I wake to the sound of wind and rain – it sounds rough out there and my duvet is reluctant to let me go – but thoughts of tea and homemade ginger biscuits eventually provide enough motivation for me to drag my sorry ass out of bed. I creek downstairs (that’s my knees) in the pitch dark and check the fire – i can’t detect any flames but the room is warm and as I open the door I can see it still burns low. This is the first joy of the day. Placing a bit of kindling on a few glowing embers and a log or two across these, I close the door, open the vents and put the kettle on. As I make tea I can see that the log situation is critically low. The wood burning stove has been burning almost non-stop since I moved here on Christmas eve. Its now mid February – the ton of logs delivered in the week before Christmas is significantly diminished. The old farmhouse has no central heating and apart from an electric blanket this fire is the only source of heat. I grew up without central heating in Sheffield and, its true, it is grim up North which is probably why Yorkshire folk are so hard. Compared with winters in Sheffield it’s tropical here in Swansea. I shouldn’t split logs in dressing gown and slippers but needs must. The dry logs in the cottage are too big to fit in the woodburning stove – so long handled axe in hand and woolly hat on head (reminiscent I think of a scene from Withnail and I) I step outside into the cold and dark and notice that rain has turned to snow and there’s a biting wind. In two minutes or so there’s a lovely pile of dry logs and I am boiling in the bag. Fire is roaring now, I have a large mug of tea and am tucking into ginger biscuits – noticing that these, like the logs, are quite diminished also. Best part of the day….watching the fire, feeling the room warm up from the radiant heat of the fire, sipping tea and eating sweet biscuits. As I meditate on the fire I begin, without really thinking, to mentally prepare myself for the day ahead. Who needs TM eh?
The daily commute from where I sleep to the place where I keep my two horses is a 12 mile round trip. This is so frustrating given that I can see the yard from my back door. The direct route from my home to the yard is cross country – swamp, bog and ditches to be more precise and it takes 45 minutes and it’s like prep for bog snorkeling. I do this quite regularly now – out of choice and sometimes out of having no choice like when car failed MOT. It’s a tough call but its stamina building and coming between a warm-up log splitting session and mucking out two horses it’s a way of getting me fit enough to ride Frank without needing to go to the dreaded gym. And I can eat as many ginger biscuits as my friends mum can cook!
Looking after two horses is a killer. It’s fairly relentless, hard, manual labour. Apart from daily shovelling a ton of shit, carrying water, there’s feed bags to haul, nets to fill, horses to turnout or exercise and then there’s the constant battle against mud. Both my horses suffer with mud fever but I have a successful management strategy for prevention of this which I will detail in another post. The first thing I do when I reach the yard is hose off the bog mud, check the horses are OK then its coffee and breakfast – I will eat anything I can find and as much of it as possible as by now I am so hungry I am about to pass out.
After mucking out, I take a break to peel potatoes. There are three men on the yard engaged in various manual labour and they need feeding. Left to their own devices they will just consume vast quantities of tomato ketchup, white bread, margarine, cheap disgusting biscuits, sweets, chocolate bars, cans of pop and cake. We were taking it in turns to do the chip shop run when one day I suddenly thought… why do I need to buy chips? The kitchen is full of potatoes. That’s how I came to be peeling potatoes. Funny things aren’t they? Men. Not much more sophisticated really than bears with furniture. They are all simpletons. We are just looking for a special kind of simpleton. This is why I love Frank. Leggy, lanky, slinky Frankie. My handsome, fit and oingy boingy, showy offy show horse who’s team chasing, eventing, showjumping and dressage is exceeding all my expectations. He’s like sunshine on a winters day and every day, in all sorts of ways, he makes my day. I love him so much I sometimes think my heart will burst. He’s my one and only Valentine and he’s mine… all mine.
Only Joolz and Horses 