The Voices in my Head have a cocktail party. Or, I really have no idea what I am talking about.

There is a lovely line in Charade, when Audrey Hepburn looks at Cary Grant and smiles her blinding smile and says:

‘Do you know what is wrong with you?’

Cary Grant does his Cary Grant thing.

‘No,’ he says, all smooth and wry and suave.

The blinding smile goes into orbit.

‘Absolutely nothing.’

Sometimes I wish I could be my own Audrey Hepburn to my own Cary Grant.

It’s not that I think what is wrong with me is everything, but the chuntering voices in my head are grumbling and shouting at me. ‘Time management,’ they are saying, rather sourly. ‘You really could work on that.’ At this stage, if I let them, they would go into their familiar riff of ‘Call yourself a grown-up?’ But I’m not having that today; I’ve heard it all before. They can go and have their mean old cocktail party somewhere else.

I have been running about all day, constantly half an hour behind, watching ruefully as things slip through the cracks. Admittedly, I have done two really important pieces of work, the ones that are not for me, but for my friends at HorseBack. I always feel happier when I have achieved some prose for them. I even had a fruitful meeting. I have done the horses and walked the dog and made some tomato soup. But I completely forgot one quite crucial telephone call, had to tell the Younger Brother from Bali that I could not even speak to him for three minutes, and the To Do list still yawns in front of me. It is never, however hard I try, quite covered in the neat line of ticks of which I dream.

After such a frantic day, my head goes fuzzy and my fingers seize, and I think: oh, poor Dear Readers, I have nothing for them. I am running on fumes. There are at least seventeen important things on which I could be writing, and I can’t remember any of them.

I suppose this is a good thing, in a way. It’s all a bit messy and muddly and human, which is part of the point. I never wanted to do one of those shiny, envy-inducing, look at me being perfect blogs. (Ha, ha, ha, go the hollow laughs of the chuntering voices, looking up beadily from their Sazeracs.)

There is a part of me which wants to show you the shiny side, which wants to say Look, Ma, no hands. But it would never ring true, and there’s no point to it. I hate bogusness in all its forms, so it would be absurd if I started trying to pull that number. And the irony is that although I fear admitting to weakness, it is when I do that I get the best comments. It is when you all rally round and yell ME TOO, and I can sit back in my chair and sigh a sigh of relief and think, there, I’m not the only one. Which perhaps is the whole damn point.

 

Today’s pictures:

Actually do not exist. In amidst all the rushing about, I did manage to take rather a lot of photographs. I was stupidly proud of some of them. Then I sat down at my desk, opened the camera, and, true to the theme of the day, discovered I had forgotten to put the memory card in. How the cocktail party howled.

So here are a few from the last days:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Autumn the Filly:

Red the Mare:

Stanley the Dog, with the sky in his eyes:

The hill: