Drained. This physical exhaustion, this utter emptiness that feels full somehow. Solid. Good. CC says Henny’s secretly training us for a triathlon, what with the horse riding, and the swimming, and the walk all over Victoria yesterday.

The Ealing Riding School is just down Gunnersbury from the Chinese medicine place—this one a nice suburban English house with a pagoda top over the front porch. There’s a metal pipe gate and a wooden swinging gate out front, and the paddocks just beyond. There’s coffee in the main room, a small white dog keeping an eye on all of us, wood floors scuffed and gritty. Boots clump-clump-clumping, and a fuzzy brown ball of cat asleep on a pile of jackets.

The horse was called Promise, and I didn’t fall off. True, we were just moseying ’round the paddock, while I learnt how to make her halt and go, to turn left and turn right; and true, Henny and I somehow found ourselves on the IJ girls of horses, who kept stopping for a nibble. But still.

Learning how to get on the horse was easy, learning how to get off was hard. To dismount, you need to swing your right leg over its ass and slide down the other side. You swing your right leg up and back, and you think you are swinging high enough, but I assure you you are not. And every time your heel kicks the horse as you try to swing your leg over, you say, “Oh! Sorry! Sorry!”

Today there was Georgia, a brown horse with white socks. I am learning trot work, which is surprising all around because of the rhythm of it, the speed, the bumpiness on muddy ground, and having to be aware of every bit of my body at the same time: standing up in the saddle, sitting down, hips wide, knees soft, heels down, shoulders back. There were moments when it all came together, though, and, man, it makes a girl want to crow ya-haa!



I poked about in the stables after, “Hi, beauty; Hi, cute; Hey, sweet; You’re nice”, stroking their long noses and patting their smooth necks. The horses were probably thinking “Loopy city girl”, but they patiently stood about to be petted.

These half-hour lessons are a tease. We only have one more session tomorrow, and I might just have to refuse to get off the horse at the end of it. Hens is suggesting a riding holiday in Andalucia, but this will have to wait till she gets a job at the United Nations and starts raking in big enough bucks for the both of us.

I want to say one more thing, which is this: A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says: “Hey, why the long face?”