A new page.

Even though I indulge myself too often in endless horse stories, I am aware that not all the Dear Readers are quite as entranced by the red mare as I am. (Nobody could be as entranced by the red mare as I am.) So I am starting a small experiment. I’m giving her her very own Facebook page, where I can bang on to my heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that the audience will be kindly self-selecting.

She is so precious to me, and the work she does makes me so proud, and the lessons she teaches me are so profound that I have wanted always to keep a record of her. I am keenly aware that she will not always be with me. I hope to keep her into a delightful old age, but any sudden colic, random field accident or unexpected illness could rip her from me, at any time. Everyone who keeps horses knows that if you have livestock, you will also have deadstock. I try to take a leaf from the equine book, and be flinty and unsentimental about this. Horses deal with life and death much better than do humans. But of course, when she goes, I shall be undone. That is when I shall need to take down this book, and slowly read. I shall want to remember her moments of glad grace.

I start to think that the correct place for this is not here. I cannot banish her from these pages entirely, as she runs through my life and my heart like Brighton through a stick of rock. She is stitched into my very being. She makes me a better human and causes the wings of my better angels to flap. But when I need to elaborate on some training exercise, or wax madly on a moment of love, or gallop off on a tangent about the life lessons my red professor teaches me, I can now put all that into a discrete chapter.

I quite often start experiments like this and do not maintain them. It’s one more thing to do in a busy life, and eventually I decide that there is not enough time and thought and space. It may take. We shall see. But if you want to find her, she is, for the time being, here: https://www.facebook.com/RedTheMare?fref=photo