Click the button to hear my hoarse, equine tones resound to this ode.
There are, it appears, modes of movement that monitor. They know where you’ve been, and may know where you’re headed; your sex life, your thoughts, and your feelings; and they spread muck wherever you go.
Some, you know where they’re going: it’s displayed; on the front, and, for those who’ve missed the bus, on their rear …
Whilst the dangers, worries and annoyances of a motor that sends its maker the minutiae of your meanderings may be minuscular or of magnitude, as befits one’s measure of mindfulness, the modes alluded to lack wheels, have legs and are labelled workhorses.
There are workhorses, and there are pleasure horses, residing in manèges, where you’ll find horses that are loved, and that love, that befriend those humans who befriend them. Manège is a French word of global equestrian application: the art of training and riding horses. It relates to the English word manage and, as all management know, it combines the use of sticks with that of carrots. Nowadays, spurs and whips are eschewed, and children and adults alike spend hours grooming and caring for the animals they rent to ride.
My gran, reeling in shock, would ejaculate involuntary utterances of “Poor horses!” as poor stuntmen were ejected from their saddles astride stumbling beasts in the Westerns of Huston. Then War Horse, Black Beauty, Horse Whisperer, and Mr Ed brought rapprochement between human and bestial sentiments in scenarios of common experience and enhanced understanding (of which the animal inevitably harboured the greater part, be it dumb or … otherwise Ed-ucated).
That’s fine for the movies, though. Elsewhere, the beast of burden is still part of the everyday human scene: in Gaza, asses and donkeys trot by the devastation of an iniquitous conflict; Argentinean herdsmen drive their cattle in droves from the backs of their mounts; and in old East Germany or new East Asia, in fairgrounds thrilling child and adult alike, the power train’s a mule, turning its ever-constant rounds.
Four feet eight-and-a-half inches is the track gauge of Britain’s, and, hence, much of the world’s, railways. Isambard Kingdom Brunel experimented with seven feet and a quarter inch, but, despite the wider gauge’s superior performance, his main lines and his branch lines had to fall into line, with a gauge representing two draught-horses’ width while hauling abreast.
Image: a 19th-century broad-gauge train on the Great Western Railway in Wales. The inset rail was laid to accommodate standard-gauge vehicles, the nearside rail being common to all traffic. Turnouts (US: switches) were pure geometric genius. Note the large distance between the sleepers (US: ties).
Such are the consequences that horses and horsepower have propelled onto our modern world. And they will track you, have no fear. Ride them a route on but few occasions, and they will know where to turn, when to stop, to walk on, whether rounded or on rounds for the mail, the milk or Middle Eastern mongers. They feel the fears, the plights, the worries and joyous exuberance of their masters. And, needs must, they poo, just like a diesel doos.
The pleasure rider, like the visitor to the zoological garden, sees beasts as company, as fellow residents of our world, to wonder at and adore; or perchance, in the circus ring, to dread, where the lion and the tiger don’t always feign their fearsome roar. The pleasure visitor casts disdain on them who handle horses, felines, canines and assinines with workaday rough-and-readiness. They no doubt lovingly wash, polish and vacuum their own modes of transport; recoil at buses not pristinely presented, plying like route-masters hither and thither; rejecting retail purchase of produce from pantechnicons sullied with slush. No doubt they would retort: these are but machines, and machines must function simply, and simply function; and, if they look nice, that’s nice, but no must.
I suspect it’s the divide between workaday and play, as between tools of trade and means of leisure, that redouble this split view between the horse-driver for commerce and horse-rider for pleasure.
For some in trade, time and energy for horse-riding is sparse; their daily programme of chores sends them weary abed at night, and weary up in the morn; and there are some in commerce with little time nor energy to lavish care that fawns on their beasts, be they mechanical or animal.
The Middle East’s donkey and the Mennonite’s mule are the beasts that alleviate the burdens that rest on their owners’ shoulders, and that day in, day out. And that while manège mounts gleam, tack buffed by dutiful grooms, reins polished to perfection, petted with delight by wealthy men’s progeny.
If groom, magnate, Maghreb merchant and Mennonite mendicant could but swap places for an instant, in what measure might the world’s breadth of understanding be augmented, for that hirsute hero: the horse?