haynets.

My bedtime "haynet check" revealed another side of Sonny - when I hung the haynet for him, Ruby came to help him taste it over the partition, and he snapped first at her and then at me. Unfortunately for him, I'd seen him coming so I put up a fist as he swung his head, and he smacked his cheek teeth on it and rebounded with a "What the hell was that for" expression. Unlike the brightest horse we've had he didn't then repeat the misdemeanour to see if he'd connected his action with the self-inflicted punishment.

Tuesday 30th June
Alison arrived prompt at 9.30 and we tacked-up Sonny with his nice clean saddle and bridle.

Naomi helped by kissing him on the nose at every opportunity.

Alison mounted to practise handling the lead rope as well as the reins, and ground tying. We let her take a stick with her, one that some boy visitors had collected a few weeks ago - on the principle that if she carried a stick she wouldn't need it and if she didn't - she would!

She walked him up and down the yard, and then set off for home, with her husband John following in the car.

Bye-bye, Sonny, be good!

And we set-to to clean out his stable...

LATER

Just heard from Alison that she and Sonny had a good time on their ~10 mile ride home; both getting very wet in the heavy showers, but it was nice warm rain! and he's going to get daily rides out from now on. Great.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (18)

2009-06-28T11:33:00.006+01:00

Sonny spent breakfast time at the tying tree, with his tiny mouthful of hard feed and a small haynet. It's so sweet how he lovingly licks the bowl, over and over, to get the last trace of flavour. Jen and I shut the roadside gates, and mucked out the stables. Ruby makes an awful mess now Sonny's here, because her soaked hay is at one side (she pushes the half-barrel to where she wants it) and Sonny is then behind her, so she tramples the muck and wet shavings into a right old soup as she turns from food to grooming and bossing, and back again. On her own, she is fantastically tidy. She wandered between stables while we brushed and shovelled, pushing the door to and fro with her nose as required.

Jen found Sonny was fine today - a touch wary of the watching visitors' children, but she took him round the corner to the field gate to mount, and he settled. They went up Bretherdale in order to do "getting on and off and opening and shutting gates". All well. He wants to be off as soon as remounted, but this should settle with practice, and the "rope round the gate stoop" method (see earlier blog entries) works to prevent difficulties. The ground tying is working well - Jen dropped the lead rope yesterday by accident while crossing the yard, and he stopped at once!

Today Jen put him across the fellside grass on Nichol Hill, and he listened and didn't pull or buck. Asking for changes of pace mainly on the voice and not the rein, "up, up up" will lengthen his trot or get him into canter, while "steady" will bring him down. She worked him up and down hill, in circles, rounded up a few sheep, jumped him up a bank onto the road, paddled through the beck, and had a thoroughly good time. Limited grazing time has clearly helped once again - that and a calm yard, of course.

He had another bath when he came back and now we've swopped stables - Ruby is in "Sonny's side" and vice versa - to see if it helps with the Feng Shui...

I took Ruby for a drive over Pikey just after lunch, to check how far the road resurfacing extends, since Sonny will have to go that way to return home. Luckily the chippings end just after Dyke Farm's gateway so he won't have them tearing up his feet after that. Ruby didn't attract too many clegs on our journey, and didn't sweat too badly either, but still quite appreciated a wash off when we got home, which makes a change as she usually fusses a bit. The clegs were bad, so I left both ponies indoors with haynets.

I had to beat part of the tyre back into place on the carriage wheel again though, as we'd needed to turn in a narrow lane at Roundthwaite on account of Jackie Parsley's tractor and hay trailer.

Ruby's side of the stable is blissfully tidy once again. Sonny's is a bit messy. The main thing is that he's almost permanently in the dark as he WILL keep shutting the top stable door. Ruby doesn't bother with it but he does.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (17)

2009-06-27T20:47:00.006+01:00

Yawn. A slow start this morning! I fed the two nags but didn't tidy the stable (BAAAD mother!) Jen, Rob and Naomi came today, Naomi having determined that she, too, had to "Boss Sonny!"

We were going to work in the fields again, so Jen opened the field gate and shut the front gate - our cottage visitors having gone out for the day - which meant the "Caution - Lesson in progress" sign was visible to the roadside. Of course, then silly James Beevor, Big Time Boy himself, ignored the sign and came bowling in, leaving his bike at the gate thank God, but getting thoroughly in the way. That meant there was me, Ruby and Naomi, Jen, Sonny, Graham talking to Big Time Boy, Rob taking photos, the Allen family and their farm bike driving a flock of sheep down the road and back to their field after clipping, and Sammy lurking behind my car ready to tell Sonny off if he put a foot out of line.

Poor Sonny, he just couldn't handle all that information at one time. He managed to behave until Jen wanted to mount, then had a small "backing" explosion. Jen got up, and made him settle, then got off and went through it all again. Ruby, Naomi and I didn't see all this, but I heard Graham offering advice so I poked my head round the corner to see if it was ok to set off with Ruby; got the nod and went quietly away down into the field.

Sonny (see Jen's Facebook photos) was gobsmacked that Mother had gone without him! Usually because we've had more stuff to attach (like harness and carriage) we've followed him, and not the other way around. Ruby was pretty chilled. Naomi was asking questions of me about "why did the sheep need to have their fur taken off," so I didn't watch Sonny working in, but Jen says he was pretty keen and for the first time she needed to have a contact on the bit as she circled him at walk around various of the smaller fields, before she joined us in the hayfield. Once she'd brought him along he was sensible and walked, trotted and cantered on either rein without being naughty despite all the clegs that were about. I did wipe a few off Ruby with the tip of the whip, but she wasn't as covered in them as Sonny was, poor lad!

When we got back to the yard Naomi wanted to sit on Sonny, so Rob popped her onto the saddle in front of Jen and Jen walked him around the yard. They took some pics of Naomi sitting on him at the tying tree, and as by this time he'd decided perhaps small children were not actually Martians, he was very calm about it all. It helped that Beevor had gone, too!

Sonny had another hosepipe wash - having got quite sweaty in his tizzing and his workout in the field - and Naomi helped me to take Ruby's harness off (Oooh, grannie just couldn't manage all those big buckles on her own). We turned the two ponies out in the paddock and mucked out (Naomi, Rob and Graham sitting on the field wall like the three wise monkeys) and went off to the pub in Tebay for lunch. We brought them back into the stable after that, as Jen said, "I think four hours grazing yesterday must have been too much for Sonny!"

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (16)

2009-06-26T11:19:00.003+01:00

I woke very early and was up and about by 6.30 so the ponies had not only had breakfast but digested their hay too when we got them out at 9.30 and brushed off.

Jen took Sonny into the field and mounted him by the gatepost there, just to let him be mounted in a different place. I followed when I'd harnessed and yoked Ruby. Jen and Sonny were already walking the sheep off the hayfield so we joined her.

A stag and two hinds cantered out of the Nursery wood and across the river, over Tom's fences, across the road, and away over two walls, running from Mr Allen's motorbike as he "looked" the sheep. Jen was astonished at how large red deer are - it's a long while since she's seen them close up. The horses didn't bother, for once; Ruby has got quite sparked up at times when we've put-up roe deer close at hand.

It was all very laid-back today; the weather was fresh and cool, Ruby was chilled and Sonny relaxed, despite several hours of grazing in the paddock yesterday afternoon and despite the clegs fastening on blood at every opportunity. I didn't get bitten - I must be doing something right! Jen rode Sonny up and down the slopes, circled at trot, and cantered him frequently, which he evidently enjoyed. She also went on working on ground tying - throw down the lead rope and he will halt. He was confused though when I asked if he was reacting to the throw or the rope ... she moved her arm without the rope and he thought about stopping, then didn't. Bright boy! The memory of his crack over the backside evidently held good; he didn't "plant" himself at all today.

I moved the sheep away from the yard gate a couple of times with Ruby, who quite enjoyed being a sheep-herd. Sonny saw Jackie Taylor and her son James walking up the road, and pricked his little ears and asked to investigate, so Jen told him to canter after them, which he was delighted to do. He saw that they had a dog, and was curious but not too bothered. I took Ruby for a nice trot along the wood side and back, and we both really enjoyed that. She wanted to tank through the gateway (also remembering Sonny's crack over the backside yesterday!) but I made her walk back in quietly.

It all made a nice change from sorting out web forums and damn-awkward trolls :)

Photos of tomorrow's schooling session, I hope. Today was too laid back to bother :)

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (15)

2009-06-25T12:18:00.007+01:00

The ponies had their usual breakfast, some mix (half a scoop for Ruby and a handful for Sonny), a bucket of fresh water and some hay, while I tidied the stables. I was puzzled by a sploshy-sploshy noise coming from Sonny's side of the partition so I looked over to see what he was doing. He was picking up a mouthful of hay then shaking his nose in the water bucket, dabble-dabble, to wet the hay before he ate it. Obviously the idea of Mother's soaked hay appeals to him.

This morning was cooler with a fresh breeze and the ponies were much more comfortable than they were yesterday in the heat with the flies bothering them. We worked in the hayfield (though it's just being grazed by sheep, that's still what we call it), with both Ruby and Sonny. Jen said Sonny was very ready to go, but she just sat him quietly, with a very light contact on the reins, and walked him round the perimeter of the new territory for a good twenty minutes to let him calm down. Ruby, in the carriage, also walked quietly. Eventually we were walking round each other, passing and repassing, closing in and moving away, standing and moving off again quietly. Jen got on and off a couple of times. Sonny was very well behaved.

We moved into trot work on big circles after half an hour or so and both ponies were obedient and sensible. The only time there was any argument from Sonny was when Jen took him back into the other field and worked him up and down the banks, cantering him up towards the paddock and turning away in trot. Ruby and I were just coming up through the gateway and couldn't see Sonny for the hedge, when there was a loud CRACK! and Ruby shot through the gateway in three strides of a gallop. I picked up the rein and asked her what was the matter, and she calmed down again, "Oh, wasn't that for me?" Jen said Sonny had planted himself once again, so she gave him a proper smack on the bottom with her long whip to convince him she meant it when she said, "Walk on." The crack had echoed all the way down the field! After that she cantered him in a circle, and he was obedient, so then we all walked quietly back to the yard to take some photos. Jen uses a handy technique for remounting, eg after opening a difficult gate - which would be useful in case Sonny takes it into his head to be silly about being mounted in a different situation from our yard.

Keep the lead rope attached to his headcollar - it's easy to carry the rope. Loop it round something (like the gatepost) while you get up. Hold the rope, not the reins.

Throw the rope loose (Sonny allows you to flip it round his head like a skipping rope and doesn't worry).

Lean forward and catch the rope ready to carry it again. Sonny often lifts his head to make it easier for you.
Jen's working on ground tying, but although he is very good about it, he is still likely to wander, so he hasn't got the rules perfectly right yet :)

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (14)

2009-06-24T12:56:00.008+01:00

Sonny and Ruby had their breakfast hay and were comfortably nattering over the intervening panel in the stable when Jen came to take Sonny out. This time, as she's finding the 17 inch saddle that came with him rather too deep for her comfort, she used my Thorowgood 17 1/2 inch synthetic, which is very nice to ride on. With its endurance pad underneath, it gives a really wide bearing surface so is likely to be comfy for Sonny too. She mounted off a tack box outside the stable, and Graham let them into the field. Jen reports that Sonny expected to go wild - after all, this is the field where we let him and Ruby go to graze and play - and he walked "with a quiver" for some time, but when she sat still and let him quiver without picking up the rein or kicking him on, he decided he would rather wait to be told what to do. She does think though, that if she had grabbed him by the bit, he'd have tried having a gallop and a buck.

After they'd been walking big circles for a while, and up and down the rocky bits of the field, I went out to take pics. That was the only time Sonny planted himself! Jen moved him from side to side with her legs, and backed him a few strides, and after that he went forward again nicely. She trotted him in big circles and figures of eight, and up and down the slopes, and he offered her a canter so she let him stride on.

They walked in after that, doing more big circles away from the gate, and Sonny behaved well in spite of the 7 or 8 clegs on his neck and flanks. Jen unsaddled him and walked him down to the hosepipe - which he thinks is a snake. He wasn't very happy about being washed, but when he realised that the water cooled him off and got rid of the flies, he tried very hard to be brave (better than Ruby who swings about when washed).

I had cleaned out the stable and given both him and Ruby fresh hay and water, so they are now indoors away from the heat and the clegs.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later

The afternoon cooled pleasantly around 4 pm so I harnessed Ruby and set off to Greenholme. She was happy on a loose rein, walking nicely, so we just kept going, up the hill towards Orton, left at the guidepost for Scout Green, along to Sproat Ghyll farm where the cows were being turned out after milking. We walked along behind them and behind the boys on the 4 wheeler motorbike who drove them into their field and shut the gate. We passed the couple of cars that had been held up by meeting the cows, and walked steadily on. I saw clouds of pollen being blown from a field of flowering grass, and the gate of the Roman road bridleway was open so we trotted up it, just to the brow; turned there and came back. I was glad we had gone up, because the view across to the Howgill Fells was fantastic, all the way from the Lune Gorge round to Wild Boar Fell beyond Kirkby Stephen. Amazing how the view opens out with just another fifty feet of elevation. Ruby strode on happily back to the guidepost and steadily trotted home. I was very proud of my cheerful, shiny mare.

I put both ponies out for half an hour while the breeze was there to keep the clegs off, and mucked out and put hay and water in for them. They didn't really want to come back in, but they didn't object and Sonny managed to be brave about the dog, without trying to crush up to me for safety.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (13)

2009-06-23T12:52:00.004+01:00

Jen's coming later today to teach a lesson so Sonny, officially, was having a day off. However, I thought if he'd been awkward about being harnessed and yoked up yesterday, it would be good for him if I did it today.

He stood nicely and accepted all the harness being put on. His mouth was open, splonk, for the bit well before I got it anywhere near his nose. He didn't make any fuss about the crupper, and he didn't fidget when I put the ex cart on. I untied him from the tree and he started to lean on me, so I tied him up again and got in and out of the cart, and sang, and bounced about, and rattled my feet on the boards, and he just... stood...there. I got out and in and out again, and untied him, and he just...stood...there. So I got in and asked him to come around and move on, and away we went. I drove him to Tom's "black plastic" gateway, then up to Bretherdale cattle grid and back, and up the brow towards home. Sonny trotted nicely each time I asked him, and although he wasn't very enthusiastic at starting, each time he got better.

I drove him past our gateway and he planted his feet and effectively said, "BUT you've passed it! Are you stupid? We go IN here, not PAST."

"Tough luck, Sonny, we are going to Greenholme whether you want to or not."

But he just....stood....there. He was willing to stand forever despite being smacked, but by turning him one way and then the other I got his planted feet to pick up and move. Quite suddenly he gave in and started walking again. Of course I relaxed the rein, stopped tapping him and gave him lots of praise the moment he shifted his weight forward. We walked down to Greenholme and walked a right-handed circle on the green, but he began to resist again when I suggested a left handed one, because it TURNED AWAY FROM HOME. Little banana-brain stood there planted once more. So I turned him right, until a left turn would be "homeward", and we did a left handed circle that way, and trotted home. I took him round the yard and up among the trees, and turned left, and behold, he could do it. He made no fuss about standing at the tree to be unyoked and unharnessed, so I smothered him in fly spray and turned him out with his mum in the little paddock. (She's horseing, and because there's a male pony in her company she is showing it, despite the fact that he's her son, and a gelding!)

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (12)

2009-06-22T13:16:00.008+01:00

Jen came while I was at work and took Sonny out. She put the Easyboots on his hind feet, and reasoning that if her bum was sore from the saddle his back would probably be a bit uncomfortable too, she decided not to ride. Instead she brought out the black harness and set him up for driving. He accepted all this until she put the crupper under his tail, which made him tuck his bottom in. Graham came and put a hand on his rein and talked to him, and he settled down again all right even with Jen clanking the chains about and fiddling with the harness. She brought out David's ex cart and put it on him - he fretted and fidgeted a bit, but when she stayed relaxed and told him not to be such a fairy, he settled down. He pretended to fuss about going down the yard, when the breeching came into play, but again soon settled into his work. He was a bit lazy going out - hardly surprising after his quite long ride yesterday - but stood well for her to pretend to adjust harness and re-fasten one of his boots at the Selsmire substation layby. Jen reported that he needed "a lot more rein" in the carriage, as he definitely missed the leg contact and "wobbled about" a lot more.

On the way home he trotted steadily past the young ponies and walked down the hill into the village despite there being a large sheep-wagon coming down the hill after him. Jen let him have 30 minutes in the paddock with lots of fly spray but put him back indoors after that because despite the spray, the flies were biting.

I took Ruby out in the afternoon - which was one of those annoying drives that start out badly, not because of anything Ruby did, but because we had only just left the yard when we encountered a large Manitou loader towing a large flat farm trailer. There was really nowhere to go but home, and although our road is very narrow, poor Ruby did her best to screw the carriage round in its own length, and very ugly it all was too, with the wheels scraping the wall behind me and Ruby trying not to get the shafts hooked up in the sheep netting on the wall in front of her. We got turned round and went back into the yard to let the loader go by, and then I had to take Ruby out of the carriage and spend the next fifteen minutes with a mallet and cold chisel whacking twelve inches of solid rubber tyre back into its channel on the inside wheel. F***ing road chippings, f***ing farm equipment, grrr grrr grrr.

I finally got the carriage hooked up again and took Ruby along the road for a couple of miles, hoping the tyre would continue to settle into the channel as we went. Eventually I found a nice, shady, grassy roadside with no biting flies, where she could graze for ten minutes and I could recover my lost temper. She trotted home from there in good style, and I was pleased that when we met the Manitou loader again the young driver pulled in where there was plenty of room, and let US go by in return for our gesture an hour earlier.

Ruby didn't appreciate me giving her a wash when we got home, but a scoop of mix, a clean shavings bed (thanks to Jen in the morning who had tidied up my hasty picking-over) and a slab of soaked hay, soon made her forget her grumpyness. Sonny said he'd rather like some of Ruby's mix, too, but as he still had half a haynet left, I told him he'd have to make do with a clean bed. And so did Ruby.

The tyre isn't right but I think it will hold okay.
.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (11)

2009-06-21T15:03:00.014+01:00

The ponies had breakfast and some hay today before we got them out to go down into the village and meet our Treasure Hunters. Sonny wore Ruby's size 2 Easyboots on his back feet, and was happy with them although he was puzzled by the crunching noise they made on the fresh chippings on the road!

We only had two people driving after all. Pauline's horse hadn't been shod because the blacksmith had brought shoes that were too small, and Alicia who had been going to drive just gave apologies. So we had Ann with her grandson David as groom for her black Shetland, and Ann Marie and Roger Harrison with their grey one, and Sonny and Ruby who weren't taking part because I'd set the clues. We walked the ponies to the village and gave out the clues (there were 30 questions) and let the drivers go off at their own speed and their own time, while we just nattered with Pauline, then we set off as well. Sonny was very well behaved. I had meant to take a photo, but the camera was lurking somewhere dark and I didn't have time to go hunting for it, so tough.

We walked and trotted up the hill and over the motorway, and encountered lots of Sunday traffic, some of it much less considerate than weekday traffic. Bikes and motorbikes, people walking, chuffographers sitting with their scary tripods waiting for trains on the main line, parked cars, a wagon, several big vans, impatient car-drivers, and people walking dogs. We diverted from the route to go down the Martinagap track, and Jen used the far end of the track to try walking Sonny in circles in open grassland. He did this very well, responding solely to her body and legs, without needing the rein. He didn't try to rush into trot, or to buck. She left it at that for the time being (too big a field to want to try anything argumentative, and not ours!). We went on down into Orton village, which was busy, with what looked like an entire Mazda car rally parked outside the chocolate factory. We used the Treasure Hunt route round the village, and through the narrows I occupied the middle of the road to discourage a car driver behind us who badly wanted to overtake where it was unsafe. Jen and I both indicated we were turning right, and got out of the way ASAP - Sonny showing good acceleration when asked. Then we took some detours through the far side of the village, and Jen asked Sonny to walk down the beck side, which he did, but he wouldn't put his feet in the water even though it was clear and with a sound bottom. She didn't make a big issue of it as it would have made a mess of somebody's nicely mown grass.

We trotted out of the T junction by the school, out onto the main road again, and walked back through the village, turning towards home. After trotting up Stephenson's Brow we caught up the two Shetlands whose drivers were picking up clues at Mazon Gill Cottage. Ann suggested we overtake her, but I said we'd wait until we got out of the dip, so oncoming traffic could see us; in any case, we were going to trot home by the wider route and let the two Shets go on collecting clues. This worked well, and Ruby and Sonny went on "leap-frogging", overtaking each other at walk or trot, all the way home. Jen trotted Sonny home up Daw Bank (and had a few strides of canter) while I checked the date on Yew Tree farm which I had used as a clue but kept forgetting to write down (1675).

Back home, I unharnessed Ruby and brushed her off; she was hardly sweaty at all, but Sonny was - we had, after all, done a good six miles.

Ruby the Racing Snake

Jen got a bucket of water and a dandy brush and gave him a wash. He was very good about this and didn't make any fuss.

Slimline Sonny

Then we smothered both ponies in fly spray and put them in the little paddock while we buzzed back to the village green with the answer sheet and the rosettes. Lots of chatting and "what a pity there weren't more people to enjoy that lovely drive" etc.

We came away when the midgies started to bite, and we brought the ponies back indoors for the same reason and gave them a slab of hay each.

So Sonny has been to his first social drive out. He was a little star for the whole 2 and a half hours. He deserved his yellow rosette.

Two for tea....

And tea for two...

The only blot on his copybook for today was that he didn't want to go back indoors after he'd been out for these photos! But he only pulled back once and then gave in and followed me. I daresay he was thinking he only had to obey Jen. Tough luck Sonny.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (10)

2009-06-20T15:31:00.006+01:00

Jen was here and grooming Sonny before I rolled out of bed this morning, so the poor fellow had to go to work without any breakfast - like he's getting anything other than a tablespoonful of mix on his windowsill. He hadn't polished off all his hay (Ruby leaves NOTHING) so he probably wasn't empty, but he did look a lot more trim than when he arrived a week ago. He needed the lung space however as Jen, having thoroughly brushed out his mane and tail as well as his body, rode him over Pikestoll to Roundthwaite. The idea was to see if the watersplash there was easier to use than the river in Greenholme. It turned out the bank was a bit steep there too (I haven't used it for a month or two) so Jen just walked him around some big puddles until he had to get his feet wet. Then walked him on the other rein, ditto. On the way back they met a sweeper wagon preparing the road for resurfacing, and Sonny stood quietly while it whisked and whined past. They walked back over Pikey and met me and Ruby as we trotted up to Dyke farm. He was more bothered by Felicity's dog Molly, who was running about in the field, than any of the things he had met. He walked quietly on down to Greenholme while I turned Ruby and followed him back. I saw them trotting nicely up the brow to home.

Jen reported he was "running on empty" as far as energy went, which is probably true, but it did wonders for his figure. We brushed both ponies off and turned them out in the paddock, which has a good deal of grass on it, as Graham shut it up for a week to let the docks die back after spraying. They had a couple of hours on there and came in thirsty; when I checked the water tank I found a dead bird in there, so no wonder they didn't drink. I must go and bucket out the decaying remains. Yuck.

Tomorrow's North West Driving Club drive is on, as we all seem to have asked every roadman we met whether they're resurfacing round the village tomorrow - they are not :)

I suggested Jen check Sonny's feet, as if he is being a bit reluctant now on account of them getting short, we might need to Easy-boot him tomorrow on these fresh chippings. Ruby's size 2's fit his back feet, but not the front ones, even though I rasped the outer rim; he didn't bother much about Jen trying the boots on and she turned him out in them so he could accept the feel of them. She's going to ask Ali Morton if she can borrow a pair of her 3's for tomorrow and the remaining week of Sonny's stay with us.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (9)

2009-06-19T12:48:00.011+01:00

More blustery, showery weather this morning. In contrast to yesterday, both ponies were sharp and eager to go: Ruby clattering about and not wanting to wait for Sonny, Sonny swinging about and not wanting to wait for Jen to mount. Maybe two hours of spring grass is more than they need. Jen walked off and left Sonny tied to his tree (they must be well acquainted by now), and when she came back he stood ok for her to get up.

We walked from Daw Bank to the electricity substation past Selsmire farm, a distance of about two miles, and back. The idea was to get Sonny quietly across the two motorway bridges, and past a field of young horses whose curiosity can be upsetting as they trot, splash and canter along their side of the field fence.

We met a good deal of traffic, a couple of 4-wheeler wagons, couple of tractors, lots of cars. Everything very circumspect, unusually so, which was fine of course. Sonny was less fidgety once we got going. He was very nosey this morning, wanting to watch the men rebuilding part of Brown Bank barn, and Jen reported that he was fascinated by the idea of the traffic disappearing under his feet on the motorway bridge, and had to stop and watch it reappear - "ooh LOOK" - on the other side. He thought it was the strangest thing he'd seen in ages. Passing the young horses he just quivered, and didn't do anything silly, as the newest of them, a bay filly, trotted alongside Ruby in the carriage.

We trotted a little distance of the homeward journey and Sonny behaved well. He even stood to watch a big heavy goods train chugging up the railway line, and one of the aforementioned wagons creeping past us at Bridge End with its air brakes hissing. He was more bothered by the fact that Ruby was keen to go and was doing some backing, hence squeezing the amount of space poor Sonny had behind us. He led happily as we trotted up the brow to home and Mum hammered after him in racing mode.

As the field is getting a bit wet after all this rain, both ponies are back indoors. It will be interesting to see how they behave tomorrow with no fresh grass inside them.

PS Ruby trod on the back heel of me OTHER Ariat boot with her damn great steel clog, so now I have a slightly ruined PAIR. Do you suppose - like live items - Ariat boots have a Time To Die?

In the late afternoon the weather changed from blustery and wet to blustery and sunny, so I put the two beasties out in the little paddock while I mucked out and did-up for the night. I tied Sammy up short so he couldn't nip any heels as we passed by.

When I came back for them Sonny had a dicky fit because he didn't hear me coming for the wind and I "just appeared" round the end of the field shelter. However, he didn't go anywhere, just leapt a foot in the air. I caught Ruby and Graham looked after the gate while I walked her in, not realising I'd closed the yard gate onto the road so it didn't really matter if Sonny went walkabout. Sonny came out and went back in through the gate, so I walked in and called him and turned sideways so I wasn't threatening him, and he came up to be caught quietly.

Ruby is looking like a racing snake in her summer coat, and Sonny is beginning to shine too, and continuing to lose fat off his neck and belly, so he is starting to look like the pony he ought to be.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (8)

2009-06-18T11:38:00.008+01:00

Jen arrived shortly after 9 am and we brought both ponies out to be brushed over and tacked-up, Sonny at the tree, Ruby outside the end stable. The weather was windy with brief, heavy showers but both were relatively laid-back about it. There's a lot to be said for Fell ponies :)

After yesterday's through soaking Jen had cleaned saddle and bridle and saddle soaped them. I had opened up the curb hook on the bit, to make it easier to remove the curb chain when unbridling. Previously it had been tight and difficult to remove, which agitated Sonny unnecessarily. David had spent half an hour teaching him to open his mouth for the bit (because he was being obstinate about it) and now he'll open his mouth, and more importantly his teeth, to let you slip the bridle on without fuss. All you need to do is put the bridle in position with the bit under his nose, and he'll do it when you say, "Open."

Jen had put the reins onto the (Uxeter) bit at the plain ring setting - instead of the lower, curb setting as we'd received it from David. Sonny doesn't seem to need the curb setting. Taking hold and "grabbing him" by the bit just doesn't work. He needs to be ridden forward from the leg, and then will round up nicely into a good outline, and ask, "Where's the bit? I need to know you're there." A light rein contact is all that he then needs, and he'll work in a nice outline on no contact at all if you just trust him to do so.

I harnessed Ruby to the carriage and peeked round the end of the stable to see whether Jen wanted any help with Sonny today. She led him round the mounting block but then ignored it. She tied him with the usual quick release knot to the tree at the high ring that she could easily reach from his back, parked her long dressage whip through the stirrup keeper on the saddle, and mounted him from the ground. He was foiled. She then pulled the quick release, and carried the lead rope as well as the reins for the rest of the ride. (She used to do this when breaking youngsters at Trotter's yard.)

We walked down to Bretherdale road-end, for a change, and then up Pikestoll which is steep. Part way up we met a county council 3-ton pickup coming down, so it, and we, each had to edge over to enable us to pass. At the first farm gateway - where Tom always leaves silage bales in winter, so it's full of black plastic - we made the ponies walk over the plastic, then walked back down to the road-end. Here we parted company: I went to the bridge, and Jen rode Sonny up Bretherdale, then we both turned, and came back to pass each other. This was complicated by the pickup truck returning from Bretherdale behind Sonny, and a tractor with (?fencing?) equipment on it following me and Ruby. I parked in Tom's farm lane, Jen rode Sonny to join us, and the motorised traffic moved on before we crossed, and turned, and joined up again to walk back up Pikey for a second time. Jen put Sonny in front and he walked away and trotted nicely up to the second gateway. Here we turned again, and came back down. It all sounds a bit boring to describe, but enlivened by the brisk breeze and occasional showers, it was actually quite pleasant! At the "black plastic" gateway we met the tractor again and the ponies were both very good about walking over the plastic to get off the road; scary stuff but very much "old hat" now not only to Ruby but also to Sonny. On a loose rein, Sonny in fact stood the tractor better than Ruby, who wanted to make an excuse to jump in front of Sonny. Down the hill again, along the level to the bridge; I suggested Jen use her leg on Sonny to move him sideways across the road a few times, while she had level straight going and no traffic. He responded easily and without flapping. Up the hill to the house, over the brow and down into Greenholme. No traffic, no fuss, all very boring, just as it should be.

Jen rode Sonny down to the beck, where there is a slope into the water. I didn't expect her to pick a day when the beck was running a bit high to ask him to walk into water, or else I would have stopped her, since everything had gone very well up to that point. They had - not an argument - but a minor discussion, on the bank, with Jen asking Sonny to step in, and Sonny saying, quite mildly, that he didn't think so, thanks.

I have to say I think he was right, as the water was still coloured from yesterday's rain and he could not be sure of his footing. We know it's a sound bottom, but he didn't. However, he didn't do anything naughty other than stand still, and he could easily have ducked Jen with a well timed buck. So she got off and got back on him while his feet were planted. No arguments.

We'll save crossing water for a nice hot day. He'll be happy to splash, when we've trotted over Pikey to the ford at Roundthwaite, where I can get Ruby and the carriage across and there is room for Sonny to follow Mum.

We went home, and I trotted Ruby away from Sonny, who preferred to investigate the track to Brown Bank barn - possibly thinking it was like the track up to David's buildings! Anyway, Jen let him look, and then brought him home.

We've mucked out the stables (always easier with 2 people!) and turned the ponies out for an hour's grass while the wind is there to keep off the flies.

Of course, the hour had stretched to 2 by the time I got round to bringing them in. I put up a haynet for Sonny, and Ruby's usual flake of soaked hay in her half-barrel. I shut the yard gate, opened the field gate, and walked down the field to catch Ruby, who walked quietly in, picking bits of grass as we went. Sonny came wandering along a respectful 20 yards behind. I put Ruby indoors with her mugful of feed, leaving a tablespoonful on the windowsill for Sonny. He was still 20 yards from the open gate, but looking for me, so I called him, and he trotted up and let me lead him in ... walk with me, stand with me ... he is better at this than Ruby is, now.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (7)

2009-06-17T15:14:00.008+01:00

Yuck - pouring rain and wind this morning. Jen arrived shortly after I'd fed the beasties and tidied up the stable. Sonny ate his carrot and spurned his haynet, wanting to eat Ruby's soaked hay instead (which he couldn't actually reach). Bet he regretted that when Jen marched in and saddled and bridled him.

I was just going out to visit one of my web clients, but seeing that Sonny was circling the mounting block without getting anywhere near it, I went over to give a hand. He tried creeping backwards while Jen was mounting, but a firm hand on the headcollar under his chin stopped that. She climbed up and he settled. We must practise the mount/dismount stuff tomorrow, but p**sing rain is not the time to do it, and so I got the car out of the way and left Jen to carry on his ride after I'd gone.

She took him to Scout Green, basically because it's a sheltered route where you can do a 2 mile ride out and 2 miles back without opening a gate. He was happy to go out, Ok with going out solo, was forward and obedient. Jen was riding him with a very light rein, almost none at all most of the time, just using leg to move him onward. At the road junction where we've twice turned towards Ewelock Bank, he whinnied for Mum, but when Jen gently took up contact on the rein he went on OK. He spooked a bit at the bridge at High Scales (oooh, rushing water and a bridge) but went forward when Jen insisted. She rode through to Scout Green and he walked through big puddles just fine.

Coming back, she put him on the grass at Beckside lawn - mostly to see what he would do - and he offered to trot so she let him, and he put his ears back and bronked, two or three dirty big bucks with his ears back, so she knew it was naughty and not ONLY excitement. She sat him, and when she picked up the rein he put in a sudden stop (which she said was the most unsettling thing he had done!) and froze as though he expected to be beaten. She moved him on at a strong working trot all the way up the bank from Beckside and over the fell at Whiteholm and he gave no more problems.

In the village once more, she asked him to stand and wait, and he did, looking about but not moving his feet. If he fidgets, speaking "Stand" and "Wait" gently, with loose rein, will keep him still - if he does move, simply lifting the rein a touch is all it needs to stop him. Yesterday he fidgeted, and crept backwards, but today despite the excuse of awful weather, he stood well. He walked home fine from there. Jen says, "he just needs to be ridden with seat and leg, from back to front, and not hung onto from front to back." He feels solid as a ride, not wobbly like a young green horse, but a lot of this is down to his physical maturity (8 years) and his square build - very short back and broad chest.

Jen said he flinched at her getting off in the yard, but walked about quietly after her on a loose rein and didn't make any fuss about going back into the stable even though Ruby was busy investigating both stables (making sure Sonny hadn't got anything she hadn't got). Tomorrow we will drive him out, then do some mounting and dismounting practice.

Incidentally, his mother is bossing him too. Ruby was never Top Dog when she was at Sedbergh. She had borne him and Belle, but Boxer (Tebay Vespa) was Top Dog. After Ruby came to me, Sonny's youth and strength must have been more than a match for Boxer as he aged. So the positions are reversed while they are here: Ruby is gaining self-respect, and Sonny is having his dented. Both of which are very good things.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (6)

2009-06-16T12:14:00.008+01:00

Not so good today, at least to begin with. I think it's probably the grass yesterday - as on Sunday they only had less than an hour out, whereas yesterday it was nearer 5.

I put Sammy the sheepdog on a short rope in a different place for Sonny to look at and not have the excuse of "oh he startled me". I brought Sonny out just after 10 am, after he'd had his morning haynet (which he isn't mad keen on). I tied him to the "patience tree" and groomed him, and harnessed him up. He was okay. Then I brought out the cross country cart, which he'd seen on Sunday, and let him look at it, then I brought it up and put the shafts round him. Scuttle, fidget, quiver, "oh my, that's dangerous." So I let him settle, and took it away briefly and put it on again. More fidgeting. I fastened him in and let him stand.

He did a lot of wandering from one side to another, so I set him up with the wagon line again in case he got really stroppy. I'd put on coat, hat and gloves to go out driving, but I discarded the idea, and shut the yard gates. I sat with him for an hour while he fiddled and faffed about. Every now and again I went and walked round him and shoved the trap shafts about, bumping them up and down and side to side, and pulling and pushing the trap back and forth. He fidgeted a bit each time, but less, until eventually he didn't really bother. He spent some time rubbing his head on the halter ropes and trying to get his head under them to bust them. It didn't work, mainly because the tie level is higher than his withers and he can't get any purchase on the rope by snagging it over his poll. He's obviously done this a few times and been able to escape.

When he had stood quiet for a while I took off the cross country gig and put the exercise cart back on him, which he didn't fuss about nearly as much. He's now standing for another hour, with a haynet (and refusing to eat the hay). I think the photo for this one needs a caption of Harry Enfield's teenage monster saying "It's NOT FAIR."

It doesn't matter which cart he accepts, since he isn't going to be a driving pony. What matters is that he stops buggering about when he doesn't think he wants to do something.

LATER
Having let Sonny stand for another hour, (like a pot of tea stewing) I went out and put on my hat and gloves and prepared to drive him round the yard. Jen's driving pupil Mike turned up and seeing the CAUTION sign on the gate he parked the horsebox outside and walked in to see what was going on. He introduced himself to Sonny, who'd calmed down by then into boredom, and I asked him to unclip the rope while I drove Sonny round the yard. After his three hours of standing, Sonny went willingly and only tried to second guess the turns once.

Then Jen arrived, ready to teach, and as this little 5 minute trip round the yard was a big improvement on Sonny's earlier attitude, I took the cart off and unharnessed him. Jen saddled him and we put him into the stable to stand with another haynet while she taught her lesson to Mike and his pony Dennis; and I took Ruby out for a drive. His whinnies for his mother were pathetic but we hardened our hearts :) - even Ruby by then had got fed up with him and didn't bother to respond to his shouts.

An hour later again, after Mike and Dennis had done their thing, Jen brought Sonny out, checked the girth, showed him the mounting block once more, and rode him into Greenholme and up the hill onto Whiteholm, and back. She made him walk and stand, walk and stand. He tried shying once to each side and then gave over. She chatted to Willy Kipling in the village ("That's not your Mother's horse." "No, it's out of Mother's horse." "Ah. It's nice though. And is it naughty?" Hmm ....) Sonny fidgeted about but Jen didn't let him eat grass (which was what he wanted) or move on till she told him. They had some discussions about standing still on the way home, but she came back happy with him. She led him back to the stable and he was really listening to her - when she stopped, he stopped, and when she walked on, he walked on, on a loose rope. This is the result we are looking for. So although it was a long day, by 3:15 pm there was a definite improvement to be seen.

I turned him out with Ruby while I tidied the stables for the night, and he had a good roll: "wash that cart right outta my hair!" I brought them both back in after half an hour. Ruby was busy scratching on a low tree branch and made me walk all the way down the field for her, but Sonny came cantering after his mum in case he was going to miss something. While I took Ruby indoors he had a good long drink, and then let me clip on his lead rope and lead him in. Walk with me, stop with me; walk with me, stop with me. He's improving.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (5)

2009-06-15T14:01:00.006+01:00

Ruby was scowling and squeaking and stamping at Sonny yesterday evening and he was sulking, not eating his haynet, but by breakfast time he'd eaten up.

More education today. Danny the farrier was due to put a set of shoes on Ruby. I left Sonny standing tied to the big pine tree across the yard. He also had a wagon-rope about 1 cm in diameter round the tree and once round his neck under the headcollar, tied with a bowline so it wouldn't tighten, and placed six inches back from his poll so it wouldn't do any damage. I knew he and Danny had had "issues" previously and he'd pulled tying points out of walls. I wasn't going to give him any excuses.

I picked out his feet ready for trimming, all round, and he co-operated. "This is all getting to be old hat," he said. Fine by me.

Danny arrived and we chatted while Danny shod Ruby, then he moved to work on Sonny. And Sonny, though a bit "numb" about giving his feet to be trimmed, didn't even offer throw himself about or object. So we gave him lots of praise.

When Danny had gone, I put Ruby in the stable with some more hay, and went back for Sonny. As we walked down the yard he shied as though the dog had rushed at him - which I knew it couldn't because I'd tied it up short. He stepped on the edge of my boot and effectively pinned it to the ground so I rolled over. But he didn't go anywhere - just stood there, being a big numb teenager. Graham took the lead rope while I dragged myself off the floor, and then I put the boy away while I had a cup of coffee and a think. I know he did this with David Trotter - stood on his wellie and felled him. So after my think, I tied up the dog elsewhere, picked up a length of alkathene pipe and took Sonny for a walk round the yard. I had no intention of hitting him - the pipe was just the right length to poke him in the shoulder but not splinter if he decided to jump or lean into me. And of course, actually being a wise pony, he didn't. So more praise and he got put away with his haynet (and Mum) once more.

Later on I got him out again (still with the pipe for reference!) and harnessed him up. Lots of fiddling and chat. I put him to David's ex cart and drove him round the yard, turning right and left. He was fine. I made him stand once or twice and wait for the command to move on. Then took him back to the tree and tied up. Chatted, fiddled and faffed (he probably thought, bloody women!) then untied him, and drove round the yard again and up among the trees, and turned in places I hadn't turned before. Made him stand some more. Lots of praise because he was getting everything right. This time when I tied up he was unharnessed and I led him back to the field -- Still carrying the pipe because we were going down the yard where he'd shied both today and yesterday. And he walked circumspectly and behaved.

I turned Ruby out with him and finally had time to inspect my ariat boot - big tear at the welt where his foot had pinned me. Still, it could have been my toes. No complaints.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (4)

2009-06-14T17:05:00.008+01:00

Jen (our daughter) arrived this lunchtime, with Rob (her partner) and Naomi (our grand-daughter). We shut the gates, hung the CAUTION - LESSON IN PROGRESS sign, and brought both ponies out and tied them in the sunshine while we fitted harness to Sonny. Lots of fiddling, all very good for him. He stood well and even when we decided to trim the matted bit off his ear he didn't make much of a fuss. Jen cupped one hand round his eye like a blinker while I nipped off the "felt". He tries to lean on you to stop things he finds annoying, but he doesn't thrash about or kick or rear, so gentle persistence is working. He actually rather enjoys having his ears scratched, once he's let you get your hand up there; the eyes go all sleepy and he leans on your fingers. We picked up all his feet again too. He wasn't actively naughty, just a bit stubbornly unco-operative. His feet do need a trim so if Danny isn't coming soon I might get the rasp out and have a go at them where the excess growth is cracking. Mind you, steady work on the roads should sort them out. Interesting how the pony's movement is shown up by the places where wear and overgrowth occur in the hooves.

We fitted all the harness and brought out the carriage. Graham was doing some maintenance on David's exercise cart, so instead we showed Sonny the cross country cart with its big wheels. This involved letting him come up and sniff them, then Jen led him round to the other side (horses' brains need to accept input from the left eye AND the right eye). I walked round the yard like a daftie pulling the cart while Jen led Sonny after it, circling in both directions, so he could see how the wheels behaved. Much interest, but no panics. Good. Rob and Naomi sat on the barn steps and made remarks about Grannie having got the sequence wrong because the pony was following the cart. Ha ha.

We fitted the carriage to Sonny after that. He accepted pretty well everything, which is as it should be, after nearly 3 weeks of trotting round Tebay with David and the ex cart. He was a bit puzzled about the shafts bumping more freely in the tugs (David's cart is a nip fit, rather like a pair of nutcrackers!) but accepted it. More adjustments to the harness followed. More scratching of his ears and picking up of feet. All good stuff. Lots of praise.

Then it was "take it all off time", and Jen saddled up and introduced Sonny to the mounting block (highly portable home made thing) which we'd plonked in the middle of the yard. We edged him up to the block and she leaned across him then mounted. He was okay with all this as he'd been ridden before, and I left her to walk him around the top of the yard while I harnessed Ruby and put her into the carriage ready to go. Opened the gates, walked Ruby up to top yard and let Sonny see the whole thing, before setting off for a quiet walk up to the top of Whiteholm.

Both ponies walked out well and Jen gently convinced Sonny not to try being silly. He tried one shy, and didn't bother again. While we were talking Jen said he had been unusually reactive when she introduced herself in the stable. He had known she was there, but when she touched his shoulder he "turned himself inside out". So the quiet stance and the gently sleepy eyes are not entirely to be relied on. Sudden explosions like that make you wonder if someone has at some time been very rough with a pony.

We walked all the way up to the top of the common with Ruby leading Sonny, or Sonny alongside the carriage to watch the wheels, which he didn't mind at all. He also obeyed when Jen stopped him well short of the cattle grid while I took Ruby on and turned her. She then asked him to lead the way home; classic early mounted work. Put the experienced pony in front on the way out, and the youngster in front on the way back. He walked well and Jen collected him and asked for trot as they went up Daw Bank. Which he did nicely on a pretty well loose rein.

By now we'd been working with or around him for over 2 hours, which would have been too much for a young horse, but as he's 8, equivalent to a fairly mature teenager, it didn't seem to overface him. We gave him a carrot, and Naomi helped give Ruby a handful of feed, then we turned both Mum and son out in the field for half an hour to finish their socialising and have a nibble of grass. Jen didn't let him drag her about on the way to the field - he had to walk away and back several times and behave properly before she would let him through the gate.

Ruby demonstrated her athletic stride for us with huge gusto and Sonny bounded along after her. She's already put him in his place once or twice, the initial delight at seeing him having faded into parental responsibility!

Jen and Rob and Naomi went out to bring them back in, after we had all had a drink and done some jigsaws indoors. Ruby kept looking back - she appeared to be worried that Naomi was with Jen and Sonny, instead of herself. She is so maternal. Sonny followed her into the stable without argument - an improvement on 9 am this morning.

All in all, a good afternoon's work. Tomorrow, I'll drive him.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (3)

2009-06-14T09:22:00.009+01:00

I turned Ruby out early into the field so the two adjoining stables would both be empty for Sonny's arrival. David appeared on the yard just as I poured my breakfast coffee, but I went out to see how things were going. Roger had driven up in the car following David and Sonny with the exercise cart, so he was already standing at Sonny's head while David unyoked and unharnessed. "He came over Pikey just grand," said David. "Got into trot to keep up his momentum and just kept going. Never bothered about the motorbikes either, and we met quite a few."

Sonny was quite sweaty after doing four miles over hilly country, and ordinarily I'd have washed him off, but I thought perhaps that would be a question too far on his arrival in a completely strange place. He was a bit worried by Sammy the sheepdog who made a couple of dashes at his heels as we walked round to the stable, but he only went a stride or two and obeyed the halter.

The stable was another matter. Outside the sun was bright and the stable looked very dark! He jibbed, but David told him firmly to "walk on" and after a moment's consideration Sonny walked in.

I left Sonny to look round while I fetched a haynet, and David and Roger went off back to Tebay, since Roger had to go to work. Once the haynet was up, I walked out to collect Ruby. Typical of his family, as soon as he realised the door was shut, he started trying the latch.

Out in the field, Ruby had her head down and was hoping nobody was going to take her away from the grass, but she came in obediently. At the gate she must have smelt Sonny, because she stood very still and he let out a series of loud whinnies. So in we went. Mother and son met nose to nose over the connecting door and stood like statues, breathing deeply, almost kissing, for several minutes, before Sonny's sniffing became too much for Ruby and she let out the classic indignant-mare squeal.

Graham wandered out to have a look and I went back for my breakfast. The coffee was still hot.

An hour later when both were settled, I took the grooming brushes and gave Sonny a firm going-over to loosen the sweat from his coat. He stood quietly, so that's no problem. He wasn't sure about me handling his right ear, which has a matted bit on the ear-tuft, but i persuaded him it was all right. I'll trim off the tuft, which is probably catching on things apart from my brush. Must find the round ended scissors (you don't use them much with Fells!). Then I picked up all his feet. After I'd handled the left side he said, "No, I know what you want but I'm not going to pick up my right fore." So I moved him about until that foot had left the ground, and asked again. He made me use two hands, but he picked it up, and the right hind, peacefully. That's going to be something to do at least once a day then.

Ruby meanwhile stood yearning over the partition, "Groom ME, groom ME!" and scratching her neck on a handy knot in the woodwork (which she hadn't had access to when in the other box.) I fetched a saw and got rid of the knot, and gave her a fuss and a bit of hay. Silly old dear.

Sonny's visit to Greenholme (2)

2009-06-11T12:00:00.006+01:00

9 June
David's done the groundwork and it's just a case of spending a week or two filling in a bit more experience. Sonny is coming here early Sunday morning and David is going to give me a hand to introduce him to my cart with its bigger and more visible wheels. Then I will give David a lift home. I might drive Sonny out later in the day when he's had time to cool off after coming over Pikey [big hill to the south], but before he's thought about getting fresh again. Stabling him with straight hay-and-water and no hard feed has done wonders for his figure and also his attitude :) Like his Mum, he slonks a bit at walk unless you nag him. He still peeps at things, but that's just greenness, nothing nasty. Time and miles are the cure for that. Danny is booked to come and shoe Ruby and I've left a message that I want him to handle Sonny if he comes while Sonny is here. And yes, I know they have had their differences, but I have a strategy ready :)

Sonny's visit to Greenholme

2009-06-11T08:48:00.009+01:00

My bay Fell mare Ruby had 2 foals with her previous owner and the younger one is "Sonny" an 8 year old brown gelding. Both have Sunday names, as Shacklabank Sonny Boy and Coppyhill Suzanne, but you can forget that for now as "Sonny" and "Ruby" are much shorter to type! Here's Ruby with me driving and Dylan Winter (Radio & TV presenter) as passenger, complete with fluffy mike.

Sonny is a big grown up boy who hasn't done very much work because his owner is a very busy lady with a walking-holiday business (near Sedbergh). We email periodically about the management of her web site (www.shacklabank.co.uk)....

23 April
I was talking to David Trotter at the weekend and mentioned Sonny and his naughtiness, and David is intrigued. You know how he loves a challenge :)
Sue

24 April
Sonny is still out on the tops with Belle both have lost weight thank goodness so ill call David and have a chat then hope to bring him off and walk him to Davids in the next few weeks (if he will have a go!) he would have someone to ride him im sure, the time has come and David understands fells, Sonny knows im a push over and to be honest he is so lovely its a dam shame not to be out on him ...
A

24 April
That'll be good for Sonny, and I know David likes a challenge. I shall definitely be dropping in on the yard at Tebay to see how the naughty boy is doing. I haven't seen him except at a long distance out in your fields so I'll be keen to make his acquaintance.
Sue

23 May
Well its time David said he could fit him in this week so ill contact and then get him up to David and hope all goes well
my main need is to have him straight and be able to ride him..there is a pressure to have him useable i know this takes time David seems to think it will be no problem and will drive him! im uneasy about this as i know Sonny and his explosive behaviour and his is a creature of flight! however David has a helper and his many years of fells will come through.
A

1 June
I gather Sunny had a few steckies in the first couple of days but David says he drove him at Lynn's yard today and people were saying how well he was going. I'm hoping to see him in action myself tomorrow afternoon.
Sue

7 June

I have your saddle here and DJ says he will drive Sonny over to our place next Sunday (I'm quite busy this week with some teaching and writing stuff, plus web work on Weds; and it is Greenholme Show on Sat) so I can drive him and maybe Jen will ride him. Video here of Sonny working well on the way home.

I wonder what Mum Ruby will think when he arrives!
Sue

8 June
you have made my night thanks.... so whats the plan now are you to have Sonny for a week or so?? and from when
im so thrilled with the pictures and video..

Panto shopping

2008-08-18T13:23:00.012+01:00

It's the time of year when our cars/vans etc all seem to be due their annual M.O.T.s (roadworthiness tests, for those not resident in Britain). Today was the turn of the Ford Transit so, having had it checked out by our local garage man, I duly trundled it down to the Kendal industrial estate and sat reading newspapers and doing crosswords for an hour before the hostages (the pass certificate and keys) were returned to me in exchange for my fantastic plastic. £50 quid lighter, but glad I didn't have to arrange for a re-test, I trundled back homewards via the supermarket. Gleefully I occupied four parking bays ... well, two and two quarters, to be precise ... surrendered a pound coin to the release thingy on a trolley and off I went.

I shop only rarely in Kendal (it is 15 miles south and I work 40 miles north of my home) and it seems that every time I go into Morrisons they have moved the things I want to somewhere else. This makes shopping more akin to foraging. I start off with a list, and end up with a headache. Fish and flowers are no trouble as they are always near the entrance. Fruit and veg ditto, except that I get mine from my friend Mr "No-Relation-To-Del-Boy" Trotter, where we conduct our business in civilised fashion over a mug of coffee, a ginger biscuit, and a discussion of the weather, horses and whatever is showing on TV when I call.

It's after bakery that I begin to fall down. What used to be tights and knickers is now toothpaste and baby food. Jams and tinned fruit have turned into household maintenance and car polishes. And what has happened to raspberry yogurt? I haven't seen a raspberry yogurt since January. I've been told that raspberry yogurt costs more to make. I don't understand why this should cause a shortage since here it is, another good raspberry season, and when I finally ran the dairy section to ground there was no lack of strawberry or other soft-fruit flavours.

Worryingly, Red Leicester cheese was also playing hard to get. Foreign cheeses I could find in abundance: Brie, in French or Somerset varieties, Emmenthal, Lierdammer, Gruyere, Camembert, Danish Blue, and plenty of chunks of bulk-buy Cheddars with full fat or reduced fat content; but the local makes, Cheshire, Stilton, Leicester, Double Gloucester, Caerphilly, were doing the equivalent of panto audience interaction: hiding coyly in opaque, one-size-fits-all packaging, or else "be'ind yer!" in the deli section.

By the home baking shelves, a lady was having the same "oh no it isn't" problem; she was looking for syrup and treacle, a reasonable brace of sticky ingredients to expect alongside sugar and flour, dried fruit and marzipan.

"Perhaps they're in the jam section?" I suggested. "I'm looking for cocoa myself."

"Ah no," she said, "dark chocolate and white chocolate and milk chocolate, you'll find them here, but cocoa's over that way, with tea and coffee."

I'd been there. I went and looked again, but I never did find it. Clearly the Genie of the Lamp had been there before me. It can't POSSIBLY be my age.

Born Carers

2008-07-30T18:43:00.004+01:00

Naomi, my grand-daughter, has had little option but to become a horsey child. With a mother and grandmother who think equine before speaking human, the odds were always strong that she'd be fluent in Horse before she could read.

Luckily, Ruby the Fell pony seems to have had much the same thought. She carries Naomi around with patient circumspection, something notably lacking when we go out carriage driving, and is careful not to make any untoward moves that might damage the small child. Naomi is not quite three.

Ruby's recent visit to the vet for eye treatment coincided with Jen and Naomi's appearance at the Surgery with Ribena (a necessary additive to Ruby's dinner to get her to eat her medication) Jen met me there to hand over the Ribena and Naomi, having accepted that she wasn't to worry the mare and foal in the paddock by the surgery, wanted to see what the vet did with Ruby, so we all stood in a darkened box while the vet peered at Ruby's eyes with the ophthalmoscope. Next thing we knew Naomi was hugging Ruby's leg really tightly, and kissing her elbow, which was all she could reach, "to make her feel better".

That child can be really spooky - she isn't three till the end of next month and has already decided which friends and relatives she will ask for which presents (I'm down for sticker books, apparently, and her Great Granny's got to buy Iggle Piggle pyjamas - rather her than me!).

As for the rosette which she accepted for being the only Fancy Dress entry at our village show, riding Ruby as The Tooth Fairy: "Please will you put the rosette up really high on my bedroom wall?" When asked why, she explained: "So I can't reach it till I'm a big girl and I can't spoil it." Three going on ninety-three, I'd say.

Nurse! the Screens!

2008-07-30T18:30:00.004+01:00

Haven't been posting here for some time, I realise, seeing that the last post was back in April. Blame it on going back to work, and getting various book manuscripts up to scratch. I've also started a writers' group in the village, so have to think of things to do once a month - though that hardly counts as arduous.

At present, I would normally be getting my Fell pony fit and clean for the local shows, but she is taking up a lot of my time for quite another reason - she has an eye problem, and has to live in her stable to stay out of sunshine because it causes her some pain. I imagine it's like cramp in your iris, so it can't be pleasant. I seem to do a lot of application of eye drops (she dislikes them but huffles for the subsequent Polo mint) and am getting fanatical about cleansing my hands with that alcoholic gel stuff. It's amazing how much I rub my OWN eyes too. Probably that's got more to do with being hyper-aware of it than actually doing it more. Mind you the stable has seldom been so well kept, so I suppose there are advantages.

I have to go back to work for a few days next week, and a whole week the week after, so anyone who's not squeamish about a horse with a permanently tearful expression would be welcome to do the midday application of eye drops. Just remember you also need a roll of Polo mints.

You heard it here first

2008-04-25T14:32:00.002+01:00

Well, second or third probably. Anyway, some of my collected rustic witterings should be appearing through a reputable publisher sometime later this year: articles, rants, poems and wacky letters to an imaginary local newspaper. It's gone under the working title of "Wellies", but now needs something short, daft and marketable to put on the cover.

Suggestions please!

Euphemisms

2008-04-24T21:49:00.000+01:00

Knickers, smallclothes, underwear,
things that cover bits down there;
hipsters, Y fronts, passion killers,
big-pants, smalls and crotchless thrillers,
boxers, underpants and panties,
directoires as worn by aunties,

lon-jer-ray and thongs and things,
inexpressibles and strings;
slimmers, hi-legs, trunks and naughties,
tangas, briefs and lacy shorties –
all must fall when nature calls
and we are screened by modest walls:

bathrooms, washrooms, smallest rooms,
loos in cupboards full of brooms,
lavatories, netties, johns,
toilets with sitdownupons;
privies, closets, single-bowlers,
one- and two- and family-holers.
Plastic potty, thing of wonder,
used to be a plain gazunder,
jerry, china pot or po,
brimful with night’s overflow.

Pay a visit, wash your hands,
spend a penny (man just stands)
to plant a sweet pea down the drain,
point Percy at the porcelain,
or sit in state upon the throne
whereon the Pope must go alone
to do his reigning over China
painted by a fine designer.
Shake hands with your oldest friend.
It has to come out in the end.

Aussie Beasts

2008-04-24T21:43:00.000+01:00

Aussie Beasts

We are Betcherrigah. Yellow and green we are.
Flocks in the trees we are, you know us well.
We’ll copy anything, whether you laugh or sing.
What Aussie beast are we – can you tell?

*

I am the Lillipilli, gentle and shy,
I don’t make a fuss, and I never ask why.
My head is fluffy and I hold it high –
I’m an Australian, but what am I?

*

I am the Kookaburra, I eat snakes.
I don’t like trifle and I don’t like cakes.
With my sharp nose and my laughing cry,
what kind of Australian beast am I?

*

He is the Boggi, scaly and rough.
He'll flash his tongue to show he's tough.
Don’t pick him up, he'll bite and hiss!
What kind of Aussie beast is this?

*
I am the Bandicoot, sometimes in stripes.
I have a long nose that nobody wipes.
My favourite call is a trumpeting sound
and I’ll eat just anything I find left around.

*

He’s a Koala, who looks sweet and dumb.
He eats the fresh leaves of a species of gum,
he has big ears and an opposable thumb,
but his small eyes tell you he’s nobody’s chum.

*

This is Echidna, with spikes on her back
and a pointy snout for a termite attack.
Her babies drink milk though they hatched out of eggs
and her husband’s penis has got four legs.

*

We are a singular creature, the Platypus
and Platypod-es is the plural of us.
We swim underwater and wear a soft beak
that makes it extremely hard to speak.

*

She is the Kangaroo, rusty and red.
She has a pocket for her baby’s bed.
She can jump on enormous feet –
She's the boundingest Aussie beast you’ll meet.

Hot and Cold

2008-03-01T13:19:00.001Z

Greenhouse effect? What greenhouse effect?

It was peeing down with rain and after the monstrous heat of the summer of 95 it was almost a relief to feel cold while I was loading light lambs to go to auction. This time the lambs didn't have to sit panting with heat and travelled comfortably in the horsebox - though after listening to them bleating all night for their mothers I supposed there was still plenty of stress in the simple fact of the separation.

After the auction I smiled to see a farmer in full waterproof kit striding through the rain back to his Land Rover, bearing a brand new hay rake. They say farmers are pessimists, but things like that make me wonder! I once met a neighbour in a narrow road and as is customary we both rolled down our vehicle windows to pass the time of day and comment on the weather.

"I've just been to buy some waterproofs ready for haytime," he announced.

Now, the animals know enough about weather to put Bill Giles / Sue Charlton / Bill Kettley to shame. Fell ponies trek determinedly to the lee side of the mountain when snow is imminent. Or if they expect to be fed hay near the farm during a snowy spell, they will wait Cassandra-like at the fell gate. When the thaw is due, they take themselves off... and then the snow melts.

At the other end of the temperature scale, Chris, a large, fit and extremely physical neighbour given to shepherding in nothing more than shorts and boots during the summer, announced as I passed one steamy afternoon, "Reckon Ah need to tek a skin off."

But there are also more daft sayings about weather than you can shake a stick at. Cause is confused with effect without any attempt at logic. In early spring when the fells are still streaked with snow, it's quite common to hear Cumbrian shoppers remark, shaking knowing heads, "It won't get warmer till them snow patches go." No - the other way about - surely?

"Oak before ash, Only a splash; Ash before oak, In for a soak." So goes the proverb. Must be written in order to rhyme. I've never seen ash trees leaf before oaks. But I have seen summers with both extremes of wetness and dryness!

Likewise, the pundits who have nothing better to do than pester the local paper with repetitive letters announce every September that the heavy crop of hawthorn / rosehip / rowan berries must surely presage a hard winter. I can only say that I must live in a different country. Our hawthorns and rowans flowered profusely in 96 after 95's hot summer ripened their branches, and as a result they berried tremendously in autumn. And the winter of 96/97 was not bad enough to prevent me going to work over Grayrigg Hause with a summit height of around 1300 feet.

Likewise people write to comment on the early return of the robins in their garden, predicting a bad winter again. What the robins would say I do not know. Does anyone think that they all leave England in spring? Ours have been known to nest in the cupped palm of a rhubarb leaf. One summer it was quite normal for them to mug you when you went innocently seeking something for a totally vegetarian pudding. Did that mean winter would be here all year round? I don't think so. Their presence in my garden means that, in summer, robins among the dense foliage have got better things to do than their highly conspicuous bare-branch winter activity of telling all other robins to get the hell out of their territory. So, you don't see them much in summer, but suddenly when the leaves are down they become conspicuous once more. QED.

A steadying thought for St Valentine's Day

2008-02-10T16:26:00.000Z

She snuggles up to him under the duvet.

"Happiness," she sighs, "is a warm hairy husband."

"Happiness," he replies, "is a chilly wife on her OWN side of the bed."

Football league

2008-01-20T15:58:00.000Z

I can live without football. Hush! I do not need a weekly fix of 22 men in shorts kicking hell out of a ball. I try to make a point, though, of watching televised footie on Saturday nights because my husband looks forward to it so much. I fire up the laptop and sit checking my e mails, while he snorts and gasps and exclaims, and Messrs Lineker, Hansen, Lawrenson, Shearer et al dissect the finer points of each game. He doesn’t have a favourite team as such, so this is not the agony it might be with a certain other family of my acquaintance, whose rabid allegiance it is not wise to question.

I have detected some partisanship in my mate’s behaviours though. My more mundane tasks around the house have often been lightened by mentally categorising them. Here’s what I’ve constructed so far.

International: We don’t think a lot of the England team, but we want it to win if playing a foreign one.

National: Leagues: We’ll support any northern team that’s playing a southern team. If both teams are northern we’re truly impartial. If both teams are southern, ditto, unless there’s someone obnoxious managing one team, when we’ll hope the other wins. From that point of view, it used to be the highlight of the evening if Chelsea got stuffed and “mean, moody and magnificent” Mourinho had one of his tantrums. I miss him.

National: F A Cup competitions: We’d like to see any small lowly club beat any big one.

Thinking about all this has made me realise that I have other, smaller, fragmentations in my own support. Raised as an Everton fan, I really want to see the “Toffees” win a Merseyside Derby / Premiership / F A Cup, but I have to admit that one of the best things David Moyes did was to sell Rooney to Manchester United. My brother, who has a season ticket to Goodison Park, would never admit that any other club could offer any excitement, but Liverpool’s Gerrard sprinting through the midfield or taking a penalty does it for me just as much as EFC’s Johnson heading for goal or Man U’s Ronaldo dancing contemptuously with the ball round the opposing defence. Like I said, I’m impartial.

A few niggles. One is the group hug that seems mandatory after scoring a goal. It reminds me of my Dad’s school playground game, “Weak Horse” where boys all jumped on top of someone in the hope that he’d collapse. Why can’t they all celebrate with multiple handsprings? perhaps in formation? A second is the sight of fit male footballers (I excuse goalkeepers) wearing gloves, something we schoolgirls were never allowed to do when playing netball, even in freezing rain. Televised games can be too in-your-face: complete turnoffs for me are the managers’ inability to chew gum with their mouths shut, and the frequency with which players spit during a game.

The number one niggle, though, is the quantity of foreign players in the top English teams. At least Liverpool and Everton are captained by self-controlled, gloveless, proper Northern lads.

It’s Everton, though, that has the motto to end all mottoes: Nil Satis Nisi Optimum. Nothing is good enough unless it is the best.

Darts as a sport?

2008-01-10T11:34:00.000Z

I heard an interview with a high ranked darts player on the radio. I have to say the interviewer did a good job of finding questions to ask, but the replies were possibly the most boring I’ve heard this year – the player hardly able to expand any of his monosyllabic replies. The nearest he got to any kind of reasoning was to say that darts was a sport, and if anyone thought it wasn’t, they had to take into account “all that walking”.

From the oche to the board to collect the darts after each turn. Wow. That’s 7 feet 9¼ inches. AND BACK.

That must be what keeps darts players so lithe and fit, is it?

Thought for the New Year

2008-01-06T12:22:00.000Z

An ex-actress friend, newly into writing, complained to me yesterday: “it just is not in vogue to have poems that have a regular metre or rhyme.”

I think she’s right - it is a vogue. Depends where you read, I suppose; magazines will sometimes publish the most godawful crap if it more or less scans and happens to have rhymes. It also has to have a commonplace, even saccharine message. (I have submitted poetry that rhymed, scanned, and had a sharp message and had it rejected with a preprinted slip saying that it needed to rhyme, scan and have a message. Duh? But that’s another story and probably The People’s Friend would reject that too.)

“Serious” poetry appears to have lost the skill of writing meaningful, rhymed, metrical work. I don’t include rap because it only (sort-of) works if it has a synthetic beat behind it, and like most doggerel it dies horribly if asked to stand alone. Somewhere along the line, “meaningful” has branched off into free verse, leaving rhyme and metre in the children's section. And that's a shame. It's like creating jewellery, but restricting your materials to chromium and rhinestones. Why not accept all the tools that language has to offer?

Station snapshots

2007-12-19T16:36:00.000Z

I live near a motorway service station, one that has – contrary to expectation – an excellent reputation and the framed certificates to prove it. We local yokels take it for granted that it will be open 24/7 apart from Christmas and New Year, and it does offer bizarre sights that add to the interest of our peaceful, cheery (insert platitudinous adjectives here) rural lives.

A trip across the petrol forecourt, specially on weekend evenings, is notable for scantily clad personages (I really can’t call them Ladies) wearing pink bunny rabbit ears, fishnet tights and cottonpuff tails as they stagger from coach to loos and back. My daughter tells me they are probably en route to Blackpool or Morecambe for a hen party. I feel sorry for poor Morecambe, but at least they won’t be staying here to scream their drunken obscenities – and that’s just on the outward journey.

One evening last year, when I was driving peacefully homeward past the service exit, I encountered a kilted bag-piper heel-and-toeing along the grass verge with his pipe and drones in full voice. Once I’d shaken myself and decided it wasn’t an apparition, I approved his choice of rehearsal room – the open air. Mind, it was possible that his fellow passengers (or his employers) had forced him to relocate. Confinement indoors with a set crying come-to-battle is a form of torture that even the deafened disco generation might find it hard to tolerate. Bagpipes are outdoor instruments. (Or should that be, The bagpipe IS an outdoor instrument? Someone please tell me.)

The arrival of winter was marked again this year by the lady and gent who walk a team of huskies. They always appear to be northbound, but I could just have missed their return trips. Snow sometimes follows, though I wouldn’t dare to assert that there is any connection. And I’ve never seen them wearing anything red or furry.

Last Night My Horse Became a TV Star

2007-11-30T09:23:00.000Z

(The Dales Diary on Border TV)

In honour of which I'm re-posting here a piece I wrote while we were awaiting the film crew.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello there. You’re early. Not at all, you haven’t disturbed me; I am up and about. I don’t sleep a lot. Even in summer, I’m up before dawn. Life is too short to spend flat out with your eyes shut. Up and at ‘em is my motto.

It’s going to be a fine day, don’t you think? Not bad for winter; no wind, no rain, just a touch of invigorating frost. I think the sun will soon shine in through the window.

Breakfast is served just after dawn at this time of year, so we haven’t long to wait. I’ll walk about a bit if you don’t mind; hunger makes you impatient, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. I know they can hear me, so don’t worry, they won’t be long. The floor vibrates a little, and I think it must be audible in their quarters, so there’s no need to shout for room service. They’re pretty good to me here; they know my likes and dislikes, and quite often they’ll produce something really tasty. You know how being sharp-set makes all food taste just wonderful. Oh, yes, I’m afraid I’m always on a diet. I’m sure you know the feeling; it’s all too easy for the tum and bum to start expanding when you don’t work out in the winter. They do a nice line in fruit, fibre and cereals, and even though I’ve always eaten a wide range of vegetable foods they’ve introduced me to a lot of new things. Some are quite exotic, like melon, and sweet potatoes. Even after Christmas is over, it’s fun seeing what might appear next on the menu.

No, I don’t have any eating disorders. My only trouble is that if it’s there I eat it; so I suppose it’s for my own good that sometimes, when I’ve eaten one portion I just have to wait for the next. Ah well. I see nobody’s been to feed those sheep yet; they’ll be hungry too, poor things, and they’re worse off, being out there in the frost. On the other hand, the sun is up now and the grass will be thawing for them, what there is of it anyway. At least they’re getting some warmth after the chilly night. The sun’ll be round to my window soon. I’ll enjoy that. I sunbathe as often as I can, don’t you? The sun does you good; it makes vitamin D and keeps you healthy.

There’s always plenty of grub here and it’s the best quality. They’re a bit slow bringing it this morning. I’ll look out of the window, if you’ll excuse me; no, there’s still no-one coming. What to do to pass the time? How about a drink? Yes, I think so. I admit, I’m quite a big drinker; one has to keep a lovely body hydrated, and being so active, I use a lot of water. I’ll have a good deep drink right now to stave off the hunger pangs. Ooch, that’s cold on the stomach; it fairly makes your lips curl when there’s a touch of frost about, doesn’t it? I’ll walk round a bit more to settle it and warm myself up again. Do you like the way I fling my hair over my shoulder as I stalk about? Wish they’d give me a mirror in here. I’m sure this great black mane of mine is tangled. It’s so long and thick, I really need help to comb it out. What – you think it suits me like this? How kind. You should take a photograph of it. Men do admire it a great deal, even though it often hides my face. Notice my mobile, teasing mouth; and my very long, dark eyelashes too. I’ve been told that my eyes are admirably expressive. They are a lovely brown, aren’t they? Wide set, large and clear. No, I don’t need kohl; this black-pencilled outline is quite natural. You can be quite sure, darling, that I’d use it if I needed to! I make the very best use of assets like these. I can do things nobody else would dare. Trespass, greed or theft – one bat of my eyelashes, one seductive turn of the head – trust me, I’ve done it and been forgiven.

I may be allowed outside today, you know. That would be good. I’ll take another turn, if you wouldn’t mind stepping back out of my space. I don’t want to tread on your toes. It’s cosy in here really; I ought not to fret at confinement. The weather in winter can be appalling so even if they let me out I’d probably be desperate to come back in! The bed’s changed regularly and everything’s tidied twice a day. People pop in for a natter and I’m always glad to see them, whether I’m working or not. Next door they’re doing a barn conversion so there’s lots of activity. I like to feel I’m part of things. When I’m out there I always offer them my help. I am curious about their tools, though I’m not so good at using them; but then building is hardly my real purpose in life! It just helps to pass the time until the new season opens. I get plenty of work then to keep my mind engaged.

Are you taping this? You sly dog. It shows a professional attitude on your part though. I’ve been done before, you know; local papers and Radio 4. Dylan Winter - do you know him? - quite fell in love with me. You can always tell by that note in their voice when they say my name. I hope the builders get the yard cleared of rubble before Luke Casey and the film crew come next month.

What else can we talk about to keep my mind off food? Well, I could tell you about the offspring, I suppose: I have two, one of each gender, what they call a pigeon pair. Yes, I admit, they do have different fathers; lovely fellows both of them. Both of them quite famous in their own right, too, though I didn’t realise it at the time. Love at first sight? Oh yes indeed! My taste ran to blacks as you know, but both of the youngsters take after my own colouring, and pretty nice-looking they are, if I do say it myself. They’re grown up now and very fit and lively. They’re both working, and quite independent. They send me news from time to time through the staff here. I had cards from them at Christmas.

What’s that? Lonely, me? Not at all. Let me explain – I can see you’re not comfortable with the idea of me being alone here. When I first arrived, I had a companion, in the next room over there. He was all over me at first, as though he couldn’t believe his luck; went quite off his feed, poor boy. I’m afraid I ignored him while I found my feet and learned the systems here. Was that hard of me? Uncaring? I don’t know. If you don’t look after yourself, who is to do it for you? Anyway, it didn’t take more than a day or two for his ardour to cool. After that he turned out rather domineering; been here years and thought the place was his own, I daresay – good looks can cause a good deal of jealousy, can’t they? He moved away just over a year ago and I hear he’s doing OK, but really I don’t miss him. There’s nothing quite like being the only girl around, you know. When you’re on your own, you get all the attention; the press calls and the photographers – yes, OK, you took that hint quite beautifully. Shall I pose in this shaft of sunlight by the window? How’s that? Warm breath curling into steam; very atmospheric. Darling, you WILL Photoshop me if they don’t come out quite perfect, won’t you?

AH! Look. Here’s the dinner lady now. She’s a bit late – I think I mentioned that normally breakfast is shortly after dawn – but what can you expect? You can’t get the staff these days. My word, I AM hungry. What is breakfast going to be today? Come on woman, tip it out and let me at it. Ah, lovely oats again, embellished with apple peelings and carrot sticks. And a nice generous slab of that sweet smelling hay. Excuse me turning my back on you, but I just have to eat. You could help by filling up my water-bucket, by the way, while she goes for the wheelbarrow.

Are you leaving now? All right. Thanks. So nice to have met you. I’ll look forward to reading your piece.

Carry a big stick

2007-11-28T15:13:00.000Z

Wild Fell ponies are stand-offish as a rule. After all, life out on the margin of the farm business has its own characteristics, mainly involving childcare and feeding; and on the whole it is peaceful. Walkers, on their way to who knows where, may attract the ponies’ interest from time to time, but so long as the ponies are not hand-fed on the common land they don’t expect food. Instead of pestering people, the boss mare generally moves the group steadily away about their own business.

Not all ponies are as distant as Fells though, and the “no hand-feeding” proviso often doesn’t hold good. On the Caldbeck Commons, Shetland type ponies, including stallions, have been turned out for so long, and so petted by visitors, that they are a definite hazard. They shove their heads into open windows of parked cars to demand food in a most ill-mannered fashion and if you deny them, they will snap and kick.

A few years back I heard a story of horses doing serious damage to a car in a similar situation. I happened to be at a friend’s house, when a nervous middle-aged lady came to knock at the door.

“I need to find out who owns the horses on that place called Sunbiggin Tarn Pasture,” she said. “I have to claim compensation through my insurance company, but I can’t find out who owns them.”

This wasn’t a very promising opening, but since she was determined to tell her story, my friend invited her in. She wouldn’t sit down, she was very upset and not at all coherent, and she didn’t have a clue about horses; but she was one of those people who feel they haven’t told a story until they have repeated everything twice, so one way and another we got a good feel for what had really happened.

There are two cattle grids that secure the road, onto and off the Tarn Pasture. The lady, driving alone in a small and immaculately kept car, came gently across the Pasture up to the cattle grid, and there she paused in the face of the mixed group of horses and ponies. They stood completely blocking her way over the cattle grid. She was afraid to get out and chase them, because there were so many of them – and from where she was sitting inside the car they all looked rather big. The horses, in their turn, thought the stationary car would contain people, who would give them food. This is not as silly as it might sound, because that end of Tarn Pasture is a picnic place where they had been given titbits before. Horses, like elephants, never forget, especially food. So there was one frightened lady inside, and a dozen greedy horses outside.

The leading horse stepped forward and began to bite at the car. So did some of the others. The ones behind believed the ones in front were getting something good to eat, so they began biting and kicking each other. The ones in front kicked back, no doubt with added spite at having been cheated, as they saw it, of their expected treat. Soon there was a noisy, dangerous melee going on round the immaculately kept little car.

“I was screaming by then,” she said. “They bit off the wing mirrors and the door trims, and they mashed the front wings, and the radiator grille, and the bonnet. It’s going to cost me over a thousand pounds to get the damage put right!”

My friend clucked and made sympathetic noises. “And were you all right? did you manage to chase them off in the end?”

“No, somebody, a farmer, came along from the other direction. He chased them off for me so I could drive over the cattle grid and get away. Oh I was in a state. And my car!” She trembled over the memory; but then perhaps she noticed us looking at the evidently undamaged car out in the street. “I’ve had to borrow one from the garage, mine just isn’t fit to drive.” She stiffened suddenly and went onto the offensive. “So I need to find out whose horses they are, don’t I? My insurance company says it has to deal with the owners to get my costs paid for.”

He shook his head. “Well, they’re not my horses,” he said; “you see the landowner just lets the Paster off for the summer. It goes to the highest bidder through the Auction, so it’s not always the same person each year.”

“Mr So-and-So said they would be yours,” she insisted.

“No,” he said perfectly calmly, “I don’t use Tarn Paster, I never have done. I have rights on Tebay Fell, do you see? So I wouldn’t need it. I’m very sorry to hear of all that damage, but I don’t know whose horses they would be.”

I think she was about to launch into the tale a third time, as though that would convince him of her urgent need for information, but he managed gently to edge her to the door. Eventually, still gritting her teeth bitterly over her terrible ordeal, she got into her courtesy car and drove away. My friend stood quietly at the closed door for a moment, then he dropped heavily into his armchair and he began to laugh. We both did, we couldn’t help it. The picture of the town-bred driver and the greedy posse of horses was just too silly to resist.

At last he wiped his face with his hand and said, “I suppose somebody eventually will know whose horses they are, but I don’t, and if I did I wouldn’t tell. Well, let that be a lesson to her. If you’re going into horse country, don’t feed the natives. Walk firmly, and carry a big stick.”

Did I do right?

2007-11-24T17:23:00.001Z

I was reviewing a poem the other day which brought back a memory I had completely forgotten. Usually reminiscence is pleasant, but I can’t say so this time. It took me back to when I was still at grammar school, in the little village-turned-commuter-town where I was born and brought up. I suppose I was sixteen or so; or at least, old enough to go to the library on my own on a dark winter evening.

I must have had the twelve-year-old fox-terrier bitch with me. Her name was Chispa, Spanish for “Spark” for the star-mark on her forehead. Chispa accepted that if I took her to the library she must wait patiently, with the leash tied to a hook in the entrance lobby, until I came out. When this incident opens, in my mind’s eye I am walking through Mayer Park; in those days, dog walking in parks was not frowned upon and one didn’t have to “scoop the poop” behind them. I would not otherwise have gone that way to the Library, after dark, when the nearer way, along the street, was also better lit.

It’s odd how memory layers information. The Library at that time was in an old farmhouse. It had been bequeathed to the community by Joseph Mayer, a local industrialist and philanthropist of the 19th Century. Although my grandmother’s maiden name was Meyer, having been born back in the 1890s to a German/French father and an English mother, Mayer was no relation to my family; the similarity of name was pure coincidence. I remember outside on the Library wall there were plaques in ciment-fondu, which depicted scenes from Proverbs: Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding. Mayer had donated not only the farmhouse in which he used to live, but also the Hall he built next door, and all his collection of books which formed the nucleus of the original library. The house had been extended in the 1960s to accommodate the growing demands of the book stock, and I was familiar with all its ins and outs because my mother worked as a librarian there. I (with or without Chispa) was always welcome behind the scenes. I looked forward to spending an hour among the shelves, choosing something to borrow, then walking home with Mum and Chispa.

So there we were, the old dog and I, walking through the dark Park. We were following one of the broad paths, under the bare horse-chestnut trees. The Library extension was on our right, and on our left a laurel shrubbery which we didn’t walk in because of its dense foliage and tripping roots.

It was quiet, with only the sound of occasional passing cars on the road ahead and Chispa’s claws click-clicking on the tarmac beside me, accompanying my clacking heels. I probably had my hands in the pockets of the grey wool coat Mum made for me; she often told me off for spoiling its line. Although the evening was dark and cold, we were at peace with the world. I had my eye on the orange of the street lights and my mind on the warmth of the Library.

Then I heard the cry. I can still hear it. It came from the shrubbery. One crack of a twig, a rustle of leaves, and that cry of fear. It was not a child, not someone playing a game. It was a gasp and a cry from a girl of my own age. I stopped. There was no way to see through the bushes. I listened. There was only a crack of another twig, then silence. The leaves were dark, and the spaces under the branches lay thick with night.

“Hello? Are you all right?” There was no reply. “Hello?”

I stood there with my heart thumping. I was conscious of danger but I simply didn’t know what I could do. I wore glasses and knew my short sight to be a very vulnerable point. I couldn’t see anything among the shrubs, didn’t know my way in there, couldn’t drag the old dog after me in among the laced branches, didn’t know who was in there apart from the girl. I also think I was aware of the fragility of my new nylon tights compared with the dense nature of a laurel bush, and that I currently had no money to buy more. Not even a few pennies for the public telephone.

The local police station was a mile and a half away. How handy it would have been for a police “Z” car to go by, but it didn’t.

“Hello?”

I walked away rapidly to the Library. I took the dog right indoors with me, while I looked for my mother. After five minutes or so I found her, somewhere in the back corridors, and I poured out my breathless story.

“Do you think we should call the police?” I finished.

My mother was tired after a long day on her feet.

“No,” she said shortly. “She probably didn’t get anything she wasn’t asking for.” And the topic was closed.

I don’t remember the walk home.

I don’t remember anything reported in the local newspaper. I was not forbidden to go to the library on my own, and I think the caution that I developed about dark shrubberies was entirely mine. I never heard of anything having happened to a young girl, that dark winter evening in Mayer Park.

But forty years later, I still wonder what I might have prevented.

Driving Club

2007-11-19T15:27:00.000Z

It's one of the well-known facts of the Millard household that if Father goes to buy a new car, we can all guess correctly what colour it will be.

This would be less surprising if he ever actually bought a genuinely new one with all the options of specifying preferences, but none of the family - me included - has ever thought it a good deal to lose several thousand pounds simply by driving a completely new car out of a show room. The newest car our household has ever claimed was six years old, and three years later I am still driving it.

Looking back over the years (and there are more of those than I care to count) we have had an assortment of high mileage, low cost cars. They included the two and a quarter ton caravanette in which we took our summer and weekend breaks (and did the shopping), until it quietly succumbed to old age sometime round its 27th birthday. It then spent another six years as a children's play house. We had a Triumph Dolomite (or its nearest neighbour whose model name I can't now recall; a 1300 perhaps?), and a long, long series of Vauxhall Cavaliers, Belmonts and Astras. Finally, too, I have to admit to my husband's MG Metros, all dubbed "Pogo Sticks" by me (I hated them) and by my daughter (who learnt to drive in the first one). He referred to them as "Rust Buckets" but nevertheless bought three in succession until, with MG and Rover having both gone out of business, the second-hand supply finally ran dry.

Out of thirty years' worth of vehicles, I can only think of four we owned that weren't the same colour; we had one blue, one red and one silver Metro, and one blue Cavalier. Ah, and also the retired, up-on-ramps Lotus Elite that hasn't turned a wheel in five years and is, somewhere under the dust and swallow droppings, fibreglass red. But as that doesn't go anywhere it doesn't count. And neither does the Rover 400 that I borrowed for six weeks till I bought my present car. It was a shade of green probably described by Rover as "British Racing", but it became known as the Tarnhelm because when you were in it you were, apparently, invisible.

You are working out from this what colour I'm talking about, aren't you?

The last of the Metros (the silver one) failed its Ministry of Transport road-worthiness test last week, so the hunt was on for a replacement to get my husband to work. There being no Metros still knocking around, the field was wide open; would it be another trusty Vauxhall? A Ford? Or even something foreign? He spent hours poring over Auto Trader, finding suitably aged and priced beasties that were within a reasonable distance of us. As we are not in Manchester or Liverpool, this last requirement narrowed the field considerably. Then he'd sit there trying to relocate the adverts because he hadn't marked them or turned over the page corners or even written down the page numbers.

By last weekend he still hadn't phoned anyone about any of these cars and the next Auto Trader was now out. We were back to the local newspaper.

Saturday morning: would I cash a cheque for him with the greengrocer? I duly did so, noting the sum was conservative.

Sunday morning: he announced that we (I loved the "we") were going to go and look at an 11-year-old Peugeot, 13 miles away. In our terms this is nearly on the doorstep, our nearest neighbour being a quarter mile away and on the other side of the river. I brought out the Astra and we set off. My husband doesn't talk much when driving or being driven. I used to think this was due to a) concentration on the job in hand or b) terror at being driven by me, but now I know he's just ticking off the farms we pass and tallying the things he remembers from when he used to deliver fertilisers, feeds, hay or straw to them, or collect their annual wool clip. It makes for absentmindedness about such mundanities as where we are actually going; besides, there is a sort of belief in spousal telepathy that assumes if he has thought about something, I automatically know what that thing is and should not need spoken instruction.

Luckily I did know where we were going, having ascertained this beforehand, and I got us there quietly and safely. The last time I'd been to this village, it had been with my daughter, and we had brought home in triumph a very pretty lightweight carriage for our Fell pony; a vehicle of the one horse power kind which I'd known about for years and coveted from the moment I saw it. When the original owner had asked if I knew anyone who might like to buy it, there was only one possible answer. It has the very strange characteristic of being attractive even to people who know nothing about carriage driving; they walk up to it on a show field, when it's just sitting there waiting to be put to the pony, and they stroke it, which is quite bizarre to watch. It doesn't get used much, but I still adore it. Anyhow, that's how I knew where I was going: carriage driving.

"Where do we want to be, exactly?" I asked as we entered the village.

"We're looking for an elderly Peugeot parked on the roadside. And I would say," he added, "that that's it there."

So I pulled into a small parking space just opposite, and he got out to start poking round the potential purchase.

I didn't need to ask its price tag; I knew how big the cheque was that I'd cashed. I didn't need to follow Graham round the car and peer at the adequate levels of tyre tread, or under the bonnet at the clean engine, full radiator, and correct level of oil; but I did, and amused myself by lifting off the charming mouse nest from on top of the air filter. (We had been warned that the car hadn't been used in the last few months.) We didn't disturb the contents of the car itself, though, which included a large golf umbrella, a portable television, two folding walking sticks and enough scrap paper to build a small house.

My husband went along to knock on the door of the converted barn where the owner lived; he eventually appeared in shorts and sandals, his thin legs and bare feet apparently impervious to the biting wind. The crate of empty brown beer bottles by the back doorstep perhaps accounted for his inner glow. Producing the keys, he started up the beastie and offered to let my husband take it for a spin round the block. I made small talk with the owner while Graham disappeared down the road and when, in a few minutes, he came back, we moved indoors to discuss price.

It was a foregone conclusion that he'd buy it. The owner made one proposal, Graham offered the amount of cash we had brought, and the deal was done. I sat through the ensuing search for the registration document, and his daughter's emptying of the car, and did my bit by trying to entertain two of the three small grandchildren. However, as the boys were very young, and dummy users to boot, I think the sheepdog actually had more to tell me.

How did I know my husband would buy the car? Well, quite apart from having the initials of the carriage driving club as its number plate (I shall buy it from him when he eventually scraps the car), the Peugeot was, you guessed it, white.

Under the influence

2007-11-09T09:13:00.000Z

News today of the tidal surge in the North Sea and its flood potential reminds me of the Great Flood of Carlisle in January 2005.

It also brings to mind a local furore about the alleged baleful influence of the Cursing Stone of Carlisle; erected in a local subway to celebrate the Millennium, this is 14 tonnes of polished granite with an incised copy of a comprehensive curse, which had been proclaimed on the local “Border Reivers” in 1525 by Gavin Dunbar, the Archbishop of Glasgow. But more of this later, when I’ve told you about the storm.

My husband had gone to work well before dawn, to deliver fertiliser with his 24-tonne wagon. Living as we do on a Northern rural hilltop, high winds and lashing rain are nothing unusual, but he says, looking back, that the weather when he left home was calm. I was snoozing in bed around 5 am when I began to be disturbed by the sound of the wind. It grew, and grew, and I woke fully to realise that the crashing noises mingling with screaming air meant something very dangerous was happening. As I huddled under the bedclothes, the crashing was studded with clanging, and something heavy hit the stone wall just below the bedroom window, so hard that the old house shuddered. I dismissed right then any thoughts of going outside. I stayed in bed and listened to the gale until day broke.

The electricity had been cut off. However, the wind and rain had eased a little, so I decided to go out and feed the ponies who were in the adjoining stone stable block. I dressed and went downstairs and opened the back door.

Well, exit that way was impossible. A thirty foot pine branch (the heavy “something” that had hit the house) had been hurled over the top of my Transit-van sized horsebox from the other side of the yard. It had crashed through the perspex roof of the passageway and was hanging over the outside loo. Other branches and a sheet of roofing tin blocked the steps up from the back door to the yard.

I retreated and went out through the front door, on the sheltered side of the house. At the bottom of the field, the beck ran at twice its normal width. The fenceposts had vanished in the flood and all the riverside trees stood waist-deep in angry brown water.

I covered my mouth and nose with my hand, and braced myself to go round the end of the barn into the battering of the rain and wind. I hung in their grasp for a moment like a kite poised to take off, then forced myself round to the stable door. Something must have hit the roof hard, because all the slates were askew, but the door was shut and the rafters and battens had held, and the ponies, though nervous, were unharmed. I picked my way through the debris to the feed bins and back, and gave up any thoughts of shovel and muckbarrow. Later, perhaps, when the wind died down a bit more.

Once I had fed the dog and the ponies, I started to take stock. The clanging noises of the dawn explained themselves: all the twelve-foot long corrugated roofing sheets from the hay store lay, twisted, among the trees, and down the yard, and over the roadside fence in the field a hundred yards away. The fallen pine branches in the yard paled into insignificance when I looked through the driving rain and saw that in the wood seven magnificent spruce trees had been snapped off, as though a giant hand had seized a tuft of grass and wrenched it; the trunks were split and twisted at ten feet from the ground, and the tops cast away, one perched on another to make a 40-foot T, while a dark and tangled mass of wood and broken stone blocked the river bridge. Thank God our little road is a quiet one; between flying steel and falling wood, the pre-dawn hours had been lethal.

I dragged away the branches and tin blocking the back door steps, and went into the house to dry out and make some breakfast.

Lack of electricity is no great hardship to our remote household, because power cuts have always been a possibility in winter. It is only forty years since “the electric” was provided to this area; we are always prepared to manage without it with candles and matches, torches, batteries and fuel. (In fact with the tonnes of wood that had been felled in the last few hours, we were going to have more fuel than we could comfortably deal with for several years.) The Rayburn stove was fairly sizzling from the draught in the chimney, and the bottled propane hummed through to the gas burners, so breakfast was no trouble.

Although the radio batteries hadn’t been renewed for some years, they didn’t fail me; Radio Cumbria came through loud and strong. Over the next two days the BBC staff at Carlisle – stranded by floodwater themselves – kept the county abreast of the storm damage, warned of impassable roads and informed those flooded out where refuge centres were being set up. They deserved medals as big as dinner plates for their cheerful endurance. You couldn’t blame them for making the most of the funnier stories that appeared: for instance, who could identify the goldfish that had been found swimming in the penalty area of Carlisle United’s football pitch?

Warwick road and much of Carlisle was flooded six feet deep; Hardwicke Circus and its underpasses became a lake, with traffic lights up to their necks in dirty water. Gangs of Council workers armed with chainsaws spent the next month snarling their way through hundreds of country roads blocked by fallen trees.

2005 was a dreary year for Carlisle. Hardly any of the flooded houses were habitable again in that time. In March, certain foolish remarks by Councillor Jim Tootle (you couldn’t make it up) made national news: “A local council is to debate whether to remove a huge stone from the city because it is thought to be cursed. The 'Cursing Stone' in Carlisle was made to mark the millennium, but it's being blamed for a string of bad luck that's met the city since. Fires, floods, foot and mouth disease and even a famine of goals for Carlisle United have convinced locals that the stone has to be moved or destroyed.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4310000/
newsid_4311700/4311769.stm)

Those of us who laughed sardonically at the idea are now vindicated: the stone remained, all 14 tonnes of it. The 2007 foot and mouth outbreak didn’t reach Carlisle, we haven’t had any more floods, and Carlisle United leapt through two divisions in two years and from being relegated to the Conference League they are now topping Division 1.

Under the influence? I don’t think so. East Coast, keep your pecker up and don't throw away any stones.

Drunken mice

2007-11-08T21:50:00.000Z

Comedy hour strikes .....

The mice had been out drinking.
Their tails wove in and out.
They staggered up the piping,
and fell off down the spout.
They reached the airing-cupboard
and nested in the sheets,
they peed upon the bedspreads,
on towels wiped their feets.
Then leaving several pellets
of shit upon shelves (upper)
they hiccuped, belched and farted
and went to look for supper,
for as you know when drinking,
though lager fills your belly,
it also makes you feel as though
you’d eat a docker’s welly!
They fancied Ruby Murray,
but nothing could they find,
for in a decent bathroom
a curry’s naught but wi-ind.
So gnashing sharp incisors
and scraping needled paws,
they set about a drunken search
to find that bedtime course.
And when I rose at seven,
and flicked electric power
to heat the flowing water
and give a nice hot shower,
I found the mice had feasted
behind the cupboard door.
They’d shredded paper wrappings
and dropped them on the floor:
they’d punctured all the toothpaste
and then to top their tope
they’d guzzled anti-frizz shampoo
and eaten half the soap.
Then finally, hung over,
they’d made themselves at home
and sprawling bloated fast asleep
were snoring shaving foam.

I wonder where she went

2007-11-03T09:35:00.000Z

The Internet is a strange beast. We learn so much that is intimate about other people on sites of mutual interest, yet because of their specific focus we often learn only one area in depth and the rest, such as their personality, circumstances and society, is seen only by reference.

A fellow writer brought this to my attention this morning. We both post pieces on a well known writers’ forum. There, over the past few weeks, an occasional poem has popped up on the theme of lost love and broken hearts. (I can hear you snorting now – isn’t this what poetry is for? What’s so special about teenage angst? But bear with me.)

The writer in question is not an English speaker by birth. Her poetry is not yet good, but she must be bright because already she is trying to manipulate rhyme in this foreign language. Only, in this case, her poetic angst isn’t even teenage: she is twelve years old. It is worrying that already she writes of broken hearts and disappointment and berates her own stupidity. Is her "heartbreak" an abstract, playful testing of her own emotions, or is it concrete and based on actual experience? How can we know, from halfway round the world?

Posting only every few weeks, she evidently doesn’t get to use a computer all that easily. Her country of origin is in the Far East. What can she know of Western social standards, and what can we know of hers? We can guess, and what I guess is not comfortable, because I don’t like the idea of a bright twelve year old girl being in situations that her childish poetry seems to imply. Her poems have evoked firm responses, from kind, responsible British members, used to British social structures and British laws: they advise her, “enjoy your childhood, pursue your school studies and forget about men until you are an adult.”

My first instinct, though, is to worry: would she understand or be frightened by our advice? But given the nature of the medium, my second thoughts are less innocent: is this really a twelve year old girl posting? I remember looking up her profile and being jarred by the idea of a twelve year old describing herself as “cute” (I forget the exact term but it certainly had an odd connotation). Perhaps a childish knowledge of English uses terms without being aware of undertones. That makes me wonder, too: is her writing persona really a front adopted by someone quite different, possibly adult, perhaps not even female? Childish knowledge of English does not have to mean the writer is a child.

I'm only a little reassured by finding that another young foreign forum member says she is a classmate. I still wonder if her writing is sending a call for help, a message in a bottle bobbing on that great sea of anonymity, the lure and the danger of the Internet.

New ball(joint)s please

2007-11-01T10:18:00.000Z

Background for those who don't know me: I have recently had surgery, to resurface my left hip.

~~~~~~~~~

I needed a new battery for my car, because the old one had been on since I bought it in 2003. It wasn't holding charge any more when the car stood, as it did post op, unused for weeks on end. My husband in the meantime swapped the horsebox battery onto the car so I could get about once I was allowed to drive; but obviously, I still I needed to replace that battery, nonetheless. So I asked the garage to get me one.

When I called in yesterday to collect, I parked outside and went in, where Chris, the owner/mechanic and much battered ex-rally driver, greeted me. He went to stand beside the wall, where I recognised a battery sitting on the floor.

He just sort of stood there and said, "Here you are."

Fifteen-love.

I limped over and said, "I'm not lifting heavy things just at present."

Fifteen-all.

He said, "I'm not supposed to be lifting anything. I'm on Light Duties."

Thirty-fifteen.

I said, "And I'm signed off work completely, which is why I'm here on a weekday and not a Saturday."

Thirty-all.

I'd forgotten that next week he's due to have some screws re-aligned, which have given way over the 2 decades since he smashed up his hip joint in a rally car crash. He'd forgotten that I had been in for surgery in the past six weeks. Stand-off.

Umpire?

I should have reversed the car into the bay and got close enough to lift the battery into the boot. As it was, Chris did pick up the battery and carry it over to my car. Then, while I paid the bill, we had a practical and entertaining chat about hospitals and joint surgeries.

Given the nature of orthopaedics, the garage floor was quite a suitable setting.

Pack rat

2007-10-31T09:43:00.000Z

This is going to be a rant. I feel it coming on. In fact I am so angry I can hardly hit the right letters on the keyboard – it’s taken me twice as many keystrokes to get this first paragraph written as it would normally do. And me an RSA level 3 girl.

It started with the phone call at breakfast time, and I’m not going to bother disguising names to protect the innocent.

“Who was that?” I asked my husband.

“Tony. We’re working at his girlfriend’s place this morning. She wants her lawns laid, now that the drains are completed.”

I didn’t get up in a bad mood. Honestly I didn’t. I had no intention of blasting out a trumpet call to battle. But.

Every building on our place, bar the single section of one in which my pony sleeps in bad weather, is silted up with an accumulation of “one day it’ll be useful”. There is no wall that does not have its complement of things leaning against it; no space into which you could actually put anything without major reorganisation.

I have booked a firm of slaters to come and renew the very rickety roof on the stable range, of which the other box is – you guessed it – also full of “one day it’ll be useful”.

“Oh? Barbara wants her lawns laid? I’d quite like some buildings emptied.”

He began to detail where MY few items in use could be moved to; inconveniently; and ignoring all his own pack rat accumulations. I interrupted him.

“I’m going to put all that in the container at the top of the yard,” I said.

It’s not a building, but it is a dry, clean, almost empty space. I was also under the firm belief that as I had bought it, it was mine.

“Oh,” he said blithely, “but I talked to Tom the other day and I’m going to borrow his tractor and loader at the weekend to move the container so it can be a dog kennel for people who come to stay in the barn conversion.”

And that was the point at which I blew.

“And how is it you didn’t mention that to me? I’d quite like to have a space that’s MINE. Something that’s not half full of old carpets, oil-soaked fenceposts, lumps of scrap iron where the dog gets his rope stuck, and a ton of fertiliser with its sacks rotted off so you can’t move it. Something that doesn’t leak when it rains.

“And I wasn’t referring to MY belongings – I meant yours – like your Dad’s tools that you never use, and parts for cars that you scrapped twenty years ago.

“Oh, but Barbara wants her lawns laid. Barbara wants her drains done. Well FUCK BARBARA, that’s all I can say.”

It wasn't a particularly eloquent argument, I know, but maybe my vehemence got through for once. He didn’t answer. He went off to work, very quietly. For Tony, and bloody Barbara and her sodding lawns.

I think he’ll be making his own supper tonight.

THE FINAL HORN

2007-10-30T17:29:00.000Z

This is more of lyric than a poem - being based by David Trotter on the tune of the Londonderry Air. He intended to sing it at a hunting song competition, in the year when the Hunting with Dogs bill was much in dispute. On the night he was not well enough to sing, so asked me to take it on instead. I adapted it considerably so that it was easier to sing. This doesn't necessarily work on screen, so if you don't know the tune, well, just pass this one by.

Oh, country friends, the final horn is sounding
Across the lake, and down the wild fellside.
Our quiet land is crowded with offcomers;
How can we stand, against an urban tide?

Beware, beware, the bureaucrats are coming
To take our sport and country life away,
The final horn is calling from the wild fellside;
United we must stand to keep them held at bay.

The city man, who buys a home for holidays,
Out-bids the shepherd with his modest wage,
Who sees his children waiting for a council house,
And turns away, embittered by his rage.

The supermarkets work against the farmer;
Their buyers grin and take us all for fools;
We can see DEFRA stacking up the paperwork;
The farm is drowning in a sea of rules.

Our way of life is being taken over,
Each year they pass new laws upon our lives;
Westminster pawns and European bureaucrats
Must be defied, or we shall not survive.

The countryside marched into London City
And walked its streets with humour and good will.
Now that once more we’re forced to fight the bureaucrats,
We’ll use their tools to cheat them of their kill.

Beware, beware, you bureaucrats! we’re coming,
You cannot take our country life away!
We bid the horn that calls the Lakes to waken –
The hunt’s afoot – the horn is sounding: “Gone Away!”

David Trotter & Sue Millard, Lunesdale & Ullswater Hunts, 21 November 2004

One leg longer than the other

2007-10-29T19:08:00.000Z

Now I know you are all dedicated followers of health issues: non smokers, fat-reducers and possibly even closet vegetarians; so let me share my secret with you. Go on, let me.

Given that some hospitals are now denying surgery to patients who they consider are aggravating their own ill health, you’ll know that a reduction in Body Mass Index (BMI) is something very desirable. If you have a BMI over the current “goalpost” max settings, your chances of getting NHS treatment are becoming a little slim (pardon the pun).

I have recently achieved an unexpected reduction in my BMI.

Some of it is entirely down to me; I’ve spent nearly a year limiting my intake of fatty or sugary foods, upping my vegetables and fruits, and taking longer walks. I’m now 17 kilos lighter, and have a BMI that is 6 points lower, than at this time last year.

However, in the past couple of weeks I’ve also discovered a neat trick that augments the effect: my BMI depends on which leg I stand on to be measured.

On my right leg, I’m 1 metre 61 centimetres tall. This gives me a BMI of 34.4. On my left leg, however, I’m 1 metre 62 centimetres – which gives me a BMI of 33.9. Neat, yes? Half a point shaved off just by standing on one leg.

As soon as the hospital repeats the resurfacing operation on the right hip, I’m told I’ll “grow” back to the same height on both legs! When the surgical team told me that resurfacing would be my best option, they explained that because my bones are strong and thick, they have only a small inner space; this meant that a full joint replacement would have allowed me only a slender prosthesis with a small bearing-head, but for the same reason resurfacing was the perfect solution. I just smiled smugly. You see, I’ve told the weight-critics for years that I have heavy bones.

Ah … now I think this is where we came in; I suppose my BMI can’t rely on surgery every time. Would you class it as a catch-22?

Oh well. Stay off the chocolates and buttery shortbread, and try not to bite your fingernails.

Black de Char

2007-10-29T14:22:00.000Z

This tells the tale of how Willy and Chris invented a new breed of sheep.

Jennie, who keeps rare breeds, stopped to chat as she passed by Willy’s yard. It was a hot day during clipping, and the men were easing off from their morning’s work, ready for lunch. Among the newly clipped sheep was one that took her eye: its fleece was grey – a delightful, soft smoky colour. Other than that it looked rather like a Swaledale.

Jennie took a long look, admiring its colour. Then she asked what it was.

“It’s a foreign ‘un, a Black de Char,” said Chris, Willy’s son.

“It looks good,” said Jennie, seduced by the French name - something similar to a Bleu du Maine or Rouge de l’Ouest perhaps? “How many have you got?”

“We just have the one, at the moment like,” said Chris.

Willy added, with a grin, “ – but she’s got twins. There’s a tup and a gimmer, so we might breed a few more.”

“What’s the wool like?” she asked, thinking of showing her discovery to the wool growers’ co-operative she had just joined.

The men looked sideways at one another, and puffed at their cigarettes thoughtfully, waiting to see how Chris would respond.

“Come and feel it,” said Chris, leading her down the dark and greasy shed to the heap of newly rolled fleeces.

“Lovely shade,” said Jennie enthusiastically as she approached, envisaging sweaters, perhaps even a fine jacket, of that delicious pearly grey.

When she put her hand into the fleece she found it was harsh and gritty, and her hands came out smeared with black. "URGH!" she said loudly.

Outside there were smothered noises – whether of merriment or of coughing, it was hard to tell.

The old ewe and her twins had been sleeping in the nice dry ashes of a bonfire.

Read a book

2007-10-29T14:13:00.000Z

small enough to put in your pocket
available even when the electricity fails
doesn’t need batteries
don’t have to wait for it to boot-up
play at any level you like …

go backward or forward in time
learn from the ancients as well as the moderns
meet people you’d never get to know
feel emotions you’d never experience …

teach your kids …
READ A BOOK