Living for Disco

I have, just this minute, utterly lost any scant faith I may have had in the Microsoft spelling and grammar checker in Word.

I’m already cheesed off, because it insists on Americanising all my spelling, despite my settings being set to English (United Kingdom) on a daily basis. Which is annoying.

But can someone tell me, please, because I’m dying to know, what is wrong with this sentence?

“In the evening, the group met with other young musicians from the Oshikuku area, in order to listen to them perform.”

According to Word, it is all wrong. Terribly not done, darling. The irritating wavy green line underneath it tells me so. It helpfully suggests the following amendment:

“In the evening, the group met with other young musicians from the Oshikuku area, in order to listen to them performs.”

Which is clearly perfectly grammatically correct. Clearly.

I went horse-riding at the weekend.

I’m not a very elegant rider. I can ride, but I’m not vastly experienced. The first time I went here, I rode with some Dutch friends. In the course of the ride, I discovered that they’d all been brought up on horseback. Thus I was hugely thankful for the stubborn, lazy old horse across whose wide back I was straddled, because he stayed firmly at the back, sparing everyone the sight of my arse waving about in the air as I tried to find the horse’s rhythm.

Yesterday was better. I was less nervous about falling off and shattering my skull into tiny pieces because I’d brought my cycle helmet, and it all came back to me pretty early on. The only trouble I had was trying to stop my noble steed turning and heading for home every time a well-known shortcut hove into view.

“Pull the right rein…”, shouted my friend, her voice drifting over from a distant path on the other side of the hill.

“I am, I am”, I bellowed, as the fiend pulled the reins from my hands again and ambled off into a morass of strung-out spiders’ webs in order to find some juicy grass and have a good, leisurely fart. The spiders are huge, and orange, and look like something out of Starship Troopers.

My problem is that I can imagine having a bit in my mouth, and I can imagine how much I’d hate anyone who yanked it about without any consideration. I know that, somehow, I expect the animal to read my mind, and go the way I want without my having to explain it to it in fancy terms. My empathy and expectation of animal telepathy is the horse’s excuse to be a wanker.

Anyway, eventually I found a tone to which the horse responded (“Listen, you fucker, get out of the camel-thorn tree, or I’ll kick you in the fucking nuts”), and started being firmer on the bit, and we returned to the fray.

And it was beautiful. Early evening’s alchemy turned the abundant grass to a whispering carpet of gold. The sun reflected flashes of fire in the river, serene in its wide, stony bed. Eland and oryx, fat on the copious greenery, stood alert and watched us pass. As we cantered along the long-shadowed path towards home, a huge herd of blue-grey wildebeest stampeded in front of us, shaking their thick, heavily bearded and war-painted necks, and kicking up dust.

The alarming bruises on the inside of my thighs were worth every second.