All these years later I remember what a treat it was to spot horses on Horfield Common just before Christmas in 2011, and last Friday there was an echo of that visitation when I saw more horse-drawn vans making camp on the common, alongside the rather more mundane motorised vans, caravans and camper vans that line Kellaway Avenue in these days of scant social housing.
I was on my way to the reading by Alice Oswald and Kim Moore in town, so couldn't stop for a closer look, and since I was due to drive to Oxford the next day to take Son the Elder to a roboteering event, I concluded, sadly, that I probably wouldn't get a closer look at them. But in the morning, as luck would - or wouldn't - have it, my car started making disconcerting juddering noises before we'd even got as far as the M4, which meant the trip was off, and having driven it rather gingerly to our garage in Redland, my walk home took me straight past the Common and the new camp there.
Important, I feel, not to romanticise hard lives; nevertheless, both I and the little girl who used to hang around outside the blacksmiths at the bottom of nearby Bishop Road in the 1960s in the hope of seeing a horse in need of shoeing (but never did), felt all kinds of happy to see horses grazing the common.
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