Driving, dear Google, is not necessarily in a car

OOh you couldn't make it up.... I have just had a phone call from a youngish man wanting driving lessons, and he said he'd found our phone number through Google. I teach carriage driving, and he said he was a beginner, so I listened and looked out an appointment for him.

It wasn't till he asked for 2 consecutive days of lessons *because he wanted to drive to Oxford in the car he had just bought*, that I gently broke the news to him.

I didn't mention the fact that he needed a licence and to pass both his theory and practical driving tests. I thought it might be too much for him to take in all at once.

Panto shopping

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.

Carry a big stick

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.”