PARTIES PART II

We are sitting in the tack room after a particularly rugged canter round the lanes. Bloggiana’s hair is swept windily round her face and I have a high colour in my cheeks which is for once not down to last night’s intake of Pinot Grigio. Contrary to all livery yard rules, we are smoking. So Bloggiana, I ask, how were all those parties?

It is two weeks now since we waved Bloggiana off onto a London-bound train; and a good ten days since she returned. In between there have been a lot of bonfires to set and leaves to sweep and dead foliage to gather. The rats have been eating the eggs and the fox has been stalking the chickens and the mice have been stealing the butter (again) and the old house has been moaning under the weight of all that summer rain which has now soaked into its very skin and bones. Side by side, Bloggiana and I have pushed wheelbarrows through hock-high mud and walked horizontal into the rain to catch our ponies. We have hurtled back and forth to school, narrowly avoiding in these globally warmed weather conditions becoming the jam in an Eddie Stobart sandwich on more than one occasion. And meanwhile the subject of what exactly Bloggiana got up to while south has been deftly avoided.

But this morning, thanks to her pulse-raising mind-numbing bad-hair-day hurtle of a hack, Bloggiana seems a little more disposed to talk. Marvellous, she replies. Absolutely splendid. Do go on, I nudge keenly.

And it transpires that they were indeed auspicious occasions. At a singles party in Westbourne Park, Bloggiana was introduced to a jaw-droppingly handsome Ceylonese consultant (married) and a leonine Irishman of rugby descent (unmarried but uninterested). At a pub evening in Pimlico, she met up with strings of old friends who could not find one single restaurant to eat at so they all descended onto the floor of the flat of a man whom none of them had ever met before. In Islington, she played skittles; in Olympia, she dined with the very old; in South Ken, with the absurdly young.

Bloggiana pauses half way through her cigarette and blows a smoke ring which for a moment, I mistake for the emblem of the London underground. She has a misty look in her eye and is playing with something in her left hand which I later realise is her railcard. By the way, she says her-herming somewhat, would you mind doing the school run without me for a couple of days next week? Of course not, I answer, unable to avoid adding the needlessly inquisitive And where are you off to? Bloggiana draws deep on her cigarette and exhales wistfully. The smoke leaves the tack room, drifts in a seamless ribbon out over the muckheap and on down the drive towards the motorway.

Parties, she whispers guiltily, more parties.