Of horses and dogs

Note: this post was written on November 18 but only posted today due to internet connectivity issues which should happily be resolved later today.
Friday was my birthday and as a special treat I got the day off. We went horse riding at Chukka Blue in the morning. This was my first time on a horse, and I really felt very comfortable: all those hours as a kid watching the Lone Ranger and Rawhide now paying dividends as I sat straight-backed in the saddle, reigns nonchalantly but firmly held in the left hand, leaving my right free to draw the Colt45. Chukka Blue offers a range of ‘adventure’ experiences in Jamaica – from horse riding, quad biking, tree canopy swinging, and so on. Our trip was well organised, plenty of guides on horseback to cajole and organise the group, with a good line in patter that took in history, culture, wildlife and ecology. Riders are taken on a 90-minute stroll through part of the old Maggoty sugar estate and then for a gallop through the sea. The route goes via small hamlet where kids with bare feet gaze up, but without a great deal of interest because they see this twice a day. The place is grindingly poor, but very clean and tidy. Chukka Blue have helpfully provided some branded trash cans. Further on we take a detour through the grounds of Kennilworth great house, where the ruins of what must have been a stupendous 18th century stone house are now part of Kennilworth training college - where youngsters from places like the hamlet we’ve just ridden through are training to be waiters, barmen and cocktail waitresses. The ruins we’re looking at were destroyed during the Sam Sharpe Christmas rebellion of 1831, when tens of thousands of slaves working on sugar plantations (which then covered virtually the whole of the western end of the island) rose up demanding emancipation. Now, the descendants of those rebels are studying in the grounds of said great house to be waiters. What with the heat and everything, it’s quite easy to be overwhelmed by the irony of it all. But it’s a good half-day out – they pick you up from the front door and drop you back afterwards.
Later on we went to look for a dog. The Dog Saga has been going on for a long time. We need a nice dog for the Beach House, we keep saying to one another. It’s complicated by the fact that we’ve never kept dogs, and our only experience is that Merrise was bitten by one when she was a young girl in Jamaica, and I had one when I was boy (called Rex) but he was taken way pretty sharpish when identified as a potential source of my asthma attacks.
Briefly: we went to see our friend Gloria who runs a guest house just outside Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’), saw three dogs, didn’t take any, went back next day and brought home one - a sweet mongrel bitch, with a lot of labradour in her, so now we have a dog called Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’). OK. So don’t mess with us. We ride horses. We have a dog.