Duin it Rong, redux

I was on the very verge of saying that there's nothing worse than starting a day by deleting everything you wrote the night before - but that is very obvious nonsense, so I shan't. There are many worse ways to start a day, and I've tried a few of them myself.

Nevertheless. In a writerly way, it makes for a depressing beginning. Happily it's just a short story, and just a false start; I can go back and try again, and I still think there's something here that's worth the pursuing.

Just, I do hate retracing my steps, negative wordage.

I shall bake bread, and then everything will seem better, right? Right...?

AKICOLJ/DW

Horse-people! Tell me a thing:

Back in the days when people rode horses as a matter of course, as a means of transport, if you had ridden five or ten miles to pay a call and were perhaps not expecting to stay very long, say half an hour or so; if you rode to the stables of the house and there was no one there to take charge of your horse, what is the minimum that a reasonable person would do for that horse in terms of unharnessing/watering/that sort of thing before they would feel free to go into the house? Would they feel obliged to take the saddle off entirely, or might they just loosen the girths? Would a bucket of water be good or bad? Etc etc. I know nothing...