Keeping the wood burner burning is a fairly high maintenance labour of love. Just over a ton of logs were delivered to the cottage on the 18th December and it is now exactly two months later and they are almost gone. Over these last two months I have moved these from the drovers cottage to the main house via the chopping area.

This has been hard work but the process of splitting logs is most satisfying… apart from the occasional knot where the bastard log will not give up without a fight. Over the last few weeks I have honed my splitting skills. I am satisfied that I can place the axe exactly and split the log completely and swiftly in two perfect halves. This reminds me everytime that where you look is where you go. If I loose my focus then the axe glances off the log and flies away out of control. The same focus is required when asking a horse to jump a fence. In turning for the fence eyes focus on the fence with sharp precision…this is important for every fence and more so with skinnies. In the approach to the fence, focus should shift to some distance beyond the fence and then the next fence. In training, this skill is practised over and over again until it becomes something we can do without thinking… without being aware of looking and making increasingly fine adjustments. Focus and positioning becomes second nature… like splitting logs.

The log above was a tricky customer. I think it took about ten or 12 swings of the axe before it split. I had to remove my jacket around swing six and there was a lot of swearing and grunting… it was touch and go and I nearly gave up.

Struggling with these knots got me thinking and I wondered if this is where the mildly abusive term ‘get knotted’ came from. I’m not a fan of non sweary terms of abuse as they usually sound quite pathetic and ‘get knotted’ is never going to be as satisfying or effective as the plain and simple ‘fuck off’. This doesn’t make sense really since chopping knotted logs is a lot less enjoyable than having sex.

Most of the logs require drying out. Stacking them on top of the woodburner fast forwards this process sometimes with quite alarming consequences such as filling the house with smoke and even catching fire. Splitting these rapidly drying out, sometimes smoking, logs can be quite dramatic as they split and release steam.

Hiking boots drying by the stove and night lights burning in the bread oven. Ahhhhh…just love a fire and have even managed to cook supper on the stove … makes great jacket potatoes too

Snowdrops… between drovers cottage log store and the main house…. a sign that there is something better just around the corner 😊

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.

Frank came 5th in BE arena eventing, 90cm, yesterday at Beacons equestrian. I think we have qualified for national championships (February 24,  2018 at Aston Le Walls, Northants). which is rather exciting. I really enjoyed this round and for the first time ever I wasn’t worried about losing my way and after our team chasing debut I knew that Frank was more than capable.  He can get a bit strong and fast so all I needed to do was keep a check and kick on at the right moment.

We could have been placed higher as there were only nine of 22 riders to go completely clear as the last fence, the joker, at 1m, lived up to its name and caught most people out. Frank did an unexpected double take at the gap just before fence 15 and instead of going through it he turned away.  The steering strings were too long – as usual – and I paid the price for loss of rhythm and direction –   2.8 time points to be precise.  A friend commented later that at least three other people had done exactly the same.  Clearly there’s some advantage to going later…you can spot which parts of the course might be causing problems – pity the rider who went in first, straight off the bat.   We were lucky not to have the joker fence down as Frank went in  a bit too fast but he was very oingy boingy yesterday and gave the jumps plenty of air.  If the fence had been any higher we might not have been so lucky.   Standing on the sidelines after, I commiserated with a fellow rider, who’d had an unexpected stop at fence four –  a totally benign showjump. Reflecting on these silly points we felt we had just thrown away we resolved to do better next time and not take any fence or obstacle for granted. When you lose – don’t lose the lesson eh?  On a high, I spent money I don’t really have in the lovely  Beacons tack shop and then had a free cup of tea to help recover from shock.  Watching some excellent horses and riders go round the 1m course making it look easy raised the question in my mind – should I enter the next arena event  in  Mendip Plains near Bristol and go for 1m?  Hmmmm…. something to aim for in these winter months.

Up to the yard well before crack of sparra I switched the barn lights on and found Frank blinking his eyes looking half asleep – yawning and eyes rolling he arched and stretched his neck and then stretched out his back legs as far as they would go. Here’s your breakfast buddy, tuck in, you won’t be eating for a while as we’re off on another adventure. Frank is the hungriest horse I have ever known but he can’t eat when he’s travelling which is a bit worrying as we have had some extremely long journeys recently. The anxiety starts as soon as he hears the velcro of the travel boots and increases after I have put them on. He usually goes without back boots as he kicks them off but since his fall in the lorry last week he is bandaged and booted. The back boots hadn’t been used for a while and it took me some time to dig them out of storage. It wasn’t long before we were on the road. Luckily for me, the yard insomniac was bumbling about and so I had help in putting up the ramp. Called in at Tesco for fuel, carrots and Costa caffeine. Love early morning driving as the roads are quiet – feels like the old days – when motoring was fun. It was a fairly uncomplicated journey and I didn’t get lost. I parked up at about 09.15 and set about tacking up -far too late to walk the course. Met up with my other SPH massiv team members in the warm -up and we agreed a vague plan. I wasn’t sure if the brakes would work in the excitement of the chase – if it got out of control I would pull up and retire and the others would carry on without me. Anyway, Frank was full of energy in the warm-up but I managed to keep the lid on it – we popped a couple of practice fences and I relaxed and began to look about. Some fine horses here – looking a lot like racehorses…. oh and some have event grease! I’ve never been in a warm up area with horses covered in event grease… just HOW big are these fences that it helps to be able to slide over them. Everyone seems a bit wired… there’s definitely a bit of tension. The warm up area is adjacent to fences 5, 6, 7 and 8a/b so we were aware of teams going past and got a sense of what was to come. Then we were asked to go down to another warm up area – much closer to the start (and the finish as it goes). Round and round we went, girth check, I put my stirrups up one hole, round and round…then… into the start ‘gate’ area and suddenly we were off with three team members racing towards the first fence. Frank would have been off too but he had to wait for me to let him go… this american gag is quite amazing. Releasing my hold, we were off and before I knew it we were flying over the first three fences – brush, log pile and wall. I knew straightaway that I was in control and knowing how well Frank can jump I felt safe. There was a long curve to the fourth fence a drop wall and I had to apply some brakes here or we were in danger of overshooting. Fence five was rails followed by a sweep round to the right and a tiger trap, two big hedges a sharp U turn to another tiger trap. Just after fence 7 I came upsides my team members and in true raver styleee let out a fist pumping Masiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive…. so this was what we got up so early for …. this is what its all about – this is fan fookin tastic! More fences came now in fairly rapid succession – step uppers, jump downers and all around us. Every fence Frank jumped cleanly and carefully – fast and safe – no sticky moments exactly but jeez – some of these fences were big.

I found myself looking at fence numbers thinking I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on. There were quite a few ditches (Frank has an irrational fear of ditches) and two jumps over water – I seem to recall Frank giving these a bit of air. At the penultimate fence the horse in front stopped but Frank changed his line like lightening and jumped over this hedge ditch. The final obstacle – a chase fence – and as suddenly as it had started it was all over – 30 fences in just over eight minutes – Phew! Loosening girths and jumping off our blowing, sweating horses we were as high as the fences we had just jumped. Having been worried initially about not having had chance to walk the course I am so glad I didn’t. There is NO way I would have even crossed the start line. This fast track from BE 80 to Intermediate! Now it was all over I was thinking when’s the next one… Walking back to the lorry I had so much love and respect for my show horse. I’d trusted this horse with my life and he’d not let me down – not only that, he’d given me the ride of my life – at my time of life – here’s me having the time of my life.

Horses hosed down, dried, watered, fed and made comfortable time to go back and have another look at some of those fences we just jumped and check to see just how big they were. Fence 14, below, the ‘Big hedge’.

Was interesting too to watch other teams go round and have some kind of gauge as to just how awesome we had just been! Without the rush of adrenaline and viewing these fences from the ground they did look proper scary – this just adding to the general buzz we were experiencing now that it was all over. Feeling as if we had just escaped a near death experience the occasion called for a drink. Looking at the results board we were jubilant to see that we had won a special prize of best geriatric team (combined age of 160). I wasn’t too surprised about this but what puzzled me was how the team organiser knew my age. On asking he looked a bit anxious and explained that he had guessed my age. Really? Given that one member of the team was 37 years younger than myself I wondered how this had worked out. On the entry form Russell had put my age down as 45… ha ha! Now THAT does call for a drink – two glasses of trampers please!