The Diary

Order! Order!

The Arrival of Anne

Anne was a bottle blonde, worldly woman with a Joanna Lumley on 60 a day voice, a bouffant ponytail with a velvet bow, ski slacks, a rollneck and pearls, and to me, she was old. I wonder now if she was even 40. I was 13, but from a sheltered background, so my fighting age was about 11.

She may have had a crush on the aristocratic riding school boss (who was married) or just liked to be around the horses and so many young, volatile women. Or maybe it was just a job? She never rode, as far as I remember, despite loving the horses. She took over the office, and she cleaned up the tack room. Where once the mugs you grabbed to make your lunchtime cup-a-soup had been recently used to soak leather martingale stops in neatsfoot oil, and were redolent with that unforgettable scent of a pony-mad childhood, now there was order. There was also the equally evocative aroma of Lemon Sqezy - a washing up liquid which belongs firmly in the 1960s and 70s, and can just as easily conjour up Girl Guide Camp.

Above all things though, she reorganised The Diary.

The Blessed Diary

The diary was probably foolscap, (we would now use A4, a little smaller and somehow less magical), and for five days a week, it bore ordinary entries. ‘Lynne off.’ (Lynne could be very off, as I recall). ‘Farrier.’ ‘June B, private lesson 10am, Mr Bill.’

At the weekends, though, it became a work of great intricacy, and would now be at the very least an Excel spreadsheet.

Its rows were the names of ponies - Chunky, Golden Boy, Secret, Misty - and giant, patient cobs for adults - Marjory, Prudence, Reggie - and the odd nutter like Rambler.

Its columns were the ride times. Still engraved on my memory. 09.00 am , 10.15 am, 11.30 am. (Lunch.) 2.00 pm, 3.15 pm, 4.30pm. (Turn out, tidy up, go home.) In the resulting cells were names, filling up as the week progressed.

Some were populated weeks in advance, as wealthy course pre-payers bagged a favourite. Others more last minute, as pocket money, change from grandma, and baby sitting earnings accumulated. Last of all, if a gap persisted, and the pony had at least one rest during the day, there arose the tempting possibility of a ‘free ride’ for those of us who worked untold hours for erratic ‘points’ towards such exalted rewards.

Jill, my constant childhood companion

My Imagined Future

In my dream life as an adult, I answered the phone, spoke encouragingly to the callers, and said things like:

“Well, you can come at 10.15 if you’re happy with Charlie? That’s a lesson with Gayle. But if you really wanted Danny Boy, it will have to be the 4.30 hack with Jane.”

Then I would nod understandingly and write ‘Susan B’ carefully in at 10.15 beside Charlie’s name.

The pages curled with autumn’s misty damp at the end of the show season, and the obsessively squared off muck heap steamed. Anne lit the pungent paraffin heater in the tack room for us to huddle around, and made coffee which she sent us to deliver to the instructors, shivering in the brick built 18th Century indoor school. We swept and swept the damp, sticky yard, but still bran stuck to it like Christmas card glitter. Rats ran across the top of the sugar beet tub in the feed room. We watched entranced as one or two of the fancier liveries were clipped.

I dreamed of a day when I would have charge of just such a place, just such a diary.

Imaginary Play

A year or two ago, when I was running a Community Supported Agriculture project on the smallholding, and it wasn’t going too well, I suddenly decided to indulge in a kind of therapeutic exercise.

Perhaps because of Anne, and Gayle, and Golden Boy, I buy a big page a day A4 office diary every year. It seldom has much in it. I took down the preceding year’s version, opened it to a blank spread, and played out a fantasy.

I divided up the pages. Womens Group. After School Club. Home Ed Session. Volunteer Session (with lunch). Then I imagined taking the calls and writing in the names.

Busy this week! That’s both After School Club sessions full, and the Home Ed Session. Oh! I forgot to put Trudy down for volunteering, she did say when I saw her in town.

Returning to reality, I did some maths. If I charge this and there are that many … and no, it still didn’t work. Also, I hate taking phone calls. And being surrounded by people all the time drains me to the point of actual illness. So there’s that.

I wonder why it resonated so?

Half a Century Passes

Over the years, I’ve used my secretarial qualifications in many different settings, and these days of course, diaries are online, as are booking systems. I suspect even riding schools have an app for that.

I do love a slow and simple life. I love my hand cranked sewing machine, and coffee grinder. I also love a gadget and an app though, and I can’t imagine running my VA business without Google Calendar and Asana. Why on earth do I still hold the memory of that diary so closely?

I think it might be something to do with Anne. Secretly, I think she was a motherly figure. Not like my mother, certainly, nor anyone else’s among the gang that hung out and helped, I suspect. She was a mother figure who didn’t flinch at swear words, didn’t care about dirty boots, knew that the young instructors and their boyfriends weren’t perhaps as innocent as they might have been.

She was funny, and husky, and just a little bit dangerous perhaps? But I’m pretty sure she heard out a few broken hearts. I can’t remember confiding in her myself, but she saw all. She drove the ancient pick up truck, Delilah, down to the fields to catch, first thing, loaded with all us volunteers, and drove back behind us, in case the bareback, headcollar clad ponies managed to drop one of us on the ride back to the yard. She would have heard every wistful comment, seen who gave whom a leg up, watched when we went ‘two up’.

More than all that though, now I think of it, as I face life’s challenges with a brain which doesn’t always quite conform, I realise that she came in and made order out of chaos.

She looked at the well meaning scrawl, and the arrows and circles, smiled indulgently, took up a ruler, and drew some lines.

A Prescription for a Kind of Peace

The diary wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t a spreadsheet (which had not been invented), nor was it infallible, perfect, or really, particularly beautiful (except to me, clearly) but it worked. Together with a bit of washing up, and a modicum of care for cold people, and risk taking teenagers, the square, sensible grid of Saturdays and Sundays brought calm, predictability, and boundaries.

In our over stimulated, post covid, 5G, endlessly interconnected, AI obsessed present, I think what I could do with is a clear, blank page, and a ruler. I may remind myself, sometimes, when it all gets too much, to wash a coffee cup carefully, keep an eye open for the vulnerable, and draw some lines in my diary.

What are the mysterious icons of your childhood? Have you wondered lately why they hold such a place in your personal treasure chest? Do please tell me about them.