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The rider as Alexander teacher

Now that I can usually keep my balance without having to grab hold of the horse’s mane, we are getting on to the finer points in these riding lessons. For example, when cantering on a circle, I am instructed to raise my inside hand a bit. Why? Because its presence near the horse’s shoulder is discouraging him from bending.

This puts me in mind of Alexander lessons (which I had, several years ago). The Alexander teacher rearranges your body by means of the lightest of touches. It seems like magic. It appears that this works on horses, too.

Art, speech and planning

One of our neighbours is Michael Gillespie, the sculptor. We went to his open studio recently, and Andrew asked him to what extent he plans in advance the way his abstract sculptures will develop. He replied that it’s like speech: do you plan exactly what you’re going to say before you start talking?

A while ago I was talking with Alan about what it’s like to do your job in a foreign language (he uses German every day and even chairs meetings in it). He said that he thinks German-speakers plan their speeches more carefully than we do. Before you launch into one of those long sentences with the verb at the end you have to know where you’re going!

Maybe it’s the same with sculpture: perhaps you would plan it more, or less, depending on the medium you were using. As with spoken languages, some materials might lend themselves to spontaneity while others would reward a more premeditated approach.

Trail-riding in South Wales

Two days’ trail-riding at the Cwmfforest centre (“Trans-Wales Trails”) earlier this month. This is my delayed trip report. Executive summary: it was great, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I recommend this place for all levels of rider (you choose which ride to join depending on your competence, and they provide what sound like really exciting challenges for the very experienced – of whom I am not one).

The horses are lovely, and obviously a well-cared-for and happy herd. Their friendships are respected and their individual quirks known and understood. Care is taken in matching riders with horses. My partner was Tristan, 27 years old, about 14.2 hh and with perfectly working brakes. Brakes had been my main worry (it’s a long time since I last went out hacking), so he was definitely the right choice for me. Accelerator a little dodgy, maybe – but its improvement was dramatic after the first morning, once I’d started carrying a stick. He was safe and sure-footed on the slippery ground, and quite friendly too. His conversation was a bit limited – he tends to the taciturn, unlike his owners – but he did communicate a few interesting observations to me along the way (e.g. “Look, there’s a llama in that field! It’s weird!!” and, several times, “Here’s where we canter! Isn’t cantering fun!” followed shortly afterwards – usually after about a hundred metres – by “On the other hand, maybe at our age trotting would get us there just as well, don’t you think? The others are bound to wait for us at the top.”)

It rained a lot. Well, it is Wales! They lent me a long waxed-cotton riding coat, explaining that my Rohan coat and waterproof chaps would be fine to protect me, but the riding coat would protect the saddle too. I’ll buy one for myself before I do this again (which I’m going to). Hard to believe that it was July when I surveyed myself fully equipped for riding out on the first morning: rugby shirt, fleece, body-protector, waxed cotton coat; my thickest jodhpurs, boots, suede half-chaps and full chaps on top; and my fleece-lined waterproof winter riding gloves. I was worried about getting too warm, but it didn’t happen. On return I started stripping off wet and muddy things ready to have tea, and got all the way down to my underwear before I found a dry layer. At the end of the second day my boots collapsed. (Good! I’d been wanting to replace those anyway, so now I can do it without guilt.)

I like the way you are given responsibility for your own horse. (Of course, they check the safety-critical bits to make sure you have done them right.) You take a headcollar and catch your own horse, groom it, and tack it up. At the end of my second day I was asked to take Tristan up to the indoor school (part of the herd was being kept in that night because of the weather forecast) and put him in with the others, all by myself. This involved persuading several of the keener youngsters to stay inside the gate while I opened it, led him in, and then opened it again to let myself out. An interesting challenge.

The Turner family have attitude – I’m sure they wouldn’t be unhappy with that verdict (though they might dispute my choice of word as being too trendy). I have the impression that entertaining themselves by making their guests talk is part of what they find rewarding about their job – besides their obvious love for their horses and the place where they live, of course. After three days in their company I already have the feeling that we are old friends and that I know a lot about them, and vice versa. Meals at Cwmfforest are taken around the family dining table, which seats ten, and guests are challenged with direct questions and provocative statements of opinion, designed to elicit a response. A robust defence of one’s own views in turn is met with approval. Guests are expected to sing for their supper! I like the Turners, though in theory I shouldn’t (their line tends towards the countryside-alliance, health-and-safety-is-ruining-everything, why-should-we-be-in-the-EU, representative-democracy-is-not-the-answer, vegetarianism-is-unnatural end of the spectrum).

It’s an interestingly cosmopolitan place. Nobody at Cwmfforest is Welsh, as far as I can tell. The patriarch and matriarch, Mike and Maria, who built the business from scratch and have been there since 1970, are South African and Bavarian respectively (she does the cooking – Bavarian food, yummy! – just what you need after all day in the saddle). Paul, the son who now runs the riding business, sounds English-posh (I asked him how come, as he’s lived here his whole life, and he explained that he’d been to a boarding school). The extended family includes two Swedish women, one of whom works for them during the summer season and was my riding escort on both days (an impressively competent rider). Other guests while I was there included three Germans, so the conversation around the table had a tendency to switch languages as it went along. I was amused to hear overtones of Welshness creeping into the (very fluent, but accented) English of the non-native residents. I love the way Maria ends sentences with “isn’t it?”, for example. And some of the vowel sounds that Emilie uses are neither English nor Swedish.

I took a few photos.

Things I noticed when I became lighter

I was looking for this posting this morning in order to show it to a friend, when I discovered that it didn’t exist. I thought I’d posted it ages ago. The material here comes from a notebook entry that I wrote in August 2007, to record some observations before their novelty wore off.

  • I can submerge myself in the bath. No longer must I decide which bits to leave sticking out of the water.
  • My flexibility has increased (despite not having done any exercises to improve it): I can curl my legs up underneath me on the sofa, for example, and it is much easier to wriggle on and off the bed in the boat.
  • My ability to deal with heights – to balance on ladders, etc – has improved (though it’ll never be great in comparison with that of the rest of the population). I noticed this first when going up the ladder to the loft to try and find some old clothes that would fit me. It’s also very noticeable when boating, and helps a lot.
  • My bone-structure has come into focus. Running my hand over my face is interesting – the jawline, in particular. I have quite a nice facial bone-structure, it turns out. It seems to be quite delicate: the kind of face that looks best with light, delicate jewellery.
  • Wearing jewellery, especially necklaces, is fun again! Some of them simply didn’t fit at all before, and some didn’t look right. Some of the chains now need shortening, in fact.
  • My thighs no longer brush against each other when I walk (this was a new and exciting observation in the third week of August). It felt odd at first, rather as if I were walking with my legs held wide apart.
  • My wedding and engagement rings, once so tight that removing them was only possible with the help of cold water, had become so loose that they were in danger of falling off. I was able to remove them by shaking my hand a bit. I spent that month wearing an elastic band around my finger to keep my rings safe, and took them to the jeweller in September to have them made four sizes smaller.

Dutch girls

Something that strikes me as odd in Amsterdam is the existence, side by side, of two radically different ways of being (or looking) female. Two styles. The Red Light District style—the naked body, make-up, red fabric, black leather etc—and the scrubbed face, denim, bike-riding, no-nonsense types. We speculate that there is even a cross-over between the two. Are there young women who arrive by bike wearing their jeans, undress, put on the make-up and stand in the window? This whole juxtaposition seems to us Dutch and not English. We are similar but not, after all, the same. [See also ‘Dutch Girl’ by Lisa Yuskavage, recently acquired by the Stedelijk Museum. Nice modern take on Vermeer!]

Another clue to the difference in cultures might be the lack of attention to safety precautions on the city’s many building sites. Andrew has noticed builders on scaffolding without hats, and items being lifted and lowered with no safety barriers, while pedestrians walk beneath—not just on one site, but generally. Is this (I speculate) another facet of the same basic attitude that gives rise to the existence of the coffee shops and the prostitution?

If I were younger I would start asking at this point “and is it a good or a bad thing?” But these days I don’t think in those terms nearly so much. It’s an interesting thing, that’s all. It gives rise to some consequences that are probably good, and some others that are undesirable. On balance, would I choose to live with it or not? I’m not sure. My answer might depend on how lucky I was feeling when you asked me. My optimistic self would find it refreshing. My pessimistic self might be scared.

Generation gap

[OK, so now I’d better actually write some stuff.]

Recently we’ve established social contact with the son of one of my cousins, and his girlfriend. Nice young people. It’s been a curiously disturbing experience, though. Here are people who are a whole generation younger than us, but nevertheless adults. Weird. When you reach middle age you think (well, I thought) that life would run out of novel experiences to show you. But it doesn’t.

On not writing

Well, I haven’t been.

Or reading, either, in fact.

I’ve been in a state of transition, and I don’t find such states conducive to processing much in the way of input, or to producing much in the way of output. I now have the impression (though only time will tell whether I’m right about it) that smoother water lies ahead. This might be a good time to start the blog again. Let’s see.

The art of living well

I’ve been reading, with great pleasure, French women don’t get fat. It’s a supremely elegant book, both in content and in presentation – and inspiring, too.

Actually I bought my copy several months ago but couldn’t get through it then. It seemed to be promoting an ideal that was so far out of my reach as to be depressing even to think about. Not in the least inspiring.

Now it is different: I’m most of the way through my weight-loss program (with 16.8 Kg gone at the last count, obesity already a thing of the past, and entry into the ‘healthy’ range – BMI 20–25 – anticipated later this week) and am thinking hard about my future relationship with food. The book is a delightful companion on this part of the journey, and has already given rise to several pages of my notebook covered with new ideas for ways of living differently and better.

Tagged

Alan Little tagged me in a recent posting. This is what I’m supposed to do:

  1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.

  2. People who are tagged write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.

  3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

  4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

The chance of my responding to anything within eight hours is remote, especially this week, but fortunately I have no idea what Third Series might be – so I guess what I don’t know won’t hurt me – and I don’t believe in reincarnation anyway. Here goes:

  1. I’m not a night owl any more. Maybe I never was, really. I wake early (around the summer solstice, very early indeed) and am most active early in the day.
  2. I haven’t been on an aeroplane since December 2005.
  3. I’ve lost about 12kg of body fat in the past 7 weeks. (It’s OK, don’t worry! I needed to lose it, it’s a medically-supervised programme, my doctor approves, and I feel much better for it).
  4. Tomorrow is our tenth wedding anniversary.
  5. I love to dry laundry outdoors. I study the weather forecast and wait till it’s going to be a good drying day before starting the wash. I arrange the clothes in patterns on the line: first a row of T-shirts, all with orange pegs, then a row of socks, all with yellow ones…
  6. I owned a horse for a while, a few years ago. It didn’t work out well. It was a learning experience.
  7. I’m scared of heights. It’s a problem when boating sometimes (especially when negotiating deep locks).
  8. I visit Venice most years, usually by train (the night train from Paris is best). I mean the Venice in Italy, of course, not the one in California.

The difficult bit, as Alan found, is thinking of eight people who might not mind being tagged. I don’t read very many blogs. Here are the least unpromising seven from the list in my feed reader:

  1. Rod
  2. Animoose
  3. William (but his blog is really too serious for this kind of trivia)
  4. Vicki and Alasdair (though given their posting frequency, a response is unlikely)
  5. Tromey
  6. Derek
  7. Paul Butcher? Unlikely, though – his is not really that kind of blog

I’m editing this post to remove people from the list if they don’t want to play. My original 8 is now already down to 7!

Storm in a teacup

While dramatic floods are causing mayhem in the rest of the country, all there is to report from our stretch of riverbank is … a cow in the water. There is much very localised excitement. I called out the Pindar, who turned up half an hour ago with a rope but is waiting for his team. Meanwhile the cow has got itself out of the river and is grazing on our neighbour’s back garden – which would be fine except that the only way back to where it’s supposed to be is via the road.