HotToTrot
Well-Known Member
Everybody wants their first time to be special. And, for the lucky few, it really is. Most of us, though, find that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Perhaps we're too nervous to really enjoy it. Maybe we're worried that we're going to get it wrong, and it'll hurt. Or we might realise, too late, that we're not quite ready, and that we don't trust our partner quite as much as we'd previously thought.
My first time wasn't as I'd planned. I didn't do it in the place I'd thought I'd do it in and I didn't do it with the one I'd dreamed, for the last two years, I'd do it with. Instead, he was a bit older, and whole lot more experienced than I was. He'd actually done it with two more mature ladies before he met me. In fact, he'd even done it with one particular woman who gets paid to do this sort of thing and who will, for the right price, do it multiple times a day, several days in a row. This was really something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I could draw comfort from the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing. On the other hand, though, it made me a bit nervous. Would he be put off if I didn't give him quite the ride to which he was accustomed? After all, there were still so many things that I didn't know about him. Would he want me to take control, or did he prefer to be a bit more dominant, for example?
I'm talking, of course, about my first CIC**.
Actually, it hadn't started very well. Somerset is not too far from North London, but when distances are subject to the "baby, toddler and horse" effect, they are magnified exponentially and so every slow, trailer-paced mile gets longer and longer as the baby's screams get louder and the likelihood of the toddler weeing in her car seat turns into a terrible urine-soaked certainty. As we drove over the crest of a hill early on Saturday morning, something went wrong. The car seemed to auto-accelerate down the hill away from me. "Something is wrong with the car" I thought, images of Stephen King's demonic "Christine" flashing through my mind. I braked. Nothing happened. The car was accelerating of its own accord, and my brakes were failing. Then I realised that the brakes were working. They'd stopped my tyres from turning, but my tyres were no longer touching the road. Instead, we were aqua-planing downhill on a patch of slime, mud, or slurry and I had no control over the speed at which we were travelling or the direction in which we were going.
My early cars, purchased by my parents on the (correct) assumption that I'd likely crash them within about five minutes of ownership, were basic creatures. They did not possess niceties such as central locking, electric windows, a functioning radio, or of course, ABS. So I knew what to do when my brakes locked. I knew that you get the hell off the brakes, you cross your fingers, and then you hope to ******* and back that this once, this time, this bullet does not have your name on it. I came off the brake, but the damage was already done. I'd committed the cardinal sin; I'd locked up my wheels, going down hill, I'd destabilised the trailer and now, it seemed, I was going to pay the price. Behind me, the trailer went into a snake. A lorry started up the hill towards us. "Why doesn't he stop?" I thought, wildly. "Why can't he see what's happening to us? Should I flash my headlights at him? Which side is my full beam on, anyway, and will he understand my message if I inadvertently wash my windscreen to signal my distress?" Through the cacophony of despair that filled my mind, one thought boomed loud and clear. A snippet of a conversation, I suspect, between my parents, advice given to my mother by my father when she started (under duress and with a great deal of incompetence) to tow my ponies. Now it flashed back through the years and echoed around my head: "DO NOT TRY TO CORRECT THIS. You cannot steer your way of it. Hold the car straight. Hold the car straight." I held the car on its line and the snaking stopped, but now the trailer skewed sickeningly off to the right, into the path of the lorry and we plummeted down the hill into the darkness. How long did I have? How long until the trailer, skidding now under its own momentum, tried to overtake the car, flipping us all over? I was going to have to try, try carefully, to correct it. Slowly, I inched my way over to the right. The trailer didn't start to snake again, so I crept a little further. Finally, I had the car back in front of the trailer, but there was an obvious flaw. As we know, my navigational ability, my spatial awareness and my general regard for the rules of the road are somewhat non-existent, so I thought I'd better check with my husband, as it seemed like a Man Question to me. "Am I on the right side of the road?" I asked. "Technically speaking, no", he replied. "But there seems to be enough room to get past the lorry, so I suggest you stay here." Technically speaking. I was technically bl**dy terrified, but we made it through the slurry and as my tyres made contact with the tarmac once more, I knew we were going to be ok.
So we arrived at Aldon and I thought the dressage had gone pretty well, but my dressage judgement, like so many other facets of my judgement, was categorically wrong and we were a good 11 penalties behind the next worst score by the time the day was over. Actually, we scored a whopping great 78. In percentage terms, this is 47%, which, as my husband remarked, was not even a 2:2 from a Red Brick university. As our esteemed dressage judge so helpfully observed, the problem is that P(C)arrot and I "just don't work as a partnership". He probably has an Oedipus complex from his older women.
So the failed partnership, with its third class degree from a former polytechnic, went through to the showjumping on a score that was already so bad that it wasn't going to get us a Qualifying Result. In this scenario, most normal people would likely withdraw and go home, saving their horses for another day. What works for most normal people, though, was unlikely to be of any use in the land of road slurry, toddler wee, ill-advised brake usage and general ineptitude that is my life, so of course I tacked right up and rode into the ring to tackle the coloured poles. This was my first time. This was my CIC**. It was an end in itself, not a means to an end, and I was going to give it all I had. We're not really where I think we ought to be with this phase, so two down was annoying but not completely unexpected and I turned my attentions to the XC.
I suppose the first question that concerned me, floozy that I was on my sugar-daddy horse, was a massive step down to two curving skinnies at No. 7. We approached down a pretty steep hill, but, unlike the previous time I'd tried to brake hard on a hill in the Yeovil countryside, this time we actually slowed down. He accelerated off the step a little and I held him straight for his skinnies that followed. The first water seemed to cause a problem or two, and I missed pretty dramatically at the A element of the exit fences. P(C)arrot didn't care, though. He smiled in a charming fashion, held the door open for me, got out his American Express Diner's Card, told me he'd be gentle, and jumped clean over it.
No course would be complete without a double of corners on a wonky line around a tree, would it, now, so we cantered on up the hill to meet my nemesis head on. It's a trite over-simplification to say that you learn from your mistakes and, as I said at the time, I wish I'd already been good enough not to have needed to learn the lesson in the first place, but this I will concede: As we're having Oedipus, we're also going to have Nietzsche - my horse is clearly not fussy and will have anyone - "That which doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." And I am stronger. I know more about corners than I ever wanted to know and I am on first name terms with every single mind-game that can exist around these fences. I'm like an infection and the corners are my antibiotics. They may repel me temporarily, they may keep me at bay to start with, but the more exposure I get, the more my immunity grows stronger, until eventually there's no antibiotic that can ward me off. (Didn't Nietzsche die from syphilis?)
The next difficult fence was a steep hollow, with a fence at the top and a fence at the bottom. I got the canter I wanted well in advance, but my horse had had taken note of my car's behaviour and went into auto-accelerate and brake-failure mode as we approached. We went through a lot faster than I'd planned, but then, given that we're a dysfunctional partnership, this is perhaps not surprising.
After that, I think I thought we might be in with a chance of a fault-free round, and my fantastic little horse forgave my clumsy fumblings, my chaotic driving and my incompetence in the dressage, and brought me home clear round my first CIC**.
My first time wasn't as I'd planned. I didn't do it in the place I'd thought I'd do it in and I didn't do it with the one I'd dreamed, for the last two years, I'd do it with. Instead, he was a bit older, and whole lot more experienced than I was. He'd actually done it with two more mature ladies before he met me. In fact, he'd even done it with one particular woman who gets paid to do this sort of thing and who will, for the right price, do it multiple times a day, several days in a row. This was really something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I could draw comfort from the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing. On the other hand, though, it made me a bit nervous. Would he be put off if I didn't give him quite the ride to which he was accustomed? After all, there were still so many things that I didn't know about him. Would he want me to take control, or did he prefer to be a bit more dominant, for example?
I'm talking, of course, about my first CIC**.
Actually, it hadn't started very well. Somerset is not too far from North London, but when distances are subject to the "baby, toddler and horse" effect, they are magnified exponentially and so every slow, trailer-paced mile gets longer and longer as the baby's screams get louder and the likelihood of the toddler weeing in her car seat turns into a terrible urine-soaked certainty. As we drove over the crest of a hill early on Saturday morning, something went wrong. The car seemed to auto-accelerate down the hill away from me. "Something is wrong with the car" I thought, images of Stephen King's demonic "Christine" flashing through my mind. I braked. Nothing happened. The car was accelerating of its own accord, and my brakes were failing. Then I realised that the brakes were working. They'd stopped my tyres from turning, but my tyres were no longer touching the road. Instead, we were aqua-planing downhill on a patch of slime, mud, or slurry and I had no control over the speed at which we were travelling or the direction in which we were going.
My early cars, purchased by my parents on the (correct) assumption that I'd likely crash them within about five minutes of ownership, were basic creatures. They did not possess niceties such as central locking, electric windows, a functioning radio, or of course, ABS. So I knew what to do when my brakes locked. I knew that you get the hell off the brakes, you cross your fingers, and then you hope to ******* and back that this once, this time, this bullet does not have your name on it. I came off the brake, but the damage was already done. I'd committed the cardinal sin; I'd locked up my wheels, going down hill, I'd destabilised the trailer and now, it seemed, I was going to pay the price. Behind me, the trailer went into a snake. A lorry started up the hill towards us. "Why doesn't he stop?" I thought, wildly. "Why can't he see what's happening to us? Should I flash my headlights at him? Which side is my full beam on, anyway, and will he understand my message if I inadvertently wash my windscreen to signal my distress?" Through the cacophony of despair that filled my mind, one thought boomed loud and clear. A snippet of a conversation, I suspect, between my parents, advice given to my mother by my father when she started (under duress and with a great deal of incompetence) to tow my ponies. Now it flashed back through the years and echoed around my head: "DO NOT TRY TO CORRECT THIS. You cannot steer your way of it. Hold the car straight. Hold the car straight." I held the car on its line and the snaking stopped, but now the trailer skewed sickeningly off to the right, into the path of the lorry and we plummeted down the hill into the darkness. How long did I have? How long until the trailer, skidding now under its own momentum, tried to overtake the car, flipping us all over? I was going to have to try, try carefully, to correct it. Slowly, I inched my way over to the right. The trailer didn't start to snake again, so I crept a little further. Finally, I had the car back in front of the trailer, but there was an obvious flaw. As we know, my navigational ability, my spatial awareness and my general regard for the rules of the road are somewhat non-existent, so I thought I'd better check with my husband, as it seemed like a Man Question to me. "Am I on the right side of the road?" I asked. "Technically speaking, no", he replied. "But there seems to be enough room to get past the lorry, so I suggest you stay here." Technically speaking. I was technically bl**dy terrified, but we made it through the slurry and as my tyres made contact with the tarmac once more, I knew we were going to be ok.
So we arrived at Aldon and I thought the dressage had gone pretty well, but my dressage judgement, like so many other facets of my judgement, was categorically wrong and we were a good 11 penalties behind the next worst score by the time the day was over. Actually, we scored a whopping great 78. In percentage terms, this is 47%, which, as my husband remarked, was not even a 2:2 from a Red Brick university. As our esteemed dressage judge so helpfully observed, the problem is that P(C)arrot and I "just don't work as a partnership". He probably has an Oedipus complex from his older women.
So the failed partnership, with its third class degree from a former polytechnic, went through to the showjumping on a score that was already so bad that it wasn't going to get us a Qualifying Result. In this scenario, most normal people would likely withdraw and go home, saving their horses for another day. What works for most normal people, though, was unlikely to be of any use in the land of road slurry, toddler wee, ill-advised brake usage and general ineptitude that is my life, so of course I tacked right up and rode into the ring to tackle the coloured poles. This was my first time. This was my CIC**. It was an end in itself, not a means to an end, and I was going to give it all I had. We're not really where I think we ought to be with this phase, so two down was annoying but not completely unexpected and I turned my attentions to the XC.
I suppose the first question that concerned me, floozy that I was on my sugar-daddy horse, was a massive step down to two curving skinnies at No. 7. We approached down a pretty steep hill, but, unlike the previous time I'd tried to brake hard on a hill in the Yeovil countryside, this time we actually slowed down. He accelerated off the step a little and I held him straight for his skinnies that followed. The first water seemed to cause a problem or two, and I missed pretty dramatically at the A element of the exit fences. P(C)arrot didn't care, though. He smiled in a charming fashion, held the door open for me, got out his American Express Diner's Card, told me he'd be gentle, and jumped clean over it.
No course would be complete without a double of corners on a wonky line around a tree, would it, now, so we cantered on up the hill to meet my nemesis head on. It's a trite over-simplification to say that you learn from your mistakes and, as I said at the time, I wish I'd already been good enough not to have needed to learn the lesson in the first place, but this I will concede: As we're having Oedipus, we're also going to have Nietzsche - my horse is clearly not fussy and will have anyone - "That which doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." And I am stronger. I know more about corners than I ever wanted to know and I am on first name terms with every single mind-game that can exist around these fences. I'm like an infection and the corners are my antibiotics. They may repel me temporarily, they may keep me at bay to start with, but the more exposure I get, the more my immunity grows stronger, until eventually there's no antibiotic that can ward me off. (Didn't Nietzsche die from syphilis?)
The next difficult fence was a steep hollow, with a fence at the top and a fence at the bottom. I got the canter I wanted well in advance, but my horse had had taken note of my car's behaviour and went into auto-accelerate and brake-failure mode as we approached. We went through a lot faster than I'd planned, but then, given that we're a dysfunctional partnership, this is perhaps not surprising.
After that, I think I thought we might be in with a chance of a fault-free round, and my fantastic little horse forgave my clumsy fumblings, my chaotic driving and my incompetence in the dressage, and brought me home clear round my first CIC**.
