Two weeks ago, Jay hurt his back. That means that he can’t ride very much. So, when he comes to Time Out Farms, he has been using me as a kind of a substitute, combining training of the horses with teaching me how to ride his western-English-Natural Horsemanship mix. Some days, I’ve ridden four horses in a row, and unless it has rained all day, I’ve not ridden less than two.

After a day of stable work plus all that riding, I’m dead tired, but it’s totally worth it. It’s like I’ve found my way back home, to the joy of communicating and cooperating with a horse. That special feeling that I got with Ofelia, the pony I rented for a couple of years in my teens, the feeling that I later on lost, riding all the different, lazy and tired and ill ridden riding school horses. I didn’t feel comfortable having to force the horse to do as I wished, but there wasn’t really any other way, not with the horses at the riding school who were ridden by so many different people. They had to get used to all the contradicting signals from all the different (often not very good) riders, so in the end, most of them ended up being quite numb.

But with Jay, it’s all about simplicity and lightness. It’s about asking, not forcing. And it’s about understanding the horse, how it thinks, and working with it, not against. And, as if there wasn’t an end for how good things could be, Jay’s also a great teacher and an amazing person even without the horse knowledge.

Oh, I could stay here forever, just to learn everything that Jay has to teach.

So, maybe I should explain a few things. For most of you, the difference between English and western riding might not be that obvious.

You could say that there are two major schools of riding: English, which stems from Europe, and western, which is used mostly in western North America. Then there are many other schools and subdisciplines, but that would just make things too complicated. So, let’s start with these two.

English riding is what you mostly see on television, atleast in Europe, it’s what they do in the Olympics, it’s the dressage and show jumping and it is also what most people learning to ride in Sweden, Germany, Great Britain and many other European countries are taught. It has it’s roots in the military and is usually quite strict, technical and forcing in a lot of ways. It’s perfectionist and both horses and the style itself has been bred and developed so as to get the horses to jump as high as possible, move as beautifully as possible, run as fast as possible or be as pretty as possible.

Western, on the other hand, has been developed on the great North American prairies. It is what the cowboys, working with cattle, used (and some still use). It’s got a much larger saddle, with a big saddlehorn that you can hold on to, alternately tie your lasso around. And the style doesn’t require as much discipline from the rider and it’s generally more relaxed. Some of the signals to the horse are also different, for example how you get the horse to turn, stop and back up. The horses can be extremely well trained and do the most amazing things, but you wouldn’t know that the rider is making the horse do them, because the rider sits there with her long reins and cowboy hat and seems to just be enjoying the ride.

And while the English has gone from being military riding to becoming mostly sport and a leisure activity for (usually quite rich) people, western is still used for commercial activities, such as the herding of cattle. I think that that’s an important distinction: while the English school is being developed in an environment where it’s practiced soley for it’s own sake, atleast some practitioners of western still have a purpose with their training beyond the riding in itself.

As for me, my training has been soley English. I started taking lessons at a riding school at the age of nine, by twelve I had started riding atleast twice a week, taking special jumping lessons and for a couple of years in my later teens I even rented a pony from my riding school for a couple of years, keeping her as my own. During those years, I spent almost every day at the stables, probably spending more time with my stable mates than with my parents. At eighteen, I changed riding school and at this new place got a teacher who thought I would do well at jumping competitions. Which turned out to be true. So the last years before high school graduation, I did some competing in show jumping with the riding school horses. After high school graduation, I had to scale down on my expenses and during the last five years, I’ve been taking lessons a year here or there, helping out my teachers with their horses and generally not being a very active rider.

So, now you might understand a bit better why the kind of rusty English jumping rider in me got a bit of a chock when I was placed in a western saddle on a western trained horse with the long, divided western reins.

The blurb of the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy says that “Many believe ‘Anna Karenina’ to be the greatest novel ever written”. With praise like that, I had expected to be bored and confused for the first couple of hundred pages. The classics, especially the really highly esteemed ones, tend to be slow to start the action, slow for me to get feelings for the characters, slow to reveal their greatness. Usually, I only get them in the end, when I’ve taken in everything and have had some time to think.

Still, I enjoy reading the classics. The epics, the big stories, they’re usually written with so much finesse and such a feeling for detail. Writing is a handicraft, and the writers that have survived through the centuries are usually masters of this careful building with words. To find that kind of modern word artists is hard, you have to get through so many just ordinary ones before you find that diamond.

That’s why I don’t mind the slow beginnings of most classics. I know the effort I put into get through the first few hundred pages will probably pay off in the end. But god, with “Anna Karenina” I didn’t have to wait long. Already after ten pages, it no longer required any effort to continue reading. After fifteen, I started to sympathize with the characters. And after an additinal twenty, I was hooked.

And really, it’s not heavy. It’s almost nine hundred pages long, but it’s not heavy. It’s a drama, following several characters for a couple of years, letting you get to know them intimately, all their faults and virtues, and it doesn’t judge. It’s an emotional adventure with something for all tastes.

I got this copy that I’m now reading from Kirke just before I left Stockholm. It’s a big and heavy book, physically, dispite the paper covers, and as a backpacker I have a limited amount of space to occupy all my belongings with. Still, there was never any doubt as to my bringing ‘Anna Karenina’ with me. It was a gift for my journey, and with the dedication that she had written in it, a lively and humorous and loving poem (exactly like Kirke), I just had to pack it. And I haven’t regretted it for a second.

I’ve only reached halfway through, so I can’t say if the claim in the blurb is true. But I do know that I’m hooked, and that I could read all day every day until I reached that last page. If I didn’t have so many stalls to clean, that is.

Yesterday morning, the radio was tuned in to Sonic again.

But really, I think what annoys me most isn’t the monotony of the really popular music of today, it’s the crappy lyrics. And how some of them might even be harmful.

One of the songs that is played each morning, without fail, on Sonic is One Direction’s “What makes you beautiful”. There is a line in it that comes over and over, “You don’t know that you’re beautiful”, and then, the final line with a twist: “That’s what makes you beautiful”. And sure, the singer has been giving examples of things that apparently make this girl beautiful for the entire song, but still that last line makes me feel as if he’s saying that one of the things that make her beautiful is that she’s so insecure and cute. She is a girl that needs to be told her worth – and that worth is measured in how attractive she is to a man.

There are more songs like that. A while ago there was a Bruno Mars song that was played everywhere, “Just the way you are”, and in the video to that he had a super gorgeous supermodel that apparently didn’t know she was beautiful. Now, that’s just crazy.

I’m not saying that all girls know their own worth and feel good about their bodies all the time, but I’m saying that they should and one of the reasons why they don’t is this constant exposure to the message that if you just keep underestimating yourself, a guy will soon come along and pick you up. The Prince Charming Concept. You get it in the movies, on the tv, even in the song lyrics.

And then you get the other songs, the ones about pleasing a man, being ‘a wild one’ or what have you, and it’s all about finding your worth through a man’s eyes. Everything on the guy’s terms.

Of course, there are also the Beyonces and Lady Gagas, but somehow it feels as if they are too few to get their message through. I imagine it being a lot easier growing up in the nineties, with girl power and “If you wannabe my lover, you gotta get with my friends”. I might be mistaken. I might even be wrong in thinking that songs can affect the self-esteem of teenage girls.

I just know that the Sonic songs bug me like hell.

And so, the day after Jay asked me to exercise Zena, he also let me ride his horses, Junior and Casper. They are two really beautiful paint horses, both barely three years old, and for all of you who don’t know horses, that is really young. That’s the age when you put a saddle on the horse, sit on him for a while, just to get him used to the weight of a human on his back. Junior had been ridden before, but for Casper it was the first time with a saddle, and the first time with a rider.

First, Jay worked with both of them from the ground, getting them tuned to him, making them ready to communicate and cooperate. Then he rode them himself, making them turn on really small circles and stop and back up real western style. Then he casually just asked: “Do you want to ride?”. I thought he was joking, to let me, an English rider through and through with no experience riding really young horses, sit on his beautiful, sensitive western colts, seemed crazy. But he was serious.

And I was amazed. Jay had worked so well with them from the ground, teaching them to listen to his voice, that I had no problem getting them to walk, trot, canter and turn. The western way of stopping, when instead of using the reins, you just change your sitting position, push your feet foreward, away from the horse and say ‘whoh’ and when the horse has stopped you back up a couple of steps, that turned out to be the the hardest for me to get. Both the horses did it perfectly with Jay, but with me they barely even stopped, let alone backed up.

But I’ll get there. I still have the whole month of April to re-program my body from the stiff English style to the relaxed and layed-back western style. Just you wait, I’ll be a proper cowboy before I leave here.

Leo has used the banana plant by my bed as his litter box. I caught him in the act the other day and chased him away, but I think he has been visiting it quite frequently when no one’s inside, because sometimes the plant just reeks.

Not all the time though – and luckily the smell of cat pee seems to float upward. I’m not bothered with the smell down on the floor in my bed. Yet.

Every day, when we start working in the stalls, the radio is turned on. For two weeks, we had been working to Sonic, a station playing the really mainstream popular music, like Rihanna and Nicki Minaj and all those fake house-light hip hop-predictable electronic beats stuff.

And honestly, I think they had a playlist that they played every day, only changing the order a little to not make it too obvious. They played the same songs over and over and I didn’t even like them the first time I heard them.By the second week, I just wanted to scream when Nicki Minaj started singing “Starships were meant to fly” or Sia “Hey, I heard you like the wild ones” and then Flo Rida continued with his rap. How songwriters and composers and producers and artists can make such incredible amounts of money by making people believe they like those uninspired melodies and bad lyrics, I don’t know. The music industry of today must be the biggest sham in existance.

Eventually, I had had enough. On Friday I was the last one working in the stable, and so before I left, I changed the radio station to something called The Peak. It sounded okay, and the next morning I was rewarded. I spent Saturday in a bliss, doing my chores while listening to “Yellow” with Coldplay, “Last nite” with The Strokes, the wonderful “Such great heights” with The Postal Service and even Florence + the Machine’s “Shake it out”, one of the best new songs to come out last year. They didn’t only play great bands, they even managed to choose my favourite songs by those bands.

It didn’t last, though. On Sunday morning, someone changed the station again and this time we ended up with some real, all-American country. Slightly better than Sonic, mostly because their playlist is more diverse, but still. I end up cleaning really quickly in the stalls, just to get away out into the paddocks, so I won’t have to listen to those nasal singers more than necessary. Which might be good for the job, but not very constructive for my mood.

I miss the Swedish public service stations. But in a week, when the three Germans have left, I will be the one who has been here the longest, which means that I will be the boss. Which gives me the right to choose the radio station. No more Bruno Mars, no more country. I am nothing, if not a music snob. That’s just how my dad raised me.

Almost a week into my stay at Time Out Farms, I got my first opportunity to sit on a horse. Jay, the horse trainer, was having a lesson and when that was done, he let me ride for ten minutes or so, just to see how I looked in the saddle.

And god, was it hard. The first time in a western saddle, the first time with the long, separated western reins, nervous because I felt I had to prove something. I must have looked awful, all over the place, no feel what so ever with the reins and the stirrups. No, the start wasn’t good.

And it didn’t continue much better either. The saddle made me feel out of balance and the roundpen (the round riding paddock with a high fence around) was so small. We trotted around in a circle, Zena and me, and I kept giving her the wrong signals. Jay had to tell me to have longer reins and be still with my hands and stop squeezing the horse with my legs. Partly, these mistakes were due to my English riding style schooling, but mostly it was just me doing a crappy job at showing my fifteen years of riding experience.

No, those first ten minutes of riding for Jay are nothing that I’m proud of. But he must have seen something he liked in me, despite my incredible sloppiness, because just a few days later he told me to ride Zena on the days when he wasn’t having lessons on her, just to get her into shape.

If there are any creatures that know how to enjoy themselves, it’s the cats. And of all the cats that I’ve ever met, Alex is the master hedonist.

The first couple of days that I spent here, I barely saw him at all, because every time we bumped into each other he would run away. He still does, sometimes, when he doesn’t want to be bothered. He is a cat with extreme integrity.

But then, one morning when I hadn’t really woken up yet, he simply jumped onto my bed and lay down on my chest. Right there, making it a little hard for me to breathe, and he turned up his soft white tummy so that I would be able to scratch him between his front legs.

And now, he does that atleast once a day. I lie in bed, or sit reading a book on the couch, or relaxing in front of the TV, and he approaches and then just climbs up on me. Regardless if there really is space for him there in my lap or on my chest. He doesn’t ask. He demands. And by moving his head or paws or entire body, he shows exactly where.

And when he gets what he wants, he closes his amazingly green eyes and purrs loudly. Until he eventually has had enough. Then he suddenly just stands up and walks away, without a backward glance.

I could probably learn alot about enjoying life from Alex the Cat.

Working with horses, you get used to things turning out completely wrong at times. Especially when the horses aren’t on a training programme and can spend all their mental and physical energy on doing things they shouldn’t. For example, breaking the gate to their own paddock.

That’s what happened the other day. It was evening feeding time and I had just finished some photographing of the mountains, when suddenly the two mares, Tapestry and Tappen who share the northernmost paddock, ran out in front of the stalls and I just had time to think: “Not towards the road!”, and then they ran into the large paddock. So I ran as fast as I could and closed the gate behind them.

And then we just watched them running around, bucking and kicking and playing. There was just so much room in this paddock, compared to their own tiny one, and they were so excited. They were so beautiful, moving with that  energy, I could have watched them for hours. That’s how we want them to move when we ride them too, but only the really good can manage that. I’ve only ever been kind of on the same continent. And that was still amazing.

Maybe fifteen minutes later, they felt that they were done and walked up to the gate together, waiting to be lead back into their own paddock and their evening hay. So much for escape and adventure.