Brennig Jones (and friends)

Yesterday, while I was driving back to the yard from Highclere Horse Trials, I had one of those ‘I’m going to fall asleep any minute now’ moments. I think it was the combination of not enough sleep last week and being out all day at Highclere. So I took a breather and tried to snap out of it but the tiredness only receded, it didn’t vanish. I diverted home, deciding that I was too tired to ride. I haven’t seen enough of the horses this week, it wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the sensible one.

Neighbours can be weird things. Last night ours were setting off fireworks – very loud ‘whooshing’ rockets. They sounded like teenagers – the neighbours, not the rockets. I’m beginning to wonder if the house is occupied by a bunch of students. I’ve tried to work out what they could be up to, setting off rockets, but can’t come up with any sensible answers. Apart from the fact that they’re selfish twats who don’t care about disturbing the peace and quiet that other people might be enjoying.

Daughter sent me an email yesterday afternoon; she asked if any schools near where I live specialise in drama and acting. She’s always been keen on following acting as a career. Evidently the schools in Spain don’t tick the right boxes any longer and she is now setting her sights further afield. I feel sorry for the rest of the world.

Daughter

Sophie’s laptop is throwing out WiFi connectivity drops. Yesterday evening I planned that I would go to Maplin to pick up a new PCI WiFi card on Sunday afternoon, and then go up to the yard to ride. And then we went to bed and eventually slept.

Insomnia landed at 1.20am. My throat was incredibly dry and I felt dehydrated; I’d love to know what I was up to for the first five hours of sleep. I went downstairs, drank two pints of water, did a little internetting for a couple of hours and went back to bed.

Waking at 9.15am feels just a little bit… sinful. 9.15 is so late to be waking up! I made us breakfast in bed, then I showered, shaved, teethed and then… went back to bed. We read, we did stuff, we fell asleep and I woke up at 2pm. So much for my going in to Maplin and riding plans! I tottered downstairs and started on some overdue webdesign and email stuff. About an hour later those same pesky neighbours started letting off fireworks again – another clutch of loudly ‘whooshing’ rockets. I hate people, sometimes. Soph tottered downstairs and we agreed that people are generally thoughtless twunts, and if they really needed to let off rockets they should do so in the privacy of their own home. And then I realised I was hungry, so second breakfast was had.

Beans on toast x4 and a cheese & onion roll

During the early morning awakenings I had an idea for a video promo for the podcast. I’ve started jotting down the ideas in a kind of ‘shooting script’ sort of way.  There are six scenes to be filmed, here are the first five:

1. Shot of inside of empty pub
2. Shot of inside of empty restaurant
3. Shot of inside of empty library
4. Shot of inside of empty car park
5. Shot of inside of empty church

Ideally, I wanted a shot of an empty street scene for shot 5, but I’m not sure that’s achievable.

Advertising people talk shit. There was just an advert on the television that included the words, ‘Timotei searches the world for precious natural ingredients…’ – which, presumably, extends to ‘Timotei are going to rape the planet for, rip these precious natural ingredients out of their natural environment and cram these precious natural ingredients in to their distinctly average hair products’.  Because why else would Timotei include precisely that wordage in their advert? Really, is there any other conclusion to be reached? So here’s a message: Hey people, don’t buy Timotei products, they’re environmental rapists. Or perhaps no-one actually listens to the distinctly mediocre advertising wordage that is rammed down our televisions these days. Except me, obv. But if no-one listens, why are Timotei paying their advertising agency squillions of $s?

A mere two-and-a-half hours sleep last night, on top of the general stress, activity and rushing around of the weekend, all compound together to make me extremely worn out today

Yesterday’s one-day event at Larkhill was a bust.

Despite symptoms of misbehaviour going on underneath me, we somehow achieved a vastly improved dressage score of 39.5 penalties.

As we hacked back to the lorry to change the saddle and bridle I was starting to get very optimistic about the show-jumping.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a balls-up when a critical part of Tom’s jumping tack – the Cheltenham Gag Bit – fell apart in the groom’s hands. So to retaliate she dismantled Tom’s flatwork bridle.

Erm, umm. I may have been a little short – but I maintain that I didn’t shout at anyone or anything – and, anyway, I did manage to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat by finding the two, tiny, popper-like fastenings in the lorry, and the buckle that was hidden on the grass outside the door to the lorry living.

Anyway, with tack duly changed we hacked down to the show-jumping working-in.

Jess – my groom for the day – did a grand job. She set practice fences that were, to start, generous and welcoming, but within ten minutes we were coming in to obstacles that were slightly over-height and over-spread for our class.

But it was all good. Tom and I felt joined. We were together, we were calm, I sat quietly and waited for the fence to come to us and kept my hands down and relaxed (my failing is not doing these things!) and *gave* him stretch room as he basculed through the air.

We were good to go.

Or so I thought.

We cantered in to the main ring and although I rode him forward and kept off his mouth Tom stopped at fence 1.

I re-presented and he flew over it, and two, three, four and five.

At fence six we had issues and another stop and after that everything fell apart (almost literally) because we started hitting them down.

So we were eliminated from the one-day event in the show-jumping phase, because we were over the limit of jumping penalties.

A hack back to the lorry and a feeling of gloom, doom, despondency, disappointment and (even more) despondency invaded my head for the rest of the day.

Not even hot chocolate and home-made brownies managed to lift my spirits.

On the way home we had a horrendous moment as we were driving down the hill in to Marlborough.

A Honda Civic whipped out of a side-road in front of me and then just stopped in the road and indicated to turn across the opposite carriageway – but it couldn’t turn because there was oncoming traffic.

The trouble is, because the driver had just whipped out and, with no warning, come to a halt in front of me, we had to apply the brakes *very* fiercely and a) in a 10-ton lorry and b) carrying two horses, our stopping distance is nothing like that of a car!

Although we were slowing fast, the distance was closing too quickly so I had a choice: smack the Honda Civic up the arse fairly hard or aim for the gap between it and the hedge.

I chose the latter. Although it was very tight, it gave me the 12-feet I needed to stop the lorry.

We were actually three-quarters off the road, the hedge was overgrown and untended and the nearside of the cab was in it.

I signalled to the driver of the Civic to pull forward to a layby and, very carefully drove the lorry out of the hedge and went to join him.

We got out and looked at the car and the lorry.

The car was untouched. You wouldn’t have been able to pass a sheet of paper between the side of the lorry and the side of the civic, but somehow I’d managed to avoid making contact.

The lorry had a few paint scrapes down the side from the branches of the hedge, but other than that was similarly unscathed.

A very lucky escape for both of us, but I wonder if the driver of the Civic understands things like braking distances of *other* types of vehicles? Don’t they set questions on that in the driving test these days?

By the time I made it back to the yard, unloaded Tom, groomed him, rugged him up, fed him, unloaded all of the tack, put things away, tidied the lorry, put that away, switched off the lights and had driven home it was very late.

I don’t know how late because I was too worn out to care. And in the night, as I’ve said, I had far too little sleep.

Oh well, maybe I’ll catch up tonight/tomorrow.

Anyway.

The plan for the week is that Tom is going to have his big brown bottom jumped off him until he’s being straightforward and honest once again.

He’s entered in an unaffiliated one-day event next Saturday, but Sammi is going to take him around because she’s more, ahem, more assertive.

And maybe I could pick up some sleep, here and there?

In other news, I see from our Google Feedburner stats that the podcast has picked up 480 new listeners in the last two days.

*big smile*

Woohoo!

What a bloody gorgeous day.

There’s almost bits of almost blue in the almost not overcast sky. The sun is almost shining and it’s TERRIFIC!!!

I went to bed at (wait for it, wait for it) 8.15 last night.

I read for about 5 minutes.

I talked to Soph for about 8 minutes (but can’t, for the life of me, remember what was talked about).

I was asleep from just before 8.30 until Soph woke me just before 8am.

Today I am full of energy and bouncy bouncy bouncy happy whee and other expressions of an overactive nature.

I FEEL BRILLIANT!!!!

Here, have another exclamation mark – just because I can:

!

Soph’s laptop is dead.

Whee!

I’m temporarily between contracts.

Wahay!

Life is just brilliant.

(sorry about this, normal service will resume as soon as my sleep overdose has slipped away)

As I’ve travelled and worked my way around this small, blue, pretty planet of ours, I’ve discovered many things  worth noting.

Big, important, fundamental things.

Like, an excess of Sugar Puffs, for a start; did you know that too many Sugar Puffs can make one’s wee smell, well, Sugar Puffery? Sugar Puffy?

Whatever.

And too many visits to the Costa Latté shop, when inevitably related to the actual over-consumption of actual Latté, can similarly have an adverse affect on one’s wee?

Well, no, not quite. The latter won’t make the wee smell of Sugar Puffs, obv. But it will make the wee smell of Latté.

Isn’t that bizarre?

Why doesn’t an excess of *other things* have the same effect?

Why don’t too many Pringle sandwiches make my wee smell of, erm, Pringles? Or sandwiches?

And why don’t too many pints of squash make my wee smell of Fruits Of The Summer squash?

I realise that I now sound like a wee-smelling (not smelling-of-wee, that’s a whole different thing) freak but, in mitigation, I will just point out that a lack of sleep can have an adverse affect on one’s brain.

And I am suffering from a lack of sleep so large and profound that it almost defies description.

Weird thoughts occur to my sleep-deprived brain (or what remains of it).

For example, did you know that Germany and the UK are increasing their troop levels in Afghanistan but France have refused to do likewise?

Straight away my brain wants to know if this is a cunning ploy by the French, to invade Europe whilst German and British military attentions are focussed elsewhere?

Or, if the French *do* attempt an internal, Europe-wide coup d’etat, would the 1st and 3rd Cheesemaking Regiments of the Royal Dutch Brigade of Edam hold them at bay?

Or would the 2nd Mechanised Onion Selling Division (Cyclists) outflank the Edamists?

So that’s the French *and* the Dutch I’ve insulted. Who’s next?

News reaches me that Saint Kylie of Minogue is Welsh. This should be a surprise to no-one. A bottom as divine as that possessed by The Blessed Kylie could only have come from Welsh roots, eny fule kno that. It most certainly could *not* have been made solely in Australia.

French, Dutch *and* Australians insulted in one post, I’m on a roll! Let’s go for the big one…

I see that Prez O’bama has said ‘I’d rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president’. Such a shame he’s shaping up to be neither – and indeed, being a mediocre prez of any period of office seems to be granting him with delusions of adequacy.

Guantanamo Bay, dude? Shut the fucking place and shut it now. Bagram? Free the prisoners or charge them. Continuing the failed foreign policy of your failed predecessor is a measure of success in which fucking alternate reality?

Speaking of alternate realities, have you seen Survivors (BBC1)? That hapless bunch of half-witted defectives wouldn’t have been able to survive two weeks in a post-apocalyptic world, let alone two months. Collectively they just about muster up to the survival instincts of a toilet roll.

And the word ‘shit’ just about sums up the writing. I lost count of the Grand Canyon-sized holes in the writers’ logic in Ep 1, Season 2 of this tedious production.

I’ve had more exciting – and more consistent – poos.

No, really.

As I’m WIDE AWAKE at 03.15 for the second morning on the trot, and I’m fast losing the enthusiasm for editing audio at this time of the day… here’s a bunch of random things from my head. I don’t know if these thoughts will turn out to be ranty or not.

Horses:
Tom’s made-to-measure saddle is ready and should, hopefully, be delivered this weekend. It should have come down last weekend but we were hosting a riding club dressage competition at the yard, and that’s not an ideal environment to be testing new bits of tack.

I was very surprised, given the substantial size difference between them, that Vin’s dressage and show-jumping saddles were both such a good fit for Tom. But naturally I’ll be much happier when the perfect tool for the job arrives.

Tom’s ‘filled’ leg returned to normal within 24 hours and he’s been back in work since. He’s a lovely boy, has a great attitude to work and is fast winning many friends around te yard. Tom’s flatwork is now showing signs of improving – his ‘free walk’ is up in the ’7′ area of dressage scores, whereas it used to be down in the ’5′ zone – and overall he’s more balanced and happier on the flat.

His show-jumping is tightening up too. Over the last two weeks Owen has given us some ‘control and precision’ exercises to slow things down yet keep the forward-going nature. Last night we popped round a 1m track in the indoor school, coming back to halt after every fence (except the double and treble, obv), and it not only felt comfortable and calm, it looked good in those massive mirrors too.

Our cross-country work is still in the ‘could do better’ category. Tom’s an excitable chap and he’s still only going out in a snaffle Bit, but on Friday when we were hacking around the cross-country track and I popped him over a 1.10m ditch/wall combination. The approach and take-off were very good, but on landing Tom picked himself up and hurled himself forward in to an all-out gallop.

I don’t really want to change the Bit from a snaffle. I’d prefer to try education as a way of saying ‘you can only do that when I say so, not when you say so’, so I guess we’ll be spending quite a bit of time up on the cross-country track, training ourselves in when, and where, such behaviour is acceptable.

I took Tom up the gallops last week. I’m guessing by his behaviour that he has never seen anything quite like a 2-mile, all-weather, go-like-greased-weasel-shit track before. It’s a safe guess – especially as he was deeply suspicious about the white post-and-rail fencing! – but within 30-metres of starting our run uphill, he had quickly settled in to the comfortable cross-country-paced gallop that I’d asked for.

After about a half-mile I asked for a slower, show-jumping-canter pace and Tom obliged without any issues; we kept this pace until the last quarter-mile when I asked him to quicken again, just to see what was left in the tank. ‘Lots!’ was the answer. Tom is feeling very fit and well.

But the responsiveness that he showed on the gallops is why I don’t want to muck around and change his Bit. He’s got such a soft mouth and a willing attitude that I want to keep the contact light.

Vin continues to be Vin. He has his good days and his less-good days. Like Tom he’s getting worked five or six days a week, and he’s looking very good on it. But there are some days when the racehorse-logic in his head takes over and we have to confine ourselves to an hour of medium-level work in Walk and Trot, and leave the faster work alone, because it’s obvious that he would go mental if asked to canter.

Even K, who is an exceptionally talented rider, has days when she can do very little with Vin. It’s as though there are parts of his brain that say ‘I can’t do that’, yet the previous day he *had* ‘done that’ and he’ll probably ‘do that’ again tomorrow.

It’s very frustrating and it makes him an unpredictable ride, and that’s really not very good. Or pleasant.

They are both lovely chaps to have around the place, their attitudes in the stable are exceptional – they are both such nice people to work around and with.

I was going to section this post up in to the different areas of ‘Life’ but I’ve probably written enough for now.

So a bunch of words on Cars, Cameras, Music, Writing (freelance and authoring) and Degree-work, Accuracy in the Media and thoughts on Other Things will all have to wait for another time.

I’m off upstairs to see if my head will let me sleep for another couple of hours.

I am having a day off. This is so excellent I can barely describe the, erm, excellence.

Let me explain:

I woke up at 07.40, had a shower, shave, brushed teeth, tottered downstairs, made a cup of tea and then… went back to bed!

About two hours later I got up again, had another shower again (fnar!), tottered downstairs (again) and enjoyed another cup of tea and many rounds of toast.

It’s not even 10.30, how excellent is this?

I’ll be recording podcast episode #53 this afternoon, going out for a coffee, meeting a colleague of Soph’s and then going up to the yard to play with young Vin.

I love days off!

So, my Mum turned 60 last Friday.

I shall be 30 in June.

That means, I’m half her age.

And it made me wonder…bear with me here…is this the only time I’ve been half her age?

Because, obviously I wasn’t half her age when I was, say, 5.

And will I be half her age again in the future?

For example, when she turns 70.

Counts on fingers…

I will be 40.

Which isn’t half of 70.

I mentioned this little gem of a geekish conundrum to Bren one night just as he was assuming his Ultimate Position of Sleep.

He was totally vexed.

It was almost a cruel sight to behold. This bewildered, semi-conscious man puzzling the ages of his wife and mother-in-law.

We live the dream, don’t we?

But I really hope this one doesn’t

I don’t have dreams. I suppose ‘I don’t remember dreams’ might be more accurate but whereas Soph has dreams she can remember almost every night (and boy are they usually weird!), I don’t. So perhaps I do have dreams that I can’t remember, or perhaps I just don’t have dreams.

But last night (I’m desperately trying not to quote MLK Jr here) I had a dream.

I was standing on the fuselage of a jet airliner. It was in flight, 30,000 feet.

So I was standing on the fuselage of a jet airliner travelling forward at a couple of hundred miles an hour at a height that would have killed my lungs had I actually been able to stand up with a couple of hundred miles an hour of wind battering my body to bits…

As if that scenario doesn’t stretch reality just a tad too far

I’m standing on the fuselage with a person I actively loathe. There aren’t many of those in this life, but this one heads the list.

His family, like mine, are inside the aircraft; we’re all going on holiday together. And he and I are laughing and joking at 30,000 feet and a couple of hundred miles an hour, when suddenly…

A missile slowly cruises past us. It’s moving slowly because speed is relative, right? It’s relative speed in relation to the ground is massively fast, but it’s relative speed in relation to the aircraft we’re standing on is much less quick.

Jokingly, as it cruises gently past us, I reach up and swat the missle tail with the palm of my hand. Unfortunately this causes it to deviate massively from its pre-programmed course. It careers wildly over the sky and then homes in on and crashes in to one of the engines (Rolls Royce, I saw the badge) of our aircraft.

As the missle strikes, the engine catches fire, the aircraft flips out of control and heads downwards at a massively stupid rate of speed.

He and I slip quietly in to the aircraft and take our seats as if nothing untoward had occurred and we try to not look guilty, in a dum-de-dum kind of way.

Eventually the aircrew regain control of the aircraft, it flattens out of its dive but we’re low enough to see ground features much too clearly.

The aircraft limps on to its destination and we have our holiday. But the guy I was on the fuselage with and I don’t speak to each other for the remainder of the trip.

The end.

Dreams; I don’t have them. Ask anyone. Well no. Not anyone. Just ask someone I’ve slept with for a long time. Not ‘slept with for 18 hours’ kind of slept with for a long time. Slept with as in ‘we have shared a bed for a number of years’. So ask Soph. And she’ll tell you that I don’t have dreams.

But I had that one. I’m going to be spending much of the day looking for various meanings in it, when I’m not busy doing other things. I think my hope is to keep busy doing other things and maybe I will be able to avoid losing my marbles.

Dreams seem to have figured in a couple of things I’ve read lately. There’s this chapter of Drowning the Silence and there’s this post from A Girl I Dreamt Up.

Are we dreaming more these days or is it just me starting to remember dreams and therefore noticing other people’s?

Bizarre.

B.

1. The song that I woke up in my head with was Coolio and I’ll See U When U Get There (a version of which will be used to wrap up tomorrow morning’s podcast)

2. Soph’s guilty secret that she’s been hiding from me is that she’s been watching Dawson’s Crack Creek in the mornings

3. I’m really crap at the Soap Opera game, up until now I’d thought that Dawson’s Crack Creek was set in Australia

4. Soph’s dream about a talking Polar Bear looking for a house in France and falling in love with a girl and going on the run fills me with happy smiles.

B.

The dream that Bren refers to in a recent post was just weird.

In fact, I seem to have mostly weird dreams.

But this one was particularly odd.

I dreamt that I had itchy arms.

I rolled my sleeves up and saw that feathers were starting to grow, out of my skin.

I realised that, obviously, I was turning into a pigeon.

That’s a far as that one got. Thank God.

Then there was the one where my Mum was going to get a tattoo of a photo of herself at her own wedding, on one of her shoulders. For an anniversary present.

I am quite precise in some details in my dreams.

Then there was the one which involved a very stormy rainstorm in my Mum and Dad’s house where the rain was coming in through the very badly fitted windows, which had massive gaps everywhere. I have no idea how the windows were held there.

Oh oh oh…and I just remembered the other weird one I had last night. I was breaking into my Aunty Barbara’s house. Somehow getting onto the roof and climbing in (the details are fuzzy there). And why, Sophie, were you breaking in to your aunt’s home?

Why, to sleep, of course.

And I particularly remember the fear of being caught, when I saw the glow of light from the lounge as ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ was finishing and I realised I’d overslept and that they were going to find me and freak out…But they just acted like it was normal that their niece that they don’t really see anymore was curled up in a bedroom having somehow broken in…

These are all from last night.

I try to tell Bren about the most weird ones as soon as I wake up, but they all escape me now…But, yeah. I need help.