25 April—Remember the 4 August 2023 disquisition, Optimum owes you money, about an email regarding a class-action suit against Altice that was sequestered in Optimum email junk and never made it to Thunderbird? Well, the maximum $27.50 has been received. It will go towards feeding The Monitor’s malnourished staff; it should be enough to buy a pound of russet potatoes—on promo.

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You may have heard, read, or seen videos of the Household Cavalry horses that bolted yesterday and ran through London after they’d been spooked by construction noise. Seven spooked, four were able to break free, throwing their riders. Two—a black and a white—ran together in racial harmony, creating mayhem and doing serious injury to themselves, likely by crashing into vehicles and being cut by broken glass. Black Vida and white Quaker are as of this writing hospitalized and one of them has undergone unspecified surgery. We hope they recover fully and aren’t punished for being horses.

You’d think that ceremonial horses highly trained to work (perform) in an urban environment wouldn’t be spooked by construction noise, just as military horses—and the bolters are in fact considered military horses—should have been trained to tolerate gunfire and cannon fire.

Cannon fire brings to mind an incident some 35 years ago. Most riders, even lousy ones, don’t admit to falling off horses, they prefer to say they’ve been thrown. I was thrown only once, all the other times I fell.

The big throw happened when I was mounting my Trotsky, a big Belgian-thoroughbred, on the back lawn by the paddock. I was in the saddle, just about to put my right foot in the stirrup when a nearby cannon went off, Trotsky reared, and I flew over his back onto mine. Luckily I landed on grass and Trotsky didn’t bolt.

But what the hell was a cannon doing being fired off on South Street? Well, Trotsky and I trotted over and discovered that a neighbor had engaged the First Litchfield Artillery, a licensed private militia, to do its thing at his wedding celebration. A warning to his new wife, perhaps? Evidently it worked; they’re still married.

And then there’s the time that Trotsky, my daughter’s appendix horse Grebnesor, and Jeremiah the Welsh pony casually trotted through a broken pasture fence. First we heard about it was when a volunteer fireman called to tell us the horses were on their way to Torrington.

So an ignorant asshole of a town constable (for many reasons)—not the late Dodgie Doyle, by the way, who knew horses and told off the asshole—thought he’d be a cowboy and round up the horses by playing his siren and firing his pistol in the air. Of course, that served only to spook the poor horses. By the time we rounded them up, the equine trio was half-way to Torrington. That’s also where the asshole constable went after Litchfield had paid his way through the police academy . . .