Falling Off

Wear a hat. Hats are cheaper than little jars of anti-wrinkle serum. 

So much to write about. Addictions to ex boyfriends, being unbelievably, insanely grateful I don’t have a child, the joys of finally not having to suck in my stomach when I stand up. Where do I begin? The most pressing, and relevant of these is the job thing. Yesterday everybody was called together and told that there would be retrenchments, up to 35 of them. Until close of business this week it’s voluntary; after that there will be ‘consultations’. There is a hit list, of that I am certain, and I strongly suspect that I am on it. So, the prospect of being retrenched again. The last time I took it quite well, but then it was a shock and I had no warning. This time there are two months to cogitate on the whole miserable situation. My initial response was complete and utter fucking terror, because I cannot afford to not have a salary and medical aid and, you know, money to buy food and stuff. Then rationalizing (how can they retrench me, I’m too clever and valuable), then suicidal despair (nothing tells you how worthless you are quite like losing your job). Also intense anger, because my talents should be recognized, but instead I am going to waste. Of course, I might not be on the list. All of this panic might be for nothing. But it’s best to plan for the worst case scenario and work back from there. Thank god, thank god I didn’t buy that BMW.

A while back I confessed to a good friend that I was dreading my sister’s wedding. I’d be the sad, divorced older sister who by the end of the evening had a little too much sparkling wine, the tainted one people pointed out in sideways whispers. Oh nonsense, he said. I wouldn’t be sad and drunk, I’d be the hot liberated older sister. As it happens, he was there at this evening’s dinner party, the one where the hostess humiliated me in front of three people I’d met a couple of hours earlier. If only I’d taken my laryngitis/bronchitis 2 for 1 combo deal seriously, and stayed home. I went because I am polite and didn’t want to duck out at the last minute, though I had more than enough reason to climb into bed, surf the net and buff up the sheen on my misery. So I went along with a voice so buggered I virtually had to communicate through the medium of charades. I spoke in a combination of whispers and random squeaks, so that I sounded a bit like the feed from a radio telescope scanning the universe for signs of alien life. Nonetheless, the evening went well (mostly), and it was only after dessert and coffee that the hostess steered the conversation in a direction I’d been hoping she wouldn’t. “So are you still staying in the same place?” she said, referring, presumably, to my grandmother. I admitted that yes, I was. She asked me when I was going to move out; I said I didn’t know. She wanted to know whether I had a timetable; I said that things were still too uncertain for me to commit myself to a lease, certainly when I didn’t even know whether I wanted to stay in the country, let alone this city. She pushed and pushed and I said I was considering renting a room from someone at work, and she said you can’t have a room and I said I couldn’t afford anything else and she said yes you can and I said no I can’t. And still she would not let go, until it reached a point where I revealed things about my situation that were just a little too awkward to be appropriate material for dinner party talk or, indeed, a blog that isn’t written anonymously. Why didn’t I tell her this was not something I was prepared to discuss then and there? That this was the kind of stuff one talked about one on one, not in front of people I’d just met? But I am polite and avoid confrontation no matter the turmoil concealed by my calm exterior. I sat there smiling at appropriate points in a conversation I no longer cared about and thinking, Thank you for making it quite clear that I am a sad loser to people who don’t know me at all; thank you for reminding me how crap my life is; thank you for humiliating me. Humiliation is something I don’t get nearly enough of, after all. I have no idea what my friend, the one who told me I’d be the hot liberated sister (like hell) thought about all of this. It was impossible to read his thoughts in his expression. Next time he tries to give me a pep talk, I will remind him of this awful evening, and how my fears are entirely justified. I think I’ll be staying away from dinner parties in future.

I’ve just watched the Durban July on TV. This is South Africa’s greatest horserace, our equivalent of the Melbourne Cup. This year it was won by a colt called Bold Silvano, who hit the front at just the right time and held off his stable mate, the favourite Irish Flame. The winner is owned by Sheikh Mohamed of Dubai, who I’m sure desperately needed the R1,8 million first prize. (That’s about 250,000 in US dollars.) It struck me that the July has long since lost its magic for me. As a child this was one of the defining events of the year. I would look out for the magazine which featured pictures of all the horses, then pore over the tiny images deciding on my favourites. One year it would be a liver chestnut, the next, a grey. I knew the runners backwards; their race record, breeding, trainers. Watching the four year old Argentinean filly Tecla Bluff win in 1983 was a revelation for me, a discovery that I could indulge my obsession with equines through a sport that was covered in the newspapers and on TV. After that, I was hooked, cutting out pictures of horses in the racing pages and pasting them in a huge scrapbook that grew heavier with Pritt and newsprint every year. I can still remember the winners of the races I watched: after Tecla Bluff, there was Devon Air, then Gondolier, Occult, Bush Telegraph, Royal Chalice. Right Prerogative. The July doesn’t mean what it used to. This year, I had little idea of the records of any of the runners, no emotional connection with them, no favourites. When the runners turned the corner into the straight, my heart didn’t start hammering. There’s a part of me that misses that.

I’ve booked a riding lesson for next Tuesday. I would have ridden this week, but the horses have their annual rest and I had to wait. So Tuesday at 10 it is. The riding gear is there, in the corner, waiting to be used. I’m hoping, really hoping, that this one will turn out better than my first attempt. In the mean time, I have my imagination. This afternoon, I might have been walking at 5.5 kmh on the treadmill but in my mind I was on the back of a horse, galloping along a wide beach at sunset. It was a complex rhythm of the horse’s sharp breaths with each stride, the smack of the hooves on the firm wet sand, the roar of the wind in my ears and the slap and sigh of the waves. The horse galloped flat out, while I moved in tune with his rhythms, balancing above the flex and coil of his shoulders and haunches so that my body became one with his. In my dream, I can ride so well that I don’t fall off, not even at full gallop. Riding along a beach at dusk, when the sky is dusty greys and pinks, is very different from what I am doing now, walking to nowhere while the cars on the highway in front of the window rush past. They must all be going somewhere. Who knows. But if there were a symbol of my inability to get out of this pit into which I have fallen and from which I can’t escape, it would be this: watching cars while I walk to nowhere.

“Thank goodness for Photoshop hey?” says the IT manager I’m friendly with. He’s looking over my shoulder at my Facebook profile page, which features one of the photos from last month’s shoot. Ouch. I could brush it off, but here’s the catch: he’s right. This has thrown me. The suspension of disbelief can no longer be sustained.

It has been weeks and weeks since the disappointment of that first riding lesson and I haven’t hauled myself onto the back of a horse since. I have all sorts of excuses: cold weather, work, getting sick – but the truth is that I am wandering off the path I set for myself yet again. This failure to follow through - which is typical of me - merely lends added heft to the weight of the existential crisis that has haunted me for more than a year now. It’s really a collection of smaller crises that have added up, like bits of Plasticine, into a great big round ball of angst, and it won’t go away. The themes of this crisis are always the same, namely: 1. Nothing I have done with my life has added up to anything. 2. I have not achieved what I promised myself I would. 3. What I do for a living does not matter. It honestly doesn’t. 4. I want to create something of lasting value, and I have not. It helps to list these things. The crisis lurks deep in my thoughts, a grey cat in the night. Thinking is dangerous, I know this much, so I try to do as little of it as possible - which means finding as many distractions as possible. More of those in another entry. I’ve updated my profile page on Facebook, where there’s a section for including a favourite quote or a description of yourself. Il faut cultiver notre jardin has long since gone. This time I write: don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think don’t think That about sums it up. If I stop being or doing and start thinking, I will think about how crappy my life is by the standards I once set for myself, and how much I hate it. The panic will press against my chest and I’ll have to scratch around for the little bottle of Ativan, carefully tap the tiny white pill into my palm and place it under my tongue. Even when everybody else is so excited about the Netherlands vs Uruguay semi-final and I am dutifully wearing orange, the thoughts are there. It’s so crushingly lonely here. I log onto Twitter to follow the football because my grandmother is watching TV and hates sport, and the updates are comforting. I don’t know what I would do without Twitter, but I wonder whether, in offering a simulacrum of human company, it actually makes things worse. Thinking is something I must not do.

One of the major challenges of this project is dividing my life up into chapters that correspond with the horse that happened to be most important to me at the time. Some of them are easy. Obviously I’ll start with Bicky, the dun mare who nearly killed my mother. Then there’s Duke, Tecla Bluff, Phar Lap, Gallo’s Gold, Lindberg, Lucy’s Lad, Touch Wood, Squire’s Darling, Mile69, Barbaro and Nubian. All but three were racehorses, and one never actually existed so I never actually did get to ride most of them. I did fall off Duke, Squire’s Darling and Mile69. I parted company with Duke as a child of three and Squire’s Darling as a student, with Mile69 starting my marriage off on a high note. My memories of all three vary in detail, but all of them are vivid.

One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog about my journey to learning to mount a horse and stay on it is that it enforces discipline. You can’t start a blog and not update it. If you don’t update your blog, you might as well not exist. So, here I am on a Friday afternoon, glumly anticipating another weekend of work (pitch first thing on Monday, urgent writing work for my client the taxman, and other pieces I was meant to have submitted a week ago. In other words, just another week in the ad industry). Riding has slipped down my list of priorities for the moment; there is only so much time in the day after all. I haven’t even written about my first, disastrous lesson (that’s still coming), and the realisation of the enormity of what I actually want to achieve. It’s daunting.