Awwwww… so glad I blogged, it’s like having a family album. This is my old Saturday routine and while I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy about it, my journey to the yard is much easier these days!
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OCTOBER 2006 I get up. I leave the flat in good time, to do some errands in town, maybe meet a friend for a cuppa*, and eat [usually, unspeakably, to my abject horror, as if it’s beyond my control, at McDonalds] and in my morbid fear of missing the number 63 bus at 13.00, I stand in O’Connell Street for half an hour.
I listen to my Horseplay playlist on my iPod.
I pace up and back: there are loads of buses that use this stop, floods of them, and I nearly stand on the centre line of the road to make sure I don’t miss the bus.
I can’t miss the bus. The next bus won’t get me to my lesson on time, and a taxi costs almost €40—which I found when through no fault of my own, and entirely down to the service provider, the bus never turned up…
The bus arrives! I get on. It’s an hour’s journey to the yard, a fifteen minute walk up the road to the laneway, and I have an hour to hang in the barn, and to watch the other lessons, the little girls and the big girls < the intermediate women, who I envy as I’ve envied no one since the girls in middle school whose hair looked exactly like Farrah fecking Fawcett Majors’. Argo is often working so we don’t get to have a chat, which is too bad, it’s nice to hang out with him on the ground.
The two o’clock lesson ends. By now, I confidently march up to Argo and take his reins from the Polish girl who loves him too. He throws his head around a bit— Who is this? Someone else? Who? Oh, okay— and rubs his face on my butt. Niamh brings the block over and I mount. I can adjust my stirrups now, by myself, from the saddle. I sit tall, and I know it’s going to be another great hour, the hour that makes the rest of the day—the rest of the week—manageable, liveable, wonderful. Who knows? It may be my best hour yet.
*Or attend a 12-step meeting, which I was absolutely not willing to mention back then!
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Many Brave Fools: A Story of Addiction, Dysfunction, Codependency… and Horses debuts on the 5th of March
Preorder your copy today:
> In the US, add your email to the waitlist on Trafalgar Square Books’ site.
> In the UK and Europe, please see Quiller Publishing’s information page.
MANY BRAVE FOOLS 