Am I the only person

who finds the self service checkouts springing up everywhere unbelievably irritating? Having decided that £40 was a bit much to spend on a Christmas tree, we retreated to B&Q who now have cheap Christmas trees (good) but now have these wretched self service things installed. The chap in the queue before us gave up, dumped his stuff, and left, and after the machine had been re-set, it was our go. It's the voice that gets me - all calmly reasonable, and so bloody bossy. Do this... do that.... Pay now... tolerant pause ... Pay now... further tolerant pause... Pay now.... by which time, the idiot human (me) at the other end is steaming, as all payment methods are at the right hand side, apart from the one I want, which is to the left, which Miss Bossy doesn't see fit to mention. Then being reminded "Don't forget your receipt" makes me want to scream "NO you bossy mare, I won't take it!"

Of course, all this irritation and fury means nothing whatsoever to the machine, which sits there, utterly and totally unmoved: which of course is the point - I like a human at the end of the transaction.

Our local libraries are all introducing self service now too. I can't think of any way though, that it might mean more books unless they cut staff too. I've watched our local libraries gradually shedding books, sometimes on the most spurious criteria. One library decided to move from 6 shelves to 5, the theory being that books were easier to reach (I could reach them all without thinking about it and I am a massive 5' 8"). Hundreds of books were junked. Recently anything without the right sort of bar code - ie anything not published within the last 10 years - was also junked as it couldn't be read by the new self service machines. The dreadful irony of this is that there is very little left in our village library now that I actually want to read, so I go less and less often.

If there is anyone out there reading this who works for the library services, and can tell me what the rationale is behind cutting the number of books you stock, I would love to hear from them: the more so if it's working and the number of borrowers is up.

And more....

Having said I'd finished loading on new stock I promptly bought some more books, and they're now on the site. A couple of highlights:

I don't really feel I've done anything else other than flog away cataloguing stuff, but I hope I should be able to do a few more blog posts now (unless of course I am completely overwhelmed with orders, which would be nice....)

Anyway, the new stock's here, and the thought occurs that it might not be a bad idea to buy the odd Christmas present myself, having given precious little thought to Christmas so far, and it's not that far away is it?

New stock

You might have noticed there have been precious few updates to the website recently, or blog posts either. This is because I've been head down, frantically trying to catalogue all my new stock well before Christmas. It's now all on, and you can see it in the Just In catalogue here.

A couple of highlights: a signed copy of A Pony to School, by Diana Pullein-Thompson,

one of the best-loved dustjackets over on the forum: Kathleen Mackenzie's Jumping Jan,

and one of the rare late Brumby titles by Elyne Mitchell: Brumbies of the Night.

If you're keen on the Pullein-Thompsons, their joint autobiography of their early years, Fair Girls and Grey Horses, is very well worth a read.

Review: Susan Richards - Chosen by a Horse

Susan Richards - Chosen by a Horse

Constable: £7.99

This is yet another book that's been in the review pile for months: so long, in fact, I can't remember when I got it.

It's about a rescue horse: a Standardbred mare called Lay Me Down, and the woman who rescued her, Susan Richards. Lay Me Down was rescued when she and her companions were seized by their owner, who had neglected them so badly they were nearly at the point of starvation. At first, it wasn't even clear if Lay Me Down would survive, but she and her foal both did. The foal was reclaimed by the abusive owner, who had to sign all the foals over to his vet in lieu of fees, but Lay Me Down stayed.

She really was a quite exceptional mare, and Susan Richards shows you just what a complete sweetie this horse was. Despite the horrors she had known, she bore no one any malice, and was always accepting and kind: no mareish nasties at all, unlike one of Susan Richard's other horses, the Morgan Georgia, who was the ultimate in mareish sass. Susan Richards does wonders in portraying this mare. Thinking back over the horses I've known, I've known difficult mares by the bucketload, and I've known mares who would put up with anything a child chose to do to them, but I don't think I've ever known a horse as benign. The animal in my life most like Lay Me Down is in fact my dog, Holly, whom we took on at the age of 15 months after she'd ping ponged in and out of 5 homes. Susan Richards describes Lay Me Down thus:

Unlike me, Lay Me Down seemed to feel no rancor. In spite of everything, she was open and trusting of people, qualities I decidedly lacked. It was her capacity to engage that drew me to her, that made me aware of what was possible for me if I had her capacity to... to what? Forgive? Forget? Live in the Moment? What exactly was it that enabled an abused animal, for lack of a better word, to love again?

Alas, Lay Me Down is not done with suffering once she is rescued. She develops a tumour which pushes out her eye, and it is inoperable.

The picture of the horse drew me in, but Susan Richard's own experiences didn't, and I'm not quite sure why. I think one thing that made me disengage from her was the episode of the foal being taken away, or to be more accurate, what didn't happen afterwards. After the grim emotional haul of the foal being parted from her mother and carted away after a Judge decreed that the owner could reclaim all the foals from his herd, in order to meet his debts, I expected that we'd be told what happened to the foal after she was taken in by the vet - she was too young to be weaned, apparently, so what happened next? This complete silence was a little odd. Perhaps the foal's story didn't fit into the book, but the foal simply isn't mentioned again after she's hauled away. Susan Richards' own reaction seemed quite profound, and so I expected her to at the least, try and contact the vet and buy the foal back. Maybe she did, or maybe she didn't, but I couldn't quite remove the foal from my brain, and she haunted the rest of the book.

Perhaps tellingly, the book moves on from the foal's removal to a description of how Susan Richards became the person she was: her mother died at the age of five, and then she was shunted from one abusive relation to another. I couldn't help but draw parallels. I'm glad Susan Richards felt Lay Me Down had unlocked something in her; and she gave Lay Me Down the best and most loving of care as she became more and more sick.

That's not to say this is a bad read: it's incredibly involving, and of course the end is tragic and you will cry bucketloads. Just can't get that foal out of my mind.

Wonder where this one will end up

There have been mutterings for a while that jump racing would be banned in Victoria, Australia, and now it has been, from 2011. Read the story here.

As far as I'm aware, there's no equivalent mutterings here. There are some things I disagree with very strongly in racing: breaking and racing two year olds, for one, and not giving any thought to what happens to the horses after their racing career is finished for another.

However, I love National Hunt (as jump racing is called here). Horses do die, and it is absolutely terrible to watch one of those falls when you know the horse is not going to get up. When you make the death or injuring of horses into a welfare issue that you're determined to clear up, I do wonder where it will stop. Horses die eventing, show jumping and hunting, and of course hacking on the roads is not exactly safe. If you take as your premise that the horse hasn't asked to be doing x and that therefore if y can happen you must stop doing x will that leave us with simply poddling round an arena doing dressage? (And I am simply not going to open the can of worms that is dressage...)

I suppose what worries me is how you define what is an acceptable risk to the horse, and to you. I'm more worried about the horse than the human, the human being the one with choice. A lot of changes have been made to Aintree over the years, for example. It's much safer than it was. I don't think you can remove 100% of the risk for the horse, whatever you're doing: riding is a partnership, and either you or the horse might get something wrong. It comes down to how much death you're prepared to tolerate, and I suppose if I look at the issue rationally, I obviously am prepared to accept a small amount of death, although I hate it.

Rollkur (well sort of) in 1961

I said in a previous blog post that I'd never seen or heard of a horse doing rollkur on its own. The following example isn't really a horse doing rollkur because it feels like it: it's more because the horse wants its own way and is evading the bit, but still. Here it is:

"She had a mouth like iron, but she could not be accused of bolting, or even running away. She would just tuck in her chin until it touched her chest, drop the bit, and canter slowly, steadily and relentlessly on. The most that you could hope to do when she was in this mood was to turn her into a circle, and wait until she grew tired - unless of course you had a friend on foot who would run in and grab the bridle." (Stella Markeson - Horse Portraits, in Riding Magazine, Sept 1961)

This is of course evasion, and not at all actual rollkur, but I found it interesting to read of a horse doing something similar!

Review: Alison Hart - Racing to Freedom Trilogy

Alison Hart: Gabriel's Horses
Peach Tree Publishing, Atlanta £8.21

Alison Hart: Gabriel's Journey
Peach Tree Publishing, Atlanta £8.21

Age 10+

Alison Hart's Website

My New Year's Resolution was to get through the to-be-reviewed pile more quickly, but nearly at the end of the year, I can tell you I have failed miserably. Gabriel's Horses I have had for well over a year; Gabriel's Journey much less long, thanks to the author, who kindly sent me a copy, but still quite long enough for it to be embarrassing.

The second book I haven't read, but if it's up to the standard of the two I have, it's well worth finding. The Race to Freedom trilogy is set in Kentucky, during the American Civil War. Kentucky, as I learned, was not a centre of operations during the war. Only a few battles were fought, and racing and breeding carried on. So unaffected was Kentucky that some Southern owners brought their horses to Kentucky to remove them from the ravages of the war in the South. The state was not completely unaffected however: Guerilla raiders (the ones in the book are Confederate but I assume there were Union counterparts) raided farms for horses to use in the war: a horse's illustrious pedigree and racing career were no proof against being taken.

The book's hero, Gabriel Alexander, is an African American boy born into slavery. His father was free, but because his mother was a slave, the children were slaves too. Gabriel is, to some extent, lucky: Master Giles, the owner of Woodville Farm, where the family live, is mostly considerate and kindly. Gabriel loves horses, and manages to follow his dream of working with them. Racism though is never far from the surface, and Alison Hart paints a disturbing picture of some of its manifestations during the Civil War: Confederate guerillas hunt down and kill any blacks who survived the Saltville action described in the third book, and racism is casually present in the attitudes of many.

Being British, the American Civil War isn't something that swam into my history syllabuses, so I found the historical detail fascinating. I had no idea that there was a colored cavalry regiment. Gabriel goes to join his father in the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry, though he does not fight, but is used as a horse boy. Tellingly, the Cavalry are not issued with the most recent, and effective weapons. The Saltville attack described in the book was a Confederate victory, but Gabriel survives, having learned that war is, as his mother says, not about glory but death.

This book is a fascinating picture of the decency that can exist in human beings, as well as the unthinking prejudice and cruelty. Gabriel is an attractive character: he's brave but not unbelievably so, and the telling of the story in the present tense gives the book's events an immediacy historical novels don't always have.

This book also, gasp, is produced as a hardback, with a dustjacket: something British publishers now alas don't do for most children's books.