A good, good day

A new definition of tired. This is maddening, since there are about twenty-seven things I want to tell you. But I’ve been at HorseBack UK nearly all day, doing the usual work for them, but this time also riding Western. I cannot tell you the big whoop this creates in my mind.

They were running a UK Coaching Certificate course, so the members of the team and volunteers would have an official teaching qualification. For this, the students needed guinea pig riders to teach, and I stuck my hand up so fast it practically fell off.

Although there are cross-overs, riding Western is pretty different from riding English, and if I had not been concentrating so hard, I would have felt like an absolute eejit. As it was, I learnt something wonderful and new, was taught brilliantly, and had the great privilege of riding the magnificent Archie, an Anglo-Arabian gelding of vast grace and kindness.

I would love to write you through every jot and tittle of the day, and all the things I saw and all the things I learnt, but there is the click click click of my cerebellum switching itself off.

It’s not just the riding and the learning and the concentration and the work. I am an introvert, and being surrounded by people all day always takes it out of me. This is often quite difficult to explain, and can even sound rude. The fact that after company I need to go and sit quietly in a room is a very peculiar one. It also holds the counter-intuitive element that the more fascinating and charming and delightful the company, the more shattered I am. This is because, among such people, I am so interested and engaged and enthusiastic that all my reserves are emptied, and the needle is firmly on red.

So all I can say now, as the light turns a low amber outside, and the first of the spring birds sing their gentle evening song, is that it was the very crest and peak of a good day. On so many levels that I cannot count the ways.

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack UK:

The utterly lovely Archie, putting up with my amateurishness so kindly:

Back at home, Autumn the Filly was doing blinky eyes:

Two Myfanwys today, specially for her top fan (you know who you are):

And Mr Stanley, about whom more stories have been requested. They shall soon be furnished:

And my best beloved, who had a perfectly lovely afternoon getting covered in mud. Almost nothing happier than a perfectly filthy thoroughbred, as spring begins to lend her some warmth and some green shoots of grass:

The hill, still doggedly covered in snow:

So tired that, reading this through, I cannot tell if it makes any sense. I am certainly not offering you any dazzling prose. But there, sometimes a bald, descriptive sentence may be enough, even if it does not sing off the page. Or so I fondly hope.