There is an endeavour towards selling the house where I've been living for a while, which has involved a lot of tidying up over the last few weeks. This lead up to an open day this weekend. The entirely wonderful herecirm came down a day early and won points with my mum by being awesomely helpful while I was at work.

The ponies have been quite happy in their new home. Cash is being hilariously adorable. Unfortunately Zorro is still lame and worse for having more space. He is booked in for an MRI next week, so I need to find transport to get us there and back. I have to accept that given his age and type, along with the ongoing nature of this lameness, I have probably ridden him for the last time.

On a brighter note, teaching remains fun and next weekend is studio time with The Patient Wild.
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I am hosting my first clinic at the end of June, taught by Ross Jacobs.


That is pretty a summary of the details, but the direct link is here - if you are in the UK or know anyone who is and might be interested, please pass this on- I would hate for anyone to miss out on the first opportunity to learn with Ross in this country.

Two days of taking down and putting up fences, putting things in the car and driving up and down the lane, emptying out stables and old fields and keeping an eye on horses have culminated in Zorro and Cash being on a new yard, Small staying on the old one. Sad to break up a herd that have been together for some time- Zorro and Small had shared for five years until Zogs went onto box rest late last year- but it's what needed to happen.


Ponies felt that the new paddock contained precisely the grass they needed. As you can see, the weather was less than clement. I have never had so many outdoor tasks to perform in such heavy rain. I was soaked even with my big raincoat and my waterproof boots weren't strong vs the saturation from long, wet, grass.


Once I had finished with the arduous work, it stopped raining for a while. The new yard isn't so bad when you get to see it in the sunshine. You could almost feel you liked the place.


If long grass wasn't enough, the fields also feature an en-suite snack-bar style hedge.

When time to come in arrived, there were ructions - Cash didn't want to be first in, snorted his way around to the stables and then whinnied with such a squeally tone to his voice that the nearby bantam cockerel replied. Zorro totally lost the plot when I went to get him, barged the electric tape down and gallumphed around Cash's paddock for a while, trying to figure out how to get to his friend. He didn't seem to realise that letting me catch him would do the trick. Then when we got through the gate he did a full rear and got the lead rope caught around his front leg, then tried to canter off. This is on one side of a massive field so I wasn't going to let him go, which meant he cantered up with his nose on his knee for a few yards before my brain kicked in and I gave him enough rope for it to fall free. After that he was very prancey and intimidating, but nothing I'm not used to. Not sure it gave a great impression of either of us to the new yard owners, though. Certainly didn't leave me feeling good about much at the end of a very tough day.

This weekend I will be moving my horses off the yard I have kept them on for the last seven years. A pretty big change and maybe a time to look back over some of the times at the yard...
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Well, that is a lot of sentimentality on my part, and a lot of dearly missed equine friends. The yard has been the centre of my life over the last five years far more than my house or work or anywhere else, the axis around which I have turned. It was time to move though- the yard owners are looking at toning down the horses anyway, they have cattle and sheep again now - and I needed to find a new place. It breaks my heart to think of breaking up our little herd though. I will miss Small, who is one of the nicest ponies I have ever met, and I'm sure the ponies will miss one another too. This is the cutting adrift of the last tightly tied strand of my marriage and the life I had in those years.

Happily I have found somewhere just down the road, by sheer chance, so the complete physical move will be about 500 yards. It is pleasant, run by nice people and well maintained. And they have room for three horses, which is important, because there is another pony coming to join Zorro and Cash. For those of you on my friends list, this pony will probably be quite familiar to you and best of all, she will be bringing her human with her.

I don't know if many of you remember my years with Sequoia - it was a long time ago and it left me feeling pretty burnt out with music, bands and the music industry. I kept a very low workrate playing with my old friend shanks01 as much because I enjoy hanging out with Stu as out of any great inclination to conquer the world with music. We tried working with other musicians with mixed outcomes and sometimes playing open mic nights, but essentially although we had some really good songs we were pretty unambitious about them.

Over the last eight months or so that has started to change. Another friend of Stu's plays piano and we finally got around to rehearsing with her. Turns out she is excellent, fitted in great and brought a whole lot more to the music. As the sound got bigger we realised we should find ourselves some other musicians to work with. After a few auditions and a few false starts we found ourselves a truly stunning drummer who is also the tallest member of the band and a super-nice guy. A little while later a shiny-headed bassist emerged out of the fog with the skills to fit right into the band's sound.

So now we are a five piece and after a week of increasing excitement ( helped by the fact that a friend of ours released his band's album last week and it is genuinely excellent ) last Sunday we played our first live gig. We were probably a little under-rehearsed, but there is no question in my mind that it was one of the best performances I have ever been part of. Stu is a great singer and front man, everyone else hit their notes like we were supposed to and the audience response was really cheering. Even the song where I play mandolin and almost always get my fingers tied in knots went pretty smoothly. We were totally buzzing afterwards and doubtless completely intolerable, but what a fun evening! The other two bands on the bill ( The Automated and Take Me Home ) were both genuinely good too, which is an unusual thing for a local gig and all in all it was a pretty good value evening for everyone involved. Hopefully even for people like herecirm and ramalam who had travelled long distances to be there.

We're lining up more gigs now and working out when we can get proper recordings done, but in the meantime you can find most of the tracks from the weekend over on Soundcloud or just listen right here:


Also herecirm took a whole bunch of excellent pictures during the show, not sure if I can link them direct on account of it being Facebook, let's find out...


The Patient Wild, ladies and gentlemen. Why yes, I am wearing a suede waistcoat like it's 1994. I'm vintage.

On Tuesday I went on a day's footcare course, run by Helen Straker, the trimmer who has been looking after our horse's feet as our regular trimmer has been off work with some health problems. The aim of the course was to give us a bit of an understanding of the horse's foot and the tools to evaluate the condition of a hoof and get an idea of how they work.

The morning consisted of sessions on the structure and performance of the hoof, looking at the physical structures that make up the horse's foot and how they interact, then going on to look at how a good trimmer will work to help those structures work optimally and finally discussing some of the problems and pathologies that can occur in horse's feet.

There was so much interesting content to this that it's hard to pick out any particular parts, but I was struck in particularly by the observation that the effect of conventional shoeing is to hang the entire weight of the horse off the laminae. It was also interesting to hear about how going back to the nineteenth century it was known that long term shoeing affected the horse and that veterinarians at that time recommended giving horses breaks from shoes from time to time "to restore the quick." In many disciplines- particularly where horses worked on a more seasonal basis - this has traditionally happened, but in the modern world most horses are shod most of the time.

The discussion of pathologies was interesting as well - one of the other participants has a horse with serious laminitic problems and so there was a lot of depth on that topic. I found some of the things about dealing with abscesses interesting too, though perhaps largely because I'm fortunate enough to have rarely had to deal with them so it was mostly new to me. Having covered how the foot works it was easier to understand the nature of these problems so that I could immediately grasp why, for example, anti-inflammatories are problematic in the treatment of abscesses.

The whole day was paced fast enough to keep everyone interested, but with plenty of time for questions and discussion if there were parts that anyone didn't understand.

In the afternoon we looked at some basic hoof maintenance and then Helen performed a dissection on a foot so that we could see the structures that had previously been described. I wasn't as squicked out by this as I had feared I would be and it certainly made a lot of sense of the morning's descriptions when we could see the various parts of the hoof in situ. It was hard to watch ( and to hear ) in places but I think it was worth it for the amount I learned.

I was left overwhelmingly impressed with the brilliant engineering on the part of natural selection that lead to the equine hoof.

I believe Helen is planning to do some more of these days and I have to say I would recommend this to anyone who owns a horse. Really interesting and very worthwhile.

Yesterday the sun shone and Lou and I took Cash and Small out for a ride on the common together. It had been intensely cold and most places were frozen solid, but the sandy trails on the common are so dry that they remained sandy. This gave us an opportunity for a little canter up one of the nice cantering hills. This was the time that Cash remembered that he is actually three-quarters race horse and was determined to catch up with Small and ideally to overtake. We didn't really go that fast, but a bit like an old sports car, being small and close to the ground certainly gives an impression of speed.

As I got home it started snowing and I brought in a whole lot of firewood and settled in for an evening by the stove.

This morning there was a good 10cm of snow on the ground at home, a little less at the yard. I took a few photos...
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On Wednesday I start a new job, so I'll have to get myself back into early mornings. I'll miss all the pony time ( and I'm flipping glad I've had time to muck out while Zorro has been on box rest ) but it will be convenient to get paid...

This weekend I had herecirm down to visit and it was one of the nicest weekends we have spent together. I made pie, which was delicious, Sari came along to band practice ( Stu wanted to do it at the weekend ) and didn't get too bored, we watched Scott Pilgrim which had some entertaining moments and we took Cash out for a couple of rides.
( Illustrated Version ( in which Cash goes out on the trail and I take pictures ) )

On the whole it was a pretty excellent weekend and I didn't want to be saying goodbye to herecirm at the end of it. Hopefully by the next time she comes down, I might have a job - but then I've been hoping that for a while. What feels like the most interesting interview I've had yet is lined up for Tuesday...

My recent relative quietness online is partly because I was off with herecirm and her family in Spain. It turns out Spain in January is fairly cool, especially if you're in an apartment usually reserved for summer tourists, but there was plenty to keep us entertained, bright sun, long lie-ins and all kinds of off-season quiet places to visit.

So, that was our holiday. Unless you want to see some kind of ( illustrated version )

Holidays with herecirm are awesome.

So, you remember my 2011 Reading Challenge? No? Well I do...

As you can see, I hit March before petering out, but actually I did read a few more books ( actually I read very few books not on the challenge list in 2011 - my rollercoaster life has afforded less reading time than I have had previously ) that I didn't get around to writing up, so I may not have failed quite as much as I appeared to have. I still failed by around 50% though.

To Ride Hell's Chasm by Janny Wurts, recommended by makoiyi

This was a brisk and fun read- the central story of the little-trusted foreigner with the mysterious past who gradually proves himself to be a hero in a country that finds itself suddenly out of it's depth when confronted with devastating magic is entertaining and well told although I was unconvinced by the world beyond our little bubble of characters and events.

There were a few things that grated - firstly the way people responded to dialogue was a little weird. A made up and exaggerated example:

"I'm very slightly annoyed with you," she said. He recoiled, stung by the brutality of her harsh words, his insides twisting in bitter turmoil at the inexplicable intensity of her rage.

It seemed as though much of the time the way characters reacted to things that were said just didn't make sense as a response to what was actually said. Maybe I'm just really bad at following subtext or something but it happened enough that I started to notice it and then increasingly find it funny.

Also although the horses involved in the ride down the chasm were certainly essential for the story to be pushed on and heroic in their own right, in keeping with most fantasy they were also very much lined up as victims throughout. This is a personal bugbear of mine, but it also inspires me, which is always helpful.

Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley recommended by dancing_crow

This was an interesting book - Jane Smiley obviously understands the racing industry intimately and she describes the different aspects of it beautifully. It works more as a series of interlocking vignettes rather than a story as such, which may be one reason it took me ages to read - there wasn't anything to it that made me want to pick it up and read what happened next - but it was never dull and the characters and horses are very well drawn.

I'm currently reading In Great Waters and I have Out Stealing Horses in my to-read pile so I may almost hit half of the books I thought I would get around to at least...