Saturday was a lovely relaxing day, and it's not often I get to say that as you know. Nor is it very often that I get to stay in bed until 10am with a nice cup of tea, or operate a strict policy of avoidance when it comes to the usual Saturday doings involving shopping and the weekly pilgrimage to the local feed merchant. Indeed, even the weekly visit to the local farm shop has been replaced by a home delivery service of the finest local produce. Happy days.
And so it was that Sid and Nik Nak Chunky went off to Waitrose while I tootled around at home, tidying and pimping a suitable percentage of the homestead into a more reasonable state. Even that was quite relaxing when set alongside the fact that there was No Real Need To Go Anywhere. Of course, the weather was shit. Even setting aside the fact that this is England, the weather has been phenomenally shit. Rain, rain, rain, rain. The water table is saturated, the fields are under water and there's persistent cloud and unpleasantness. Argh.
Anyway. Sid had announced his desire to cook and was busy throughout the afternoon making preps while I did the boys. Rode Q, who was on excellent form, although he seems to think that throwing some shapes on the lunge is now an important part of his warm up routine. We went through our lateral work and looked to get a little more bend in the half pass. Very nice effort to the left but couldn't get past the head tilt to the right. Should have either done more warm up or been less crap. Went looking for some more collection and suspension in the trot or alternatively half steps into canter for a nice collected gait. Feeling puckish I did some plie and counter canter, and the most notable thing was that he maintained the counter canter on the right rein, where often he will do a change. Really pleased with the way he worked.
Gave Knickers a lesson on him, during which she did her first sitting trot without stirrups and I enjoyed regaling her with a number of unpleasant analogies to get her to stretch through her body. Meh. Feeling puckish, I decided to give her brief introduction to lateral work on the lunge, asking Q to leg yield on either rein, counting the inside hind for her and getting her to explain what she felt. I was going to demonstrate some shoulder in for her but Q was giving me evils and I decided to leave it there. Really pleased with Nik Nak, she presented quite an elegant picture which was really pleasing. The next thing is to try and get past the bit where the brain kicks in and says "hang on a minute, what the fuck are you doing?" and the balance is lost.
Meanwhile T was feeling very lively and well, putting on a nice passage for Q and generally being full of beans. He looked pretty much 100% aside from the odd moment but then later he wasn't sound again and today he was sound only in walk. So I think it's time for't vitnery.
A friend of ours came round to drop off a sack of feed which she'd borrowed in extremis. Ordinarily this would have been a straightforward task were it not for the fact that the front gate had been locked, I didn't have my phone on me and nobody heard her yelling for attention, so the only thing left to her was to clamber over said gate with a 20Kg sack of feed. Whoops!
The rest of the evening was largely taken up thus:
Food
Home made ravioli of two varieties: walnut & gorgonzola and asparagus, St Agur & bacon, served in a delicate broth
Pan fried duck breast with sauteed potatoes, braised fennel, baked chicory, Japanese mushrooms and a red wine reduction
Pear tarte tatin
I can say Jesus wept, it was a glory to eat. I've never eaten braised fennel before and it set the duck off particularly well. I also must concur with Sid that a pear only tatin is an inferior version; apples do seem to lend a particularly necessary flavour to the proceedings.
Drinks
A nice Amarone
Sounds
Lynard Skynard, the Stones, Rodrigo y Gabriela.
Sunday
Today has been rather less relaxing. I decided that the time had come to sort out the giant mound of wood chips in the middle of the picadeiro. By sort out, I mean transfer to wheelbarrow and distribute about the place then rake it out to a state of relative evenness. Like many other farm jobs, it sounds easy but is in fact hours of back breaking work. The dogs saw fit to gambol and play on and around the pile throughout, pausing only to run around like a mad thing (Willow) or sit and catch a breather on account of being persistently harassed by an exuberant young puppy (Dora).
Broke for lunch, whereupon it was decided that a fry up would be just the thing. As in all things, there are some fundamental religious differences between members of Luso Towers on the matter of fry ups. Sid, for example, is adamant that toast is the way forward and that you can't have a fry up without beans, whereas I am quite happy to have fried tomatoes instead and would rather have fried bread. Sid thinks this is wrong on two fronts: first, that tomatoes should only be eaten "as God intended" and second, that fried bread is the work of Satan. My contention however is that there's nothing like a bit of fried bread under the right circumstances, provided that it is cooked correctly, which few people do. I'd never order it at a greasy spoon, for example, but cooked properly it needn't be a dripping oily mass of rancid cholesterol on a plate. I did wonder if this preference was a result of my working class roots, but Sid's contention was that fry ups generally are inherently working class, and that posh people tend to eat Alpen :)
This afternoon I brought the mares with me into the picadeiro, what with their field being a mud bath. Let it be said that they are just as capable of throwing a wide and impressive array of moves as the boys, and delighted in a spree of bucking, spinning and charging about, or at least as much as letting off steam in a 20x20 space allows. Awesone girlies with their lovely big bellies. Meanwhile I carried on about my toil, occasionally stopping to enjoy the show. Some while later I became dimly aware that something was not quite as it should be, and I realised it was because there was a quality to Q's neigh that I hadn't heard before, so I looked up and bugger me, the girls had let themselves out of the picadeiro and were mooching about the yard! Bastards. So I gathered them up and returned them to the picadeiro, and tied a leadrope around the gate. Ha. The expression on their faces was priceless. The equine version of "what, me?".
And so to the conclusion of another weekend which has once again proven itself not to be nearly long or stretchy enough. To wrap up, another Sid special Chinese noodle soup with duck, pak choi and Chinese mushrooms. Nom.
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