The email came within thirty minutes of me posting a need, as a creative director, for images of Olympic-level riders doing extraordinary things with their horses.
Huge extensions in dressage. Massive leaps over fences taller than many humans. Combined driving, reining… all eight of the sports contested at the World Equestrian Games.
I had a client with a roster of elite endorsers, a newly minted agreement to be the official horse feed of the Olympics and World Equestrian Games, and a contender for the industry’s homeliest yet most recognizable (ergo unchangeable) logo. I needed extraordinary motion in these pictures to make a campaign of the “Pennfield stripes” concept.
On the Equine Photographers Network, I went to great lengths to describe precisely what I needed.
I asked for the epitome of elite equine athleticism.
I got… Frances.
Or more precisely, her 11-year-old daughter Flossie driving Vitamin, a furry Shetland pony of similar age.
Her email said something along the lines of, “I believe this is the power, speed, and athleticism you are looking for.”
She helpfully included Flossie driving Fivla, in case I preferred a grey.
Shetland ponies can be delightful animals – my own Strawberry is the best, and she clearly has a lot of Shetland in her – but Olympic athleticism is not generally prominent on their CV.
I laughed until I cried.
And somehow, from that spectacular failure to follow an advertising brief, a friendship began.
I have never met Frances.
For almost twenty years now, I have read her photo blog about life in Shetland, a collection of islands in the North Sea, about as far north as you can get in the United Kingdom without changing your passport.
It has become my daily 60-second reset of tranquility and laughter.
I’ve always felt a calling toward wild places. It’s why I love the northern islands of the Galápagos so much, and Shetland, sitting way up there above mainland Scotland and roughly abeam of Norway, certainly qualifies.
Frances lives there with – if you include the weather – an ever-changing cast of characters. There are the Shetland ponies, including the ancient matriarchs Vitamin and Fivla – yes, the same ponies Flossie was driving as a child – now both more than 30 years old.
There are “the Minions,” a ragtag collection of scruffy boy ponies with strong opinions and questionable work ethics, including the very tiniest of them, Newt, who has a pivoting turret back end that fires off shots at his fellow ponies without warning.
Three remaining and beloved Icelandic horses, also getting on in years.
And there are the sheeple. You know, the sheep that are people.
They are led by introvert Lambie and his Winning Smile, who likes classical music, a private dining room, and apparently believes he is a house sheep.
There have been dogs and cats and horses and sheep, arrivals and departures, births and deaths. Queen BeAnne Duvet, Frances’ Patterdale terrier and a wee dug after my own heart, was the animal I most wanted to meet when I started planning a trip to Shetland in 2020.
Covid happened. The trip didn’t.
And then BeAnne died.
I wept with a woman I had never met over a dog I had never touched.
That sounds strange until you think about how friendship actually works. We tend to measure it in proximity: dinners together, vacations, phone calls, the people who have sat on our couches and know where we keep the wine glasses.
But there is another kind, built almost accidentally through accumulated attention.
I have watched Shetland winters arrive and spring fight its way back out of the ground. I know about midge season – or, er, “damn midge season”. I’ve watched the annual horror of sheep shearing, after which the sheeple promptly get the vapors over one another’s new appearance. I’ve seen storms batter the croft and glorious days when heaven seems to pour perfection over it.
I’ve mourned a Minion. Several sheeple. Horses. Dogs. Cats.
And I’ve celebrated every successive new member of the family.
Pepper arrived after BeAnne, another Patterdale puppy with her own ideas about rules (“….Bornnnn… Freeeee… free as the wind blows” is clearly her theme song.)
Monster, the giant white cat, has very loud opinions about how the place should be run. (And believes he is utterly invisible whilst hunting, in the three seasons in which he is clearly not.)
Meanwhile, those two scruffy ponies from the beginning of the story had their own unlikely “international elite” act.
Vitamin and Fivla became famous.
In 2013, the two Shetland ponies were dressed in bespoke Fair Isle cardigans made from Shetland wool for a tourism campaign. The photographs went around the world.
Which means that the ponies offered to me years earlier as examples of elite equine athleticism ultimately became international models.
I could not possibly have written that punchline better.
And Flossie grew up, too.
The 11-year-old in the carriage went to Oxford University and became a Chinese translator, writing and speaking Mandarin.
When I asked Frances for an old photograph of Flossie driving Vitamin so I could tell this story, she sent one.
“Jolly good,” she said. “And you realise she will kill me.”
Some things apparently remain constant even while nearly everything else changes.
Over the years, little pieces of Shetland have even made their way to my house. I once helped Frances with a fundraising card for the Minions, and she sent me a tiny sheep and a puffin she had hand-felted from the wool of her own sheeple.
I sent pixels across the Atlantic. She sent some of Shetland back in physical form. I cherish it.
Frances still makes the little felted sheep and takes orders from overseas, although the puffins have apparently retired from production. Mine has become a small artifact from an earlier chapter in a friendship with someone I’ve never actually been in the same room with.
And I have artifacts from my side of the Atlantic, too.
In 2019, while planning my trip, I spotted a bone china teacup that I remembered as bearing the words THERE MAY BE GIN IN HERE.
Obviously, I bought it for Frances.
Covid canceled my trip.
Seven years later, while writing this story, I dug the cup out of the closet.
It turns out it just says GIN.
Apparently seven years is sufficient time for memory to improve the merchandise.
I also discovered I’d bought her a (needs ironing) tea towel explaining such useful Southern American expressions as Bless Your Heart, Fixin’ To, and How’s Yer Mama ’n Them?
(I would add, in the dryly inimitable southern voice of my dearly departed Aunt Martha Ann, quizzing some suitor or another of mine, “And-who-are-your-pee-pull?”
Frances, meanwhile, has gone sober.
So that worked out well.
I’ve watched her make that immensely brave and very public decision, just as I’ve watched her deal with back troubles that resemble my own and countless other pieces of ordinary life. That’s the peculiar thing about knowing someone this way for almost twenty years.
You accumulate history together.
I can remember Flossie when she was eleven, and her sister Daisy before she was Dr. Daisy, because, in a small way, I was there. I remember Vitamin and Fivla before they became sweater models. I remember BeAnne. I remember who came after her. I know which animals are old now because I remember when they weren’t.
The woman I bought that cup for in 2019 has changed. So have I.
Flossie isn’t eleven anymore. Daisy isn’t either. Vitamin and Fivla are now grand old hoary ladies. BeAnne won’t be there when I finally make it to Shetland. Animals I knew are gone, and others I now know didn’t exist when I bought the cup.
The cup is still sitting in my closet.
And somewhere along the way, “this funny woman in Shetland whose blog I read” became my friend Frances.
We still haven’t met.
I very much hope to fix that before too many more years go by.
Until then, I visit Shetland most days for about a minute. I see what the Minions have destroyed. I check on the old ladies. The old men. What neighbor Pepper has run away to visit. I admire the flowers. I find out what outrage Monster has suffered and whether Lambie has managed to get himself into the house.
Sometimes there is loss. Sometimes bad weather. Sometimes worry.
And at least once, two tiny old ponies were standing in a breathtaking Shetland landscape wearing sweaters.
For almost twenty years, Frances has been one of my favorite 60 seconds of the day.
I thought perhaps I’d share her with y’all.
Maybe she’ll become one of yours, too.
🩵
P.S. I’ve followed her all these years on Facebook and on her website, where she has a substantial following. She’s just getting started here on Substack, and that’s the link I posted before my closing heart. You can also find her website at https://myshetland.co.uk
The ad at the beginning and three snapshots on my dark granite kitchen island are mine. The rest are all © Frances Taylor / Thordale Photography.
I love this. We will meet. We have to. xx
Okay Pearl, you double tapped me on that one!