On the Hoof

  Saturday 1 June, 2024, I walked around the meadows that surround the Bethlem Royal Hospital with a colleague who works there now. We caught a bus from Crystal Palace which wound through the back streets of Beckenham and Bromley before finally dropping us off at the northeast corner of the site, a bit of a stretch from the main gate. After about five minutes’ walking, we found what seemed to be an entrance, where a gap between a small set of maisonettes revealed a gate and pathway through trees that beckoned to us. But the gate was locked fast, the grounds were impenetrable, and the fence was unscalable. We resumed our route along the road to find the entrance to the grounds, then my friend led the way around the bottom meadow, past beautiful trees, a large house now boarded up and padlocked, and up to a desolate site that once housed an IAPT operation. We stuck to the fence line, which provided a secure boundary all the way around, and passed no one. As we approached the southwes...

There are eight Exmoor ponies, all geldings, living on a lovely piece of public land called the the Law in North Berwick, Scotland. It's on the coast, a short train ride from Edinburgh, and they've been there since October 2013 thanks to the initiative and vision of an exceptional man employed by the local council at the time whose name is Duncan Priddle.  The main feature of the land is a volcanic plug which gives the place it's name: the Law. It is all that remains from an ancient eruption and it sticks up 187m in an otherwise gently undulating landscape. The ponies regularly climb to the top of the Law and Sylvia Beaumont, who lives nearby, is often there to take their photos to post on the FaceBook page dedicated to this small herd. Earlier this year she captured a moment where the ponies were drawn to a man playing his bagpipes with the Law in the background. The video she took of the moment was enchanting . We went to visit Sylvia and the ponies this summer, and for t...

I gave a talk on Zoom a few weeks ago to my colleagues in the equine facilitated practitioners group (LEAP) where I trained. On the back of that, one of my colleagues invited me to visit her place to see how she manages her venture. I looked on the OS map and discovered that her yard was based right next to an Anglo-Saxon burial site on the North Downs of Kent. I saw that it was a short riverside walk from a station that was directly connected to one near where I live, so I dug out my enhanced CRB certificate and my passport and we made a plan for me to visit the very next weekend. When I arrived I saw three women deep in conversation close to a chestnut horse who was standing quite still, as if presenting his whole right side to their gaze. This was Frank, who had made it all the way to 36 years old and now looked rather tired. The three women were talking seriously about him, making plans, and deciding what to do. I noticed the quality of his fur, the look in his eye, and his stan...

I was keen to return to see how W was doing after our conversation on Saturday. John phoned ahead, and the yard manager warmly welcomed our proposal. It was unusually quiet – staff were away for some training. Some of the horses were taking afternoon naps. Others, including W, were munching their way through their hay. We left him to finish his lunch and went to say hello to a whole row of horses who lived in an alley at the rear of the stables.  When we returned to W, he immediately came to his door and greeted me. His mouth was not so angular today, but his eyes were 'tented' whenever something caught his attention. The main gate clanged, and a small dog started barking. W turned towards the sound, raising his head, eyes tented, and looked to see what might be approaching. A friendly man walked into the yard in a purposeful way and I smiled at him. Standing next to W so that I could mirror him, I followed his gaze towards this newcomer and pointed, saying out loud "Who...

  This beautiful horse arrived at the yard a few weeks ago and seemed pretty tense. He began weaving almost straight away, hence the guard that is now fixed to his door. Then he tried to roll a couple of times in full tack, as if trying to get something out of his body and make himself feel better. He has calmed down quite a bit since then, and I know that the staff are really great with the horses here, and that I don't know the half of what goes on. But this week, I took the chance to visit the yard one afternoon and found myself drawn to stand next to him, outside his stall. I looked at his mouth as his head kept up a constant series of small movements within the v-shaped space available. I greeted him with the Horse Speak three part greeting, but at the time, it was hard to know if he registered it. In retrospect, I believe he did. I then took up a position and began mirroring him, paying a lot of attention to his facial expressions. I was curious about the shape of his mouth, ...

At the end of the last century, I was a Nursing Assistant on an adult acute psychiatric ward at Warlingham Park Hospital. My colleagues and I were tasked with packing up and closing down Barbara Ward and moving to Gresham Ward at the Bethlem Royal Hospital a few miles up the road. We were part of the march of progress, stepping towards Care in the Community for the 21st century. A middle-class housing complex was planned for the newly vacated, beautiful site that once was Warlingham Park Hospital.  To enter the new ward at the Bethlem there was a locked door and a security camera that captured our image and sent it the few yards up the corridor to the nurses' station, which looked directly onto this entrance. The ward doors at Warlingham were almost always unlocked.    It is only now, browsing the archives kept by the Museum of the Mind at the Bethlem, that I discover that the open door policy at Warlingham was the initiative of T.P. Rees, who had taken over as medic...

20 September, 2008,   The Rally of the Impossible Professions, Against the False Promises of Security  [1] was staged by the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.  Jacques-Alain Miller came from Paris to preside over the meeting and delivered some closing remarks which were published along with other contributions from the day in the first issue of the international Lacanian journal of psychoanalysis, Hurly-Burly [2]. I got a call last month from Pascale Fari, curator of Lacan Web TV [3], asking if I still had the DVD recording of the event and, to my surprise, it took me less than an hour to put my hands on it. I said to myself : " When the Other calls, the unconscious answers." I had looked for it before without luck. Like hearing a poem learned long ago, or watching a play you once had a part in,  the words in the recording struck chords that I could feel resonating in my body.  The last words of the talk had a different effect. I...