Tricky Elle was sold, which I am pleased about, because all horses deserve their own person. There are also new school horses, including tricky Bella, to keep me on my toes. Bella is a bit smaller and a lot skinnier than the other horses I have been riding, with a somewhat upright shoulder and not much muscle on her neck. (Note that these conformational observations are purely technical; it is equally correct to point out that she is a fabulously beautiful copper-bright showjumper mare.) Although for quite different reasons, because she’s unquestionably a jumper and not a hunter, Bella, like Elle, pulls me all out of balance. And this is a bit scary but it’s mostly very challenging and interesting and makes me appreciate all over again what fun it is and what a huge privilege to ride a bunch of different horses at this exalted level.

In the horse world where I grew up, school horses of this quality simply didn’t exist. I went to a couple of very good riding schools, and when you reached the top standard – a half-Perch or an ancient OTTB – your only real choice was to go get a horse of your own and have private lessons, which is what I did, firstly with Alfie and Tina Wommelsdorf, and then many years later with Noah and David Murdoch. All the Olympians. Now these were peak experiences of my life, so let’s not go imagining that I am ungrateful. But the arrangement had some drawbacks, in that my progress in riding was intimately bound up not only with the capacity but also with the physical condition of one specific animal. Alfie was old, and then he got arthritis and had to be retired; Noah was hot, and then he got a stone bruise, and that was me out for months and months.

Today, instead of having a horse who is boyfriend-and-unborn-children-and-sporting-partner all rolled into one, I have been absorbed into a busy, efficient, successful East Coast-style hunter-jumper A barn, where excellent grooms clean and tack up the horses for me, and excellent trainers condition them, and excellent vets advise on their nutrition and health. The place just absolutely buoys my spirits with its attention to detail, with the many small meals the horses are fed, with the cleanliness of the tack and the aisles and the jumps. And like a proper unsentimental adult amateur in the European tradition, I have ridden four different horses in as many months. I have revelled in the clockwork generosity of Austin and Cassie, and I have worked hard to meet the challenges posed by Elle and Bella. It feels like gross disloyalty to say so, but I can’t help feeling I’ve learned more by switching around like this than I did in whole years at Samurai or Glenoaks.

Today, for example, I had several moments when I thought I was having a very bad lesson. Bella and I got into an unconstructive loop where I was worried about my crest release and kept slowing and slowing her down and looking at the fences or the ground near them instead of up and over and away. And she is little and fast and likes to go go go, and she got more and more irked with me and ended up having a bad chip in front of one oxer. Same old lesson: let go. I had to ease up and trust her speed. I had to look up and over the fences and trust that she would get me where we were going.

And as soon as I did all this, of course, I found my balance on her and she forgave me for everything and we went racing around and over the jumps in glorious style, and the sun came out and I listened to Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba all the way home and my blood turned to apple brandy in my veins.

Julia protested the human condition at 3am and so came into bed with us, where she promptly peed. Potty training is going well, one just has to allow for these setbacks. I didn’t really sleep again until about five, when I found myself being chased by a sweaty cowboy around the old Sydney Showground, trying to get to a riding lesson on time; and then there was a series of flashes and pops above the San Bruno Mountains, and first one mushroom cloud and then another and another rose against the dark cloudy sky. “Oh shit,” I said eloquently, for the terrorists had finally obtained nukes, and I wished fervently that it could be just another atomic war dream.

And then I woke up. So however swinish and spectral today might be, at least it isn’t that.

Our number came up at Good Prospect Community Garden! Right now the plot is a mess of artichoke, sage and lemon verbena, but we’re going to cut it all back and plant cherry toms and summer squash! There are lemons and limes and apples and pears and concord grapes and raspberries and it is SO VERY BEAUTIFUL that words cannot adequately describe.

And today I rode Fluffy the Seagull the Horse the Bicycle part of the way to work. Check me out! I am all San Franciscan and sustainable and stuff!

In my last riding lesson on Cassie, Mare of Mares, I was mistakenly put in with a group of shiny teenysomethings who are rillyrilly good. It ended with us having to do flying changes at the canter, without stirrups. It was rillyrilly hard!

Afterwards one of the sparkly young X-Men said to me: “You looked good on her.”

It is embarrassing how pleased I still am, over a week later, at this crumb of praise.

My goodness but I made myself ill last week. I got on a plane on Wednesday sort-of-knowing that I was coming down with something nasty, and when I got to my destination I could neither swallow nor hear. My ears popped about twelve hours later, at which point EVERYTHING BECAME VERY LOUD; then I got on another plane to come home and the same thing happened again.

But my throat stayed raw and horrible for days and days. Talking hurt, breathing hurt and swallowing my own saliva felt like choking down a small roll of rusty barbwire. Every. Damn. Time. I do not think I am particularly wimpy, despite my brothers’ longstanding characterization of me as such; I have had broken ankle bones and ribs and gotten back on the fool horses that gave them to me, and I gave birth to my two babies without any epidurals. Beat that, boyos! But I trudged up to the Emergency Room on Saturday and described my throat pain, unironically, as “severe.” The doctors were very nice but it was viral, which I sort of knew. Nothing to be done. I went home and went to bed.

By Saturday night I was having fever dreams of striking originality. There was a sort of architectural quality to them. It was rather like watching a freight train pass, with its cars made of large pale pastel blocks of light. I tried to harness these dreams and was given various insights, among which was the in-retrospect-blindingly-obvious fact that working myself into exhaustion and subsequent viral pharyngitis is self-defeating behaviour on a number of levels. I set to changing my priorities, which felt like a physical process of lifting giant perspex concentric circles and clicking them back into place in a different order. When I got it right it was deeply satisfying, like solving a puzzle, and I finally went to sleep.

I was somewhat better the next morning and have been feeling profoundly happy ever since. Still sick enough to cancel riding, but well enough to take great pleasure in seeing friends and going to a little movie and hanging with my best girls. Tonight I threw Claire and Jules in the bath, and made dinner for them with strawberries for dessert, and walked Claire through piano practice while Julia sang along, and brushed their teeth and read them the Dragons pop-up book and put them to bed. A perfectly ordinary evening shot through with pure golden joy.

[09:35] FurHordinge: As we were going down castro, so I said that milk was nicknamed the mayor of castro st
[09:35] FurHordinge: “Does evey street have a mayor?”
[09:35] mizchalmers: awww
[09:35] FurHordinge: No, but milk helped organize the gay men and women politically
[09:36] FurHordinge: “Like martin luther king did for the black people?”

I haven’t posted about riding for a while because the week after my last post, about falling off Elle, I fell off again. That one was worse. Again at the canter transition, but this time Elle tripped and I went over her head and faceplanted in the arena sand. (The fabulous Miss Kirsty alone in the universe made me feel better about it: I twittered that I had sand in my hair and up my nose and she replied “I am so hot for you right now.”)

Otherwise I felt like hell. Riding, which was supposed to replace Zoloft as the key endorphin guarantor of my week, had become a problem instead. I was afraid again, of falling, of hurting myself, of looking like a prize idiot. The week after the second fall I had to have a long stern conversation with myself on the drive down.

I don’t know if I can put this conversation into words. I just read Samuel Delany’s “The Tale of Old Venn” (I am only now noticing the brilliance of that title) which not only describes but tries to embody the limitations of language in encapsulating lived experience. There’s a passage in which one of Venn’s students, trying to absorb the lesson, suddenly wakes up to the play of sunlight in the leaves, the air on her skin, the distant hum of human affairs – direct sensory input. And she feels, right down in her gut, for the first time, the way language acts as a bottleneck for conveying the truth of life. However precise and brilliant the language, most of life is left out.

You’ll laugh – Salome did – when I say that reading this was the first time I realized it. I have lived in my head for so long. I have lived other peoples’ lives in books far more vividly than I ever lived my own, right up until Christmas Day 2002. And here my tale loops around. I want to make a lame Derrida-derivative pun about the Christmas *present*, but for you, dear reader, I will refrain. Feel the love.

I thought about Claire’s birth on that drive down to the barn. I thought about how I needed to find the strength to push, and how I thought it would kill me, and then the moment came when I was perfectly okay with that; I was happy enough to die if it meant that Claire would be born. At which point of course my body opened and Claire was born.

We are mortal. Forward movement is movement towards our death. To get back on the horse means accepting that I might fall off again and hurt or kill myself; but the alternative is not to live at all. Oh, these words are so hopelessly inadequate! I couldn’t know this thing until I felt it in my body, and I can’t convey it to you except in cliches. This is why it is so hard to communicate between generations! I look at myself in my twenties, pathetically cyclothymic, my judgment hopeless, my competence all over the map, and I wish I could give that smooth-skinned young self some of my own wry strength. But where did the strength come from? From all those mistakes, all those falls, all that fear, every time I got back on the damn horse. There are no shortcuts.

I rode Elle that day and we jumped a course in a light and forward and happy frame, as well as could be imagined given my current fitness and capacity. For my next lesson I rode Austin, my friend Beth’s magical Paint and an old, old friend of mine too, my partner in winning the first blue ribbon of my life. Austin and I get on like a house on fire. He’s a jumper, as opposed to Elle’s hunter style, much more what I am used to from Noah and the Samarai days, and I feel so safe and confident on him. We jumped a 2’3″ course! Which is tiny but still! It was amazing!

My classmate Olynda was on Elle for that lesson and this was fascinating to watch. Olynda is an ex-eventer like me, used to an uphill horse like Austin, and like me she found Elle’s long low frame very disconcerting. It was reassuring to see someone else struggle with her balance trying to make the transition from jumper to hunter style. There’s a real difference! It’s not just me!

Yesterday, greatly enfeebled by a hot sun and a very sore shoulder, I rode Elle again. It was not by any means a brilliant lesson, but I am finding my balance. I am learning to give with my hands and hips when I ask for a canter, and to make my lower leg the foundation of my seat so that I don’t risk toppling off. I also suddenly and completely got the point of show hunters.

The action of the field hunter is efficient: the horse does not waste energy bending its legs any more than it has to. This relates back to the hunt field, where the horse had to work for several hours on end, often galloping, and inefficient movement would tire the horse more quickly.

I got Elle into her perfect, cadenced, hypnotic, rocking-horse canter, and despite my various infirmities, I felt like I could stay there all day. If I haven’t already alienated every one of my dozen readers worldwide (you can blame Rose for encouraging me), I will write further obsessive essays about the origins of English equestrian culture in foxhunting and the balanced versus the hunter seat. You can’t wait! I love horses. Did you know?

I blog drunkenly yet again (alcohol like water in these islands):

I had a completely unexpected and undeserved reward tonight for getting off my ass and going out instead of sitting in my hotel room brooding on the wrongs I have been done. I hauled my middleaged and maternal ass to Bethnal Green for Grant’s Night of 1000 Chicos. I was having a perfectly nice conversation with Ian and Rod, explaining about riding Irish cobs in Hyde Park, when my eyes deceived me and I thought I saw a young Fraser Wilson walking through the door.

But it was a present-day Fraser Wilson, miraculously unaged. I may have squealed, though a dignified mama of two would not have done so. We hugged and kissed for a considerable amount of time. We held hands and babbled for an hour. It was very very hard to tear myself away; only the prospect of a flight back to my husband and daughters could have made me do it.

Fraser! It was like meeting a fictional character, or a dream. He left California before I met even Salome. He is still so beautiful and brilliant.

The whole week’s been like that; getting to spend proper time with Grant and Kirst and Jo and Mia and Jess and Mark and Chris and Cait. My friends are so smart and interesting and gorgeous! Completely unlooked-for blessings. It was hard to get on the plane to come here, and it will be almost equally hard to leave. That’s a rare and priceless thing, to have so much love in so many places.

I am more grateful than I can say.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I celebrate my geeky girlfriends, who kick my ass and keep me honest. I wouldn’t be in San Francisco happily nerding my head off if the generous, the visionary Kate Crawford, Rosanne Bersten and Rosie Cross hadn’t published my earlier, crappier work. They saw the me I wasn’t yet. Mia Ridge turns relational databases into time machines and Bobigail Grahame and Rose White can program orbiting supercomputers by tapping out binary code with their knitting needles. Written on the body? Quinn Norton could hand Jeanette Winterson her skinny ass. Liz Henry, Skud and Sumana Harihareswara are hyperconnected nodes; through them I feel directly connected to the great world where women are taking up keyboards against their oppressors. I owe Cheryl Traverse the incalculable debt of a mentee to her mentor. And there are others, of course, many others, so many that I can never do justice to them all.

May I say, though, that I love the next generation best of all?

I was fairly miserable about coming to London so I made myself arrange various social commitments so I wouldn’t just sit in my hotel room and sulk. So far this has worked beyond all expectations. Sumana and I had high tea in the British Museum, then powerwalked past all my favourite Greek art. Back to the hotel for a nap – I told myself to wake up at six and I did, to the minute – then out to the Isle of Dogs for dinner and a play with the fabulous Miss Kirsty. I debriefed her on Racefail, she asked all the sensible questions and made me think hard about my answers. There’s very little that’s more fun than drinking wine and having a long passionate conversation with a highly intelligent friend. So glad I got off my butt.

Bellboy

Noah

Zoom right in and you’ll see them.

Army Dreamers, Kate Bush, 1980

Golden Brown, The Stranglers, 1981

Your Woman, White Town, 1997

Her Morning Elegance, Oren Lavie, 2007

Is it just me, or do these sound like they belong together? Could almost throw Tori Amos’s Cornflake Girl in there too. And tremble at my agedness: apparently my taste in pop was set in stone twenty-nine years ago.

Source: FDIC Failed Bank List. We’re closing more banks per month than we used to in a year. 2009’s already worse than previous low point 2002, and it’s only March.

I was on antidepressants from “Mission Accomplished” to Obama’s inauguration. Down to the very day.

[14:00] mizchalmers: remember that time we got married?
[14:00] FurHordinge: oh yeah, that time
[14:00] FurHordinge: happy anniversary of that time
[14:00] mizchalmers: back atcha
[14:00] mizchalmers: mister
[14:00] FurHordinge: missus

Great news from my international network of business partners (with thanks to Google Translate, which now has a Detect Language feature that is distinctly from the future):

Si Caroline is great businessman with his wife and
thence they nakabili a new set of fishing net as another
source of income.Her Crab vending previous project is still on-going to
where every week he sells in the city of Calamba.

The goal of Si Caroline’s fishing business is to generate enough income to send those adorable children to school. At my end, my 48 Kiva loans are repaying almost faster than I can reinvest the proceeds. My default rate, incidentally, is well under 3%. America’s bailed-out investment bankers can kiss my progressive, apple-shaped ass.

Said apple didn’t fall far from the tree. My Dad, recovering warmonger, is also busy saving the world, starting with rural New South Wales.

…although I still maintain it doesn’t count if you land on your feet, facing the horse and holding the reins. More of a rapid involuntary dismount, right? I’m riding a new mare, the beautiful Elle, who is a Glenoaks veteran like me and who was originally imported from, um, Australia. She’s for sale, so if you didn’t get me anything for my birthday…

…KIDDING. Anyway about Elle; she’s just as beautifully trained as Cassie, but she’s less sort of lenient. Cassie will take the most liberal and generous interpretation of your aids and act on that. She’s a progressive on the Supreme Court. Elle requires things to be *just* *so*; she’s the Biblical literalist of lovely bay hunter-jumpers, with a strict constructionist position on the Constitution.

I learned this after the fall – look, all that happened was that a breeze went through some fabric tacked to the judge’s kiosk, and when I looked down the horse had teleported eighteen inches to the right and I had not. If I’d only kept my heels down, LIKE ERIN WAS TELLING ME TO DO, I would have teleported with her. Anyway, that was our first canter transition. After poor Erin, my sainted instructor, had hoisted me back on the horse, we cantered again on that side, no fallings-off, then tried again on the other side.

I thought I was keeping good contact with the outside rein but there is a tendency, when one has recently arisen from the dirt, to mistake good contact for hanging-on-like-grim-death. Erin brought this to my attention and told me to ease up on the poor mare’s mouth. I did so and behold, Elle moved fluidly into the canter. The second time we tried this the contrast was even more pronounced. With no more than a gesture of relinquishment in my outside shoulder, Elle picked up the contact and cantered away.

Always the same lesson: freely forward. Let go of the resistance. Do not fear. I was all messy and disorganized because, different horse, trying to feel for her likes and dislikes, her rhythm and cadence. Even more than Cassie does, Elle thinks in cadence – it’s one of the differences between jumpers, who have to be clever and forgiving, and hunters, who are judged on the hypnotic qualities of their canter. Have you seen the fantastic, the amazing film The Triplets of Belleville? There’s this running metaphor where racing cyclists whinny and snort like thoroughbreds, and it’s funny and apt because of this quality of being unwilling to break rhythm. My challenge with Elle is to sit still, to stop fussing with my reins, to keep my heels down, to be quiet. “Point her where you want her to go and ask her to go forward,” said Erin.

You could argue that Elle broke rhythm when she shied but in fact if I’d had a softer, more secure seat, we would have changed direction in perfect rhythm with each other. And indeed the bewildered expression she gave me was that of a sleepwalker woken too abruptly: What are you doing on the ground? Why aren’t you where you are supposed to be?

The good news is that slight resistance in my outside shoulder on the canter transition is about all the fear I felt after the fall. That’s a lot better than I felt for the first year or so of riding Noah, my first really good big horse. I was scared pretty much every second I was on his back. And not without reason; when I fell off him I tended to land on fences and get hurt. And I fell off a lot, because I had the reins in a stranglehold and no horse needs that.

It took me a long long long time to let go. If what you’re scared of is that the horse is going to take off and you’re going to fall off, how can you release the brakes? Only through faith. And in the end, I did. Just before we sold him, when I was riding him very nicely over big fences, I held the contact as lightly as you would hold an egg.

This fall hurt my dignity but nothing else. I got back on and rode this sweet mare and got three flying changes out of her – two of them decent and one quite nice. Part of the pleasure of starting again is feeling the years and years of riding behind me – the teenage bolting around like a lunatic and learning how to land on my feet, the years in my twenties when David drummed cadence into me – coming up and helping, like a whale surfacing under a struggling swimmer. As if those years weren’t wasted after all; as if all is not lost.

Nerding out over birthday geography, I am especially tickled to see Canada, Argentina and Mexico making strong showings on my world map of love. Yoz is listed as The Internet because he was spending the day as a series of tubes.

You know you’re all well-dressed, well-read and discerning types. Puppies and babies gravitate towards you.

Francis: I hear that Sausage Day is a new holiday
Yatima: a celebration of all things sausage
Francis: I assumed it was a post-Valentine’s celebration of all things not very romantic or not involving any special effort
Yatima: i laugh every time i think about it
a lone sausage
Francis: as I was IMing to Rose about it:
[12:33] francis heaney: “Here, I bought you a Hershey bar. It was on sale.”
[12:34] francis heaney: “I ate half of it already.”
Yatima: “happy sausage day!”
funny you should mention it
jeremy got given free hershey’s bars, the little ones, and keeps offering them to me
i’m all “hersheys? …thanks, pet”
Francis: I’m actually addicted to the tiny Special Darks
Yatima: i eat michael recchiuti
and scharffen berger
when i settle, i settle for lindt
Francis: I only eat chocolates that were hand delivered to me from Germany
Yatima: gigantic, unashamed chocolate snob
germany? bah
the chocolate baths on venus, or nothing
Francis: MY chocolate comes from ATLANTIS
Yatima: MY chocolate comes from the civilization that DROWNED atlantis for its inferior choc
you can’t buy this chocolate
Francis: it is transported from the future and is made of special cocoa-treated stem cells
Yatima: you have to donate your menstrual blood
for the stem cells
HA
beat that, sausage
Francis: *hard to breathe*
*too much laughing*
also here is the Sausage Day Gift of the Magi:
Yatima: i sold the corkscrew to get you a tin of cat food, but you sold the tin opener to get me a bottle of two buck chuck