On the Hoof

  Shortly before COVID an artwork was commissioned by the Museum of the Mind, and eight posts were erected along a boundary fence of the hospital to which were attached reflective placards with words asking a series of provocative questions. But the real point of the story is this: overnight, on 24 June 2020, someone sprayed a message across seven of the placards. Seven letters and a gap which read: RIP SENI. The Guardian has a twenty-minute video documentary about this which raises a lot of questions and leads me to ask another.  Seni Lewis (born 22 March 1987) died at the age of 23 on Tuesday 31 August 2010 on Gresham Ward at the Bethlem. I had read reports about this incident a couple of years ago, when I began thinking about taking horses there. I returned to the documents last night to try to find the facts that I thought I had remembered.  Seni’s death was eventually pronounced on Friday 3 September 2010. He had been admitted onto Gresham Ward at 5pm on the Tuesday...

  Translated from the French by Janet Rachel Dear G,  Thanks so much for asking “Who is Janet Rachel?” when you saw her name as the translator of this book.  Rachel turned up towards the end of the translation process and went on to steal the scene. She has been interested in the questions of femininity, feminine sexuality, and feminism since we first got together – that was in the early 1990s. I had cancelled my surname and was looking for a name of my own to start again with when she whispered in my ear. She had been sitting quietly between my first and last names for quite a long time at that point, and now she was asking to come out.  Rachel is the name of an Old Testament matriarch who was remarkable for never having had a child of her own; when I registered that fact, it was simple to say yes to Rachel and get the new name written in all the right places.  We went on to create performances and presentations, write poetry, and put on plays. Then we ...

Three of us were out for a ride across the common and through the woods on a beautiful sunny afternoon in early spring. After cantering along the wide central path, we slowed down and turned onto the narrow path that runs along the edge of the wood, which is bordered on the left by a long line of back gardens. The sunlight was filtering through the moving branches and playing tricks with our eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a fox poke its nose through a hole at the bottom of a fence to my left, and I jumped: "Oh!" This, in turn, caused Artemis (my gelding) to jump, and he hopped to the right, tense and with his head held high. We recovered quickly, and I shared a laugh with Gwen, who was riding behind me, as she and I worked out that what I had seen was a shaft of light catching the edges of the revolving blades of a fan fitted at the bottom of the fence. A couple of minutes later, Havana, the warm-blood mare in the lead position, stopped dead in her tracks ...

A new brown mare is on the yard. She was pacing around her box and I thought, literally, "unsettled." Was it a signal that I read – or was it a "condition"?  She was put into a central pen while her stable was being cleaned, and tied by a halter rope attached to a string on the fence line. She was pacing back and forth on the end of the rope, which I found difficult to ignore.  I went and stood near her head. She was holding it high and looking around her. It was clear that the simple fact of my presence was not what she wanted, and she barely stopped what she was doing while I stood there. I began to walk around the outside of the small pen she was in, touching the posts and rails, checking the perimeter. This was something I used to do as a matter of course when I began my training as an equine facilitated psychotherapist (see earlier post, Klaus part 1 ). I suppose she noticed but I don't know what effect it had on her. Nevertheless, it gave me time to think....

  Horses have accompanied humans throughout history; they are part of our life and our memory. This image is from Chauvet Cave and is thought to be a drawing done 30,000 years ago. When two Kingsmead horses stepped out of a horsebox last month at the Bethlem Royal Hospital it might have been the first time in seventy-five years that hooves had trodden that turf.  Last week, John and I revisited the archive at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind to try to discover the date as precisely as we could. The archivist had kindly retrieved file HCQ-06 from the strongroom so that we could peruse the minutes of the Farm and Garden Committee from 1951 to 1975 (Bethlem).  As soon as we opened the manila folder the words from the very first page, dated December 1950, leapt out to meet our eyes. Item (f) “arrangements [to] be made for the old brown mare to be humanely slaughtered at the farm in the presence of the farm foreman.” A flush of emotion swept over us both at the stark dignit...

I walked around a corner into the main square of the stable yard and headed down one side and saw Nechta standing at the bar to her box facing me. She was looking at me, and as I approached she lowered her head, putting one front leg forward, then the other. She put her muzzle on one knee, and then on the other. I bent down to look and noticed some cuts just above the fetlock. I gently stroked down her left foreleg, holding my hand on her knee for a moment. I noticed her lips touch the top of my head and then my shoulder before moving to the nape of my neck. I looked up and saw that she had raised her head high and was looking across the yard. I stood next to her close to her shoulder and looked where she was looking across the corrals to the middle of the row of boxes at the top of the square, where a couple of ponies were standing at their stable doors. She showed white around her eye, as if in fear, then turned and withdrew into the shadow at the back of her box.  The excha...