Horse Sense

I was working in the garden yesterday when I spotted a steaming pile of what a horse does best just along the lane, so I downed tools, grabbed my wheelbarrow and spade, and nabbed it for my new improved compost heaps. I told a friend and she was appalled. But I'm so serious about these compost bins that I'm thinking of stowing a small shovel and bucket in the car, for I often pass similar freshly-produced piles and it's such a shame to leave them to be ground down by passing vehicles.

Still in an equine vein I watched a brilliant Icelandic film called Of Horses and Men. I don't know why but something told me to record it, and I'm so glad I did. It was extraordinarily powerful and beautiful, filmed in an isolated community where the horse is both the currrency and the object of everyone's lives. Locals played the parts, but the wild horses were the stars. It was a series of short stories, and the opener began with a very tall, fastidious, tweed-clad man getting his dainty little pony ready for a ride. The camera panned to various houses dotted around the wild landscape where neighbours with binoculars were waiting for his approach. He mounted, and he was off, but the pony was not trotting or cantering but pacing, high stepping, very fast. It was amazing to watch the speed with which this little pony ran, her rider sitting very upright and proud, his legs hanging well below her girth. Anyway, our uptight man gets more than he bargained for. A black stallion very evidently on heat takes a shine to the small white pony, and having broken through a fence ravishes the pony with her rider in situ. It was so shocking, so unbelievable, that I sat stunned, unable to move. He took it personally of course, his dignity pricked (no pun intended) and when he got home he shot his beloved pony. Each story was as dramatic in its different way. An alcoholic man rides his pony way out into the ocean to buy high octane vodka from a passing Russian ship, the freezing waves crashing around them, him immune in his alcoholic state, the land a dot on the horizon. And there was much, much more. I've kept the recording. One day I might want to watch it again.

It's been a day of baking, casseroles and soup. The kitchen is filled with beguiling smells, and soon the freezer will be stocked as well. I had planned to wash the mud off every pair of boots I possess, all caked after being stored away like that all winter, but the rain came too soon. I have a new resolution: to clean my boots when I come in each time, however tired I am, and leave them in a state of readiness for the next time. And pigs might fly.

Hou can one person have so many booots, all of them muddy?