Bump!

I was talking to someone yesterday.

I know, how unusual is that? And not in a ‘throat-grabbing, gonna punch you in the mouth’ kind of way. Anyway this person I was talking to, let’s call them David William Elizabeth, accidentally let slip that she reads this twaddle and finds it, sometimes, amusing. I don’t really ‘know’ Elizabeth. I’ve met her once. Or maybe twice.

So in an attempt to be gratuitously amusing, here is the gratuitously amusing news.

The snow has gone. Yay! The thermometer says it is eight degrees warmer than yesterday’s -4c, but it doesn’t seem any warmer. Boo!

When I drove to the stables yesterday morning, there were two holes in the wall, on a bend on top of a hill. This is a particularly lethal piece of open road when the mercury drops below 0c, it’s very prone to black ice.

Anyway, there was only one hole in that wall on Tuesday; that was the day I nearly lost it, in the same place, despite travelling at 10mph.

My car is helpful. It flashes a red warning triangle to indicate that it’s in a skid, and the ABS makes the usual graunching noise when the brakes can’t make the wheels bite. Because driving down a hill sideways, with full lock in the opposite direction to the camber of the road, isn’t enough of an indication that the car is in a skid, obv. Anyway, I managed to pull it together, but two other drivers weren’t so fortunate.

Bump!

Tom hasn’t been getting much work lately, I’ve been massively busy and things have been out of control for a while. But hopefully I can start getting back on top of things now. None of the horses have been turned out for a few days; the ice has made the safe passage of bipeds and quadrupeds to the turnout impossible. This heady combination of things (a couple of days of not being turned out and a handful of weeks of not being ridden regularly) has put Tom in a very *cough* playful mood.

A playful mood made even more playful by the sudden appearance of fucking enormous pampas grass plants in pots, in each of the four corners of the indoor arena.

Tom didn’t like these pony-eating plants one bit.

He was deeply suspicious of the one by the mounting platform, but I let him sniff it, then hopped on. He didn’t like the one in the next corner either, but I kept him on a shorter rein, not wishing to give him the opportunity to have the heebie-jeebies over a plant. The plants in the third and fourth corners seemed OK, so we pushed on around the perimeter of the arena at a smarter walk.

On the second lap, Tom ignored the plants in corners 1 and 2, so I switched my concentration to establishing a nice rhythm and getting an even balance. On the second visit to corner 3, though, Tom had a headfit.

He spooked, spun, did a little rear and bronked. As a result I hit the deck. But I prefer to think of it as ‘an involuntary dismount’.

Bump!

I remounted and things settled down, but Sammi stuck her head over the door and said ‘He looks “frisky”.’

Mmmmm…

There will be more work for Tom tomorrow, and we might be able to slip back to a daily (or near daily) schedule too, and maybe some jumping when he’s settled down.

In other news.

I’ve finished reviewing this series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! for Shouting At Cows. It was fun but, being a daily writing gig, I wish I hadn’t been so tired on a couple of occasions. There have been a couple of evenings when I’ve felt far too gone to write good gags, or even a half-decent review.

But I might be bothering Cows readers again the future.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing. We’ll have to suck it and see.