Steam off a hot horse and a drying road. Heavy rain that dies away like a round of applause, leaving the air singing to a beat of dripping trees. Anxiously counting magpies, where is your wife? Tiny purple flowers among the buttercups. Fireworks of yellow on the broom. A red squirrel squashed on the tarmac. A rare red one, he should have lived. Shot-silk silver birch bark flashing by us. Cattle jostling along the fence line, shitting and squelching. Clachnaben hunching wart-n

June evening in the horses’ field. A couple, no, a trinity of magpies. For joy. For a girl. A galaxy of buttercups, an anarchy of docks, an angry horde of nettles. One deer who grazes peacefully within our fences. The horses don’t even look up as he hurdles the fence. Tiny bunnies oblivious to the speck of buzzard above us. The rain is coming. It will be light for hours yet. The trees shelter the horses, and no one else is here. Reduce the world to this, if only for an hour

Jack’s new grooming brushes arrived this week. They work so well on his freckly white coat. He’s beautiful and strong, and now he is almost shining. I spend time over each muscle on his powerful neck shoulders and quarters. We built these muscles together, up hills, along the beach, through the forest, over fences, in looping dressage movements. I work him on the lunge, helping him stretch out his back and his neck. No one can see the muscles he’s built in me, the ability to