one stirrup and three bottles

The building work has now been in progress for about one month and 110 millimetres of rain. Despite the weather setbacks, the new room is close to lock up.  The frame is in place and the roof is nearly finished; part of the neighbour’s fence has been pulled down and now forms a side wall to the room; and the doors we bought from a grumpy man in the second hand warehouse are arrived yesterday for installation.

The new sliding doors are in place as well as the feature window - well almost.  The architect designed the room on a beautiful angle.  However, as wind-out windows don’t wind out on an angle they hit the frame of the house.  This requires a bit of further thought. I can see P loves artistic architectural touches.

P has also dug up a stirrup.  How it got there is a mystery. Maybe someone was using a stirrup instead of a ring in a game of quoits , hurled it and never picked it up again – and then buried it because they couldn’t be bothered taking it inside. Kids!

Or maybe there used to be a horse attached to it but it rotted away over the years. But of course that doesn’t explain why there is only one stirrup. I discussed possibilities with P but he didn’t seem interested in solving the mystery. He is more interested in solving the mystery of architects.

It all fell into place when I realised that P had dug up more hidden treasure without bothering to tell me. There were three old bottles down the side path - two little medicine bottles and a bottle with the word s "almond cream" and stamped" made in the United States of America".

You’ve probably worked it out already, but I’ll go through it anyway.

Given this is Caulfield there have always been lots of horses around – even more in the olden days before there were so many cars. Anyway one day a horse, sick of clopping round the nearby racehorse, tore off down Queens Avenue after someone left the wrought iron gate open.  On exiting, one of the horse’s stirrups got caught in the gate and came off. The horse careered down Clifton Street and into our street. 

Somehow it ended up going down our side path into the backyard.  In its terror at being caught in a small confined spot, the horse reared up in panic a few times and then came down heavily on the concrete breaking its leg. You can imagine the shock this must have caused the former jockey who lived in our house. Forced into an early retirement after arthritis set in, he gingerly made his way outside to see what all the palaver was about.

Of course he had  empathy with horses – creatures that not so long ago shared most of his waking hours. He tried to ease the pain and distress by administering his two bottles of painkillers.  He also rubbed in some of his special cream bought in the States when he accompanied the doomed Phar Lap. Even though the former jockey had the best of intentions, there was no way that painkillers for arthritis and almond cream were going to be much help.

The horse died and because it is too hard to cart a dead horse away, kindly neighbours came over to help bury it.  Only the stirrup and empty bottles remain to tell the story.  I should have been an archaeologist. 

Of course this doesn’t explain what happened to the saddle the horse would have been wearing. Well, the jockey probably sold the saddle because it was worth something and he no longer had a steady income.

None of this solves the window problem.  I wonder if the builder will manage to solve it or if the price of cutting edge architecture is to stifle while admiring a beautifully angled wall.

...oh and here's a few shots of our extension so far.