22/11/2023
[Author's note: warning for swearing, unfairness, and general Extreme Mabel.]
One of my strictest rules (and I hate rules and mostly don’t believe in them) is that my Mabel is not allowed on social media. Mabel is my Lesser Self. She gets furious and judges people unfairly and becomes impatient and swears like a drunken sailor on shore leave. She is demanding and she is a diva and she won’t put up with any crap, not for a single second. She expects people to behave in the way she would like them to behave and she gets extremely cross when they don’t.
She’s been hanging about for a couple of days now. I let her have a fandango - because she absolutely must dance - and then I invite her to go back to wherever she came from. (The murky depths of my subconscious, I suppose. Although it also may be from Mars. She has a stellar, expanding-universe vibe sometimes. She’d love a rocket ship. She laughs at entropy.)
But she is yelling in my ear. She wants to say something about horses. I think: do I dare?
(I think of TS Eliot and -
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.)
Sod it. This is important. Mabel has seen one too many posts about people calling their horses dangerous or naughty or difficult or mean AFTER HAVING THEM ONE WEEK.
I mean, I’m all about words and I have no words.
Sometimes it’s three weeks. I once read someone complaining that their ex-racehorse was freaking out when she asked him to do collected canter. She’d had him for just under a month and she didn’t say when his last race was. Mabel wanted to yell: ‘He’s never done a collected canter in his life! He doesn’t have the muscle set for it! He doesn’t know what you are talking about! He’s galloped in long, straight lines with a small person perched over his withers!’
There’s someone out there now who is scaring themselves witless because a horse who was fine when tried out is now not behaving well during the first week in the new home. The poor person is falling apart and is stressed to all get out and I daren’t even think about how that horse is feeling.
Why doesn’t somebody say something? Why isn’t it on the front page of Horse and Hound every week that horses are prey animals and they don’t speak English and their number one priority is to stay alive and not be eaten by mountain lions, which is how the entire species did not go extinct? Why doesn’t someone say that slapping a great big bit of leather on their back and pulling another bit of leather tight around their stomach and adding goodness-knows-what in their mouth and asking them to do flying changes is something which must baffle the entire horse population? They do all our weird human stuff because they are kind and good and big-hearted. They don’t moon about in the field saying to each other, ‘I do hope we are going to do collected canter today.’
That’s before we’ve even got to the whole stress of being walked into a horsebox with no warning and no explanation and left, miles from home, in a place where you don’t know the smells or the sounds or the routine or the horses or the humans. And on account of the whole not speaking English thing, nobody can explain to you what the hell is going on. Your fight, flight and freeze is dialled up to a Spinal Tap eleven and a complete stranger says, ‘Yes! Let’s do TRANSITIONS!’
Ah, that’s better. The worst is out now. It’s completely unfair and totally immoderate and entirely over-the-top, but that’s my Mabel. She needed to have her holler. She’s smiling slyly at me as I write that, because she will never admit she gets anything wrong.
I see suddenly, blindingly, why she is so cross. That poor person, the scared one who is branding her horse a disaster after a single week, the one who ignited the Mabel firestorm - that was me. That was me, eleven years ago. Except I was probably worse.
I got a thoroughbred after thirty years away from horses, assumed everything would come back because Mrs Payne had drilled my independent seat into me with the cavalettis and the no reins, told myself smugly that I rode before I could construct a coherent sentence, and within perhaps ten days expected that I could ride the red mare into a 30,000 acre Caledonian pine forest (one of the most ancient in Europe) with a song in my heart.
I was that person.
The red mare, who has a dash of Mabel in her, said, ‘ARE YOU FU***NG JOKING?’
The awful thing is that I wasn’t.
And so she had to show me, through a series of rearings and swervings and leapings and spookings and hurlings of the head, that I was entirely absurd and that I needed to go back to the beginning and actually learn everything I thought I knew.
So that is what I did.
I never, ever stop thanking her for that. She literally changed my life. Ironically, it was that early folly which led to acres of present knowledge.
It turned out well for me, but I’m not sure it does for everyone. I got wildly lucky. A series of connections and links and twists of fate brought me among incredible, wise horse people, many of whom are now my friends. If the Google elves and the algorithm had been in a different mood on the night I typed, through my despairing tears, ‘How to have a happy horse,’ I’d still be kicking on and gritting my teeth and crying.
So I do sometimes fret, just a little. I wish someone could say to the sad people, as I wish someone had said to me, ‘A week is nothing.’ I could have saved so much terror and heartbreak if I had known about building the relationship from the ground up - literally and metaphorically - and that time is the greatest gift and that connection is everything.
A little booklet should come with every new horse. It would be like one of those sweet primers for when you went abroad in the old days. Every horse person should be able to say, ‘la plume de ma tante,’ or ‘la robe verte est très jolie,’ or ‘je suis désolé,’ in Horse. I wish I’d had some basic grammar and syntax. I’d have liked a few phrases which would have made sense to the poor, increasingly panicked red mare, who was reduced to yelling at me. I just had cussedness and a dream, and neither of those did the miserable mare any good.
The language analogy is not bad. I helped someone with their horse the other day. There was a discrete problem and it was one of those ones which is available for solving, so I solved it. Then I showed her how to solve it. She was pleased, but she had a moment of sorrow that she hadn’t been able to do it on her own, to somehow magically know what was needed.
I said that it’s always easier working with someone else’s horse, because all the complicated emotions and all the mad love aren’t there, and one can be objective and rational.
But I also said, ‘It’s a bit like I can speak Italian. And someone has come from Genoa and everyone in Scotland is rushing away in fast English and the Genovese can’t understand a word and then, suddenly, she hears someone talking her language. Think of how absurdly happy and grateful she is. It’s a little piece of home. She no longer feels lost. Well,’ I said, ‘you just need to learn a bit of Italian, for your mare, that’s all.’
Mabel is quiet now. She’s had such a dance that she can’t even remember what got her so wild in the first place. My fingers are slow over the keyboard, wandering gently, trying to find a place to finish. My sane grown-up, who has returned to the fray, is asking kindly whether I want to press publish or not. ‘There was swearing,’ she says. ‘And intemperance.’ Mabel rushes back into the room and pops her head round the door. (She has dyed her hair fierce red and she’s painted her eyelids the colour of a kingfisher’s wing.)
‘Publish,’ she says, ‘and be damned.’
