The Slower Road

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was a rather horse-crazy kid. When I was in eighth grade and high school, my family lived overseas … which made it easier to find and subscribe to several fabulous European and British horse and riding magazines. (As I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, I’ve always loved magazines.) One of my favorites at the time was a British magazine called Pony.

Over the weekend, A.J. and I were searching the house for some old family photos, and he came across a box of images (mostly of horses) and magazine articles and highlighted World Cup results and the like, which I had gathered and kept all these years. One of the items in the box was, inexplicably, the torn-off cover of the April 1983 issue of Pony. Looking at it now, I’m not really sure why I wanted to keep it, as I loved to ride but wasn’t all that interested in showing …

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Unless, perhaps it was for the image in the Norwich Union Insurance ad on the reverse?

Yes, that was CAA member John Parker driving the Norwich Union Mail Coach thirty years ago. I now know that he is a wonderfully talented, kind driver and instructor, and a delightful person to chat with. And, yes, I’ll take this as yet another sign that this job and I were meant for each other.

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I’ve (finally!!) finished cleaning and organizing and rearranging my office. I tend to work from “project piles,” rather than from files … but those piles are now housed in neatly labeled boxes, on shelves, instead of just sitting on my desk.

Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

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I’ve spent part of yesterday, and much of today, cleaning and reorganizing my office. So, once again, I’ve had little time to prepare anything to share with you here.

But I received a fabulous gift today: three old driving-related postcards from England. I’ll be sharing two of them with you next week. The third is a Christmas postcard. And, in the midst of my cleaning and filing today, I found two more old Christmas cards that I’d squirreled away with some other old prints. So I’ll have all three of those ready and waiting in the wings for this year’s Christmas-time look at old cards and postcards.

In the meantime, here (although this is a bit embarrassing) is a “before” photo of my office …

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…. aaaaagggghhhhh. Is there even a desk under all that??

I’m excited to report that I’m nearly finished with this project and that I’ll be neatly arranged and organized. I’ll share an “after” photo next week.