HorseBack day

I got up gingerly, like a curmudgeonly old lady, checking for aches and pains. But the sun was shining and I had things to do and I was bored of being what my father used to call a Minny Moan, so off I went.

It was a HorseBack UK day. My chaise longue joke went down very well so now I really am part of the furniture and I don’t feel I have to be on my best behaviour or try to impress anyone. This is a delightful state to find oneself in, but it is oddly easy there, because the whole point of the place is to make people feel comfortable.

Comfort is a word that can be overused; it can slide into sentiment. It can have a pious ring to it, even something slightly patronising: to comfort the afflicted has the faintest whiff of de haut en bas. But comfort in its sense of ease is a lovely, true thing, and that is what you find there, under the shadow of the blue mountains.

There is no sense of one-upmanship; everyone does what they do very well, and without fuss or fanfare; the people who are visiting learn what they learn, and take what they need. One of the veterans said to me today: ‘No one is competing to see who has the worst wound.’ I thought that was interesting, especially as this group was composed of the ones who wear their scars on the inside. They do not have artificial limbs; they have wounds of the mind. From the outside, you would never know. They are charming and funny and wry and dry and articulate. I wonder if that makes it more complicated, somehow.

The funny thing was that there were some acclaimed sporting gentlemen there today. (I think they might be a secret and so shall not reveal their names or discipline.) I was very excited by this and it was part of the reason that I took my iron tonic. But in the end there was so much there to fascinate, the veterans told me so many interesting and honest things, the horses were so delightful, and every single conversation I had was so riveting, that I barely had time to shake the tall, athletic fellows by the hand, let alone admire their tremendous physique.

Still, it is absolutely brilliant that a great sport is interested in such a good organisation, and from the athletes’ smiling faces I guess that they shall be drawn back to the place as I am. As I left, my stamina feebly shot, one of the sporting gents was levering himself onto a wooden horse, and being instructed in the art of riding Western, to general waves of merriment.

I smiled as I drove home. Up at the horses’ field, Red the Mare was dozy and affectionate and faintly comical, as she sometimes is. I had been fretting, lately, about the logistics of setting up her winter quarters. ‘You know what?’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a few decisions and a bit of fencing and a new water tough. I had the perspective police good and proper today, and I marked them well.’ She nodded her head wisely, as if she could have told me this all along, if only I had had the sense to ask.

Just as I was finishing this post, feeling rather weary and wondering how my tired mind would come up with a galvanic final paragraph, an email with a short link fell into my inbox.

I opened it to discover that two women called Chrissie and Susie are walking 780 kilometres with rucksacks on their backs, over the ancient pilgrims’ route from France to Spain, all to raise money for HorseBack UK. I gazed ruefully at the iron tonic. I don’t think even an industrial vat of it would get me that far. So now I don’t need a good final line. I have two remarkable women instead. Seven hundred and eighty kilometres. ON FOOT. I swear I shall never complain of fatigue again.

 

The link to the Incredible Walking Women is here: http://heslop-allen.vpweb.co.uk/?prefix=www

HorseBack, as always, is here: http://www.horseback.org.uk/

 

Pictures of the day:

The tidiest tack room I have ever seen in my life:

Four wise professors in the University of Everything:

Work in the arenas:

The view to the south:

With Gus the foal looking on:

And inside, there is a sporting gentleman on a very splendid wooden horse:

Finally, my own girls, in sepia today, for no special reason except that it brings a waft of Edwardian elegance that pleases me:

More thoughts on Twitter: a force for good?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A very strange thing happened today. I woke to the news that the American-Iranian journalist, Roxana Saberi (pictured left) has been sentenced to eight years in an Iranian jail for 'spying'. I knew a little about Saberi after hearing an interview with her father a few weeks ago on NPR, the nearest America has to Radio Four. (I get it in Scotland through the wonder of podcast.) At the time, the Iranians insisted that they were holding her because her journalist's permit had expired; she was actually arrested because a shopkeeper reported her for buying a bottle of wine, which is illegal in Iran. Her father was extremely worried about her state of mind, but it seemed that the authorities would soon let her go, and were mostly posturing, possibly for some kind of tactical diplomatic gain. Then, instead of the happy ending of Saberi going home to North Dakota, the whole thing escalated into spying charges and eight years' incarceration.

I found myself incredibly upset and frustrated by this: what they do to the women, and what they do to journalists, under repressive patriarchal regimes, often in the name of god, drives me nuts. So I put out a Tweet. It felt mildly stupid, almost adolescent, yelling into the wind. But I had read a story about how a critical mass of people on Twitter had contributed to the freeing of a man called Roy Bennet from a prison in Zimbabwe. I thought: if Twitter can take on Robert Mugabe and win, then maybe it has a chance against the Mullahs. I know that the young people in Iran are always reported to be very tech savvy. I thought: maybe nothing will come of it, I have only a meagre hundred followers, but I'll send it out into the Twitterverse anyway.

This is when the extraordinary thing happened. I went back after a couple of hours and it had been re-tweeted, over and over, by people I had never heard of, had no connection with, did not follow. How had they even found it? I am so new to Twitter that I don't quite understand the retweeting process. It seems to work something like this: when someone finds a message they like, they copy it out and post it on the site again, presumably to get it out to a wider audience. My newness also means that I have absolutely no idea how these strangers even found my message in the first place. As far as I can see there is no search facility on Twitter, or at least I have not found it (although I have not spent much time looking). I use the whole shebang in a very basic way: I write a couple of Tweets a day, trying to be either interesting, informative or, if at all possible, mildly droll. I regard avoiding banality a matter of honour. I engage in conversations with my new, fabulous Twitter friends, mostly women who are so brilliant that lately some of them have taken to making Twitter jokes in Latin. I still have not mastered the art of posting links, I am so much in the basic stage. I like Twitter because it makes me laugh, it gives me glimpses into other people's lives, which is always riveting, and in distilling my thoughts into 140 characters, it makes me pay a slightly Zennish attention to moments in my day, which I think might be an excellent contribution to mental health.

So this whole Roxana Saberi retweeting phenomenon felt like a miracle to me. I have no idea how it happened, so it has an aura of absolute magic about it. I sometimes feel a little protective of Twitter, because people bash it so lazily and so easily. (I know about this: I was once one of those very bashers.) Until today, I thought: come along, cross people, it's just a little bit of harmless fun. Now I wonder if it is not more than that. I wonder if it might not turn out to be an actual force for actual good.