and then a LOT happened to get us to happiest day for many a year
(I NEVER WEAR NEON....! ...but fashions change for them I suppose)
18 Feb 2021
One heartfelt purpose as the kids didn't have the other school was a bit of real schooling: pass on some good rural homespun rural skills (and environmental too, as rebuilding some gateposts properly means that use of resources is reduced in that shoddy work needs earlier replacement).
Now.... our lasses - the true stars of the show.... need it done properly, they deserve it.
All March 2021...yes we have sunny times even early spring so get out in it! And more important - light footprint wise, plan jobs with the weather - i.e. prior creosote and restoration of an old trailer it needs a week or so truly drying out so the creosote penetrates much further and this the job lasts longer. Ditto other woodwwork. We get plenty of sunshine in uk if you plan to it.
All posts recycled, repaired, reused, scavenged ...illegal creosote was some left over from many years ago. But you gotta plan it around dry sunny weather ! ... dry the wood first ... ... and we had six weeks of it already prior to April.
Lots more film but the writer lives in a place thank god rather a long way away from much humanity, however the downside is 1/2 mb a second only upload..... those below took all night just for one!
A solution will be found soon.
Just on gig training day... 10 May and on.
12 May 2021
But what is actually important:
The IGRC is only for one reason, to pass down to the younger generations the simply superb rural wisdom of a certain cantankerous ageing horsewoman. Who as it happens was about to send her beasts off to glue, or at the very least retirement, last September. Living entirely alone, and alone all day, she could no longer cope she said. And had real maudlin. But...i think we cured that....
This nag had only had three training sessions with her. And the five adults gathered to watch lift off were simply awestruck. That is the real version of 'awesome', not the fey one that you hear from the mouths of the voluble attention seekers a little too often perhaps. To appease and train this nag in such a short period of time - only a week at it, which is in fact here with us as an extra to the two original beasts - doing the owner a favour, and is a far more frisky beast than our original pair, takes true skill.
And two of our young lasses stood next to me seeing for themselves how a Master, or is it Mistress? - one gets rather confused these days as to what is 'allowed', who masters her craft, can weave magical spells - the real versions not some fantasy Potter nonsense.
"well... you have shocked even me how... perfectly ....you seemed to have been born to it.."
But then what our lasses also saw, now and again, and this day - first day of the gig on the road, was something else maybe just as important: six adults have been in our loose gatheration in one iteration or other; none except two had met before. All gathered a little Pied Piperish by a certain cycling chap. And there are natural frictions that have occasionally - with that angsty societal backdrop, bubbled. But they see us never ever taking any mere human emotion so seriously that the next day the real smiles are not there once more. That is what 'animal welfare' actually requires: no human ego. Never taking frictions to heart. Every day a new day. Had we not kept these beasts exercised they would have deteriorated beyond adequate health as their age is such that they do need four or five hacks a week just to keep shipshape and all systems go.
Now, who's gonna get married and head off into the sunset for nuptials in that gig I wonder...another daft plan?
