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The Grey Mare and I have a new hobby.
No, not her dropping me in the long grass when birds fly out of it unexpectedly (which has happened twice in the last month, the first of which necessitated me hobbling around with a stick for two days)... but dressage.
Dressage is something I have thought for some years that the Grey Mare should be able to do. She has resisted. However, we entered a competition and with grim determination (on my behalf) we practised. And we practised and we practised.
In the week or so leading up to our debut, I thought we had just about got it. I thought we might not make such fools of ourselves after all.
The day dawned, I was up at 5.30am, industriously plaiting her mane and tail and polishing her to perfection. She did, if I say so myself, look rather splendid. However, that is where the splendidness stopped.
Having not competed for four years, going away to the competition was just a wee bit too exciting. New place, new horses, and the horror of the white boards - and flowers - around the arena were all a bit too much.
The lovely soft dressage horseness we had almost achieved at home went out of the window and my grim determination returned - to complete the test. Which we did, with a couple of spooks, and a step or two outside of the dreaded white boards when she thought she was going to be able to escape.
However, it has now filled me with a desire to do it again - and keep doing it again until she performs away from home as well as I know she is capable of doing.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that once blogging has caught you in its web, it's not that easy to escape.
I may not have posted for more than three months, indeed I had decided to retire gracefully from the blogosphere but I have made friends through this secret society, and last night I met up with three of them.
@themill, a near neighbour and similarly retired, and I travelled down the A1 together to a lovely pub where we met Hadriana's Treasures, who had made a 50-mile trip to be there. Expatmum had come the furthest - from Chicago - but on this evening, had just popped up the road from her mum's.
We talked about blogging, the seductive thrall it has, friends, family and oh, normal things.
Despite my lack of posting, I also speak to Gill and Karen regularly too on that other thief of time Facebook.
As The Eagles once said: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave ..."
Regular readers will have noticed I have not been particularly blogtastic of late.
A year ago, I was firing on all cylinders, enthused and eager. A year ago, I was writing for a business publisher where creativity was stifled and big words were frowned upon.
Now, working for a newspaper again, I feel fulfilled creatively and no longer have the urge to tip-tap away when I get home. I’m also enjoying the spring evenings with the Grey Mare.
So, for now, I am disappearing from the blogosphere. I may be back – who knows?
In our little pocket of coastal Northumberland, the snow rarely lingers. It has a tough battle against the salt air and needs to come fully equipped with reinforcements if it is to win the right to settle. It did - briefly - overnight but the roads are again wet and grass is peeping through the temporary dusting on lawns and fields.
It's a different story inland. Drive along an uncovered Beadnell Straight towards Swinhoe and before you reach the top, there will be snow. A definite line marks the end of the salty dominance. Looking out from my garden, the Cheviots have been white for a few days. And it's supposed to be spring.
I have a love-hate relationship with snow. Currently, I'm happy to be smothered in the stuff: I am off work for a week and the Grey Mare has a stable to be tucked into. But when I have to drive through it, and in previous years when she lived outside all year round, I hated it. Then, I was glad of our special little ecosystem.
Sometimes, though, the snow beats the salty air. At school, I prayed for snow, because it meant we would be sent home. The thickest I have ever seen was in February of 1987. We were all but blocked in for about a week. I loved it. The Grey Mare's predecessor (another grey mare, natch) lived at a dairy farm in the next village. I would trudge through the snow to feed her and be brought home by the tractor that had been called into service to deliver the milk.
The grey mare # 1 is long gone, and so is the dairy: houses occupy the field where the ponies grazed adjacent to black and white cows. I still think of them every time I pass by.
I don't like running at the best of times. And 6.15 in the morning is certainly not the best of times.
To be honest, I don't think any time is a good time for chasing chickens. It puts me in quite a fowl mood. But as there are only three left, I wouldn't like to be responsible for losing any more. Once, there were four brown chickens, six Black Rocks and a cute white one that looked like a snowball. But over the course of the winter, Mr Fox has been picking them off one by one.
The chickens, which roam freely during the daylight hours, have a perfectly fine hen house to sleep in. But they rarely do: why should they when there is the luxury of the stables to enjoy? The American barn with its sliding doors, electric lights, bales of hay, convenient stalls to roost on and horse feed to plunder must be a chicken's idea of a luxury hotel. And that would be all well and good if they didn't decide to sneak outside when you arrive to muck out in the morning.
The fox massacred one on the lawn the other week; today I thought her sisters would be going the same way after I stupidly forgot to close the main door when I took the Grey Mare the few yards to her field. Suddenly, they were clucking around my feet and I was able to quickly shoo two inside. Chicken number three, however, was made of sterner stuff. She was outside and she was not going back in.
I sprinted round and round after this feathered blur, shocked at her turn of speed. If her legs were longer, I would have sworn she was a decendant of the Road Runner. Finally, I managed to corner her near the hen house and fortunately the door was open. I bolted it smartly behind her, and leaving her in solitary confinement, I almost collapsed in a heap with the exertion.
"Are you all right?" asked my friend, arriving to feed her horse. I explained what had happened. "Oh, you should've just put some grain in a bucket and shaken it for them," she said when she stopped laughing at me.
"No, what I should have done," I gasped between pants, "is left the f***kers for the fox!"
My car is going to get me into serious trouble.
I am hugely grateful for the turning of the year and the ligher evenings - if only because it means I sometimes manage to get out of town without having to switch on my lights. Although my headlights are working, they seem to have a mind of their own. If I indicate, the full beam will come on. Sometimes the full beam comes on if I drive over a bump in the road; sometimes it comes on for utterly no reason. Sometimes it takes several attempts to turn it off and the person in front will - obviously - think I am flashing at them. I won't be surprised if some burly white van man stops and thumps me.
This itchy trigger is just one of the many ailments my car is suffering from: the engine often has spluttering fits like a 60-a-day smoker (those in the know tell me the 'big end' is going) and the exhaust seems to have emphysema. People ask me when I'm going to get it fixed. I say I'm not; I don't see the point in throwing good money after bad. "Some people pay a lot of money to make their car sound like this," I tell them. My point is proven when I drive past teenage tarts and wannabe boy racers and they turn to see which of their loud-exhaust heroes has just whizzed by.
The windscreen wipers have just started to make a tick-tock noise when I turn them on, for all the world like a clock counting down to the end of the road. If the relationship between my car and I was a book, we would now have reached the final 25 pages.
Nature can be a cruel mother. Tonight she sent the rain, heavy and prolonged, knowing it would tempt out the toads to walk across the roads as people returned home from work.
Driving into my road - a street so small that calling it a road gives it illusions of grandeur - I stopped twice to rescue two toads (and a piece of crumpled up cellophane) from the tarmac. Three more toads were saved from stepping into the danger zone and were placed in the relative sanctuary of my garden.
I picked up a big frog from the middle of the road beside the stables and popped it on to the verge. Another stood, stupified, further along. I was too late to help him: either clipped by a car or picked up by a dog, he seemed not long for this life. I placed him in a flowerbed to die with some dignity.
The Grey Mare and I have a new hobby.
