Blue Monday. Or, I remember that I know nothing.

It is always when I am getting a bit swaggery and cocky that life slaps me down. It sternly reminds me of the virtue of humility.

I do have a tendency to get a bit over-excited. Suddenly I am showing off, doing jazz hands all over the place. Look at me, Ma, on my damn unicycle.

I was given a corrective in two radically different ways today. Red decided to remind me that she is still a half-ton flight animal with a mind of her own, and racing blood in her veins. As I was taking out the afternoon feed, she put on a wild Spanish Riding School of Vienna show. Considering that I have been known to boast about what good manners I have taught her and how polite she is and that I can do every single thing with her without a halter, this was a fairly severe riposte. Suddenly, all my herd knowledge and good body language counted for nothing. (The little Paint, who has a different heritage, was living up to her own ancestry by doing a bronco display in the background, which did not help.)

I think that earlier in the day I had actually said aloud the sentence: ‘we have the best behaved horses in Scotland.’ They had obviously heard, and now decided to play a joke on me. They had got together with the hubris police and were bringing me down to earth with a bump.

Ah well, I thought, stumping away, having finally settled my two crazy dancing queens. Back to basics. Serious groundwork tomorrow, and no more wild boasts.

In the human sphere, all my good resolutions about work and order were crashed by a catastrophic failure of time management. The work I did get done was not of a very high quality. My determination to be more organised turned out to be a puny plan, which made the universe laugh. Also I did a really stupid bet on the races and lost.

The elements joined the party, just to top it all off. It snowed in the morning and sleeted at lunchtime and now is just dreich and blah. And I have not done the healthy cooking I was supposed to, and I have only written 496 words, which is pathetic, and it’s ten past five and I have not come close to finishing all my tasks for the day.

Today, I was supposed to be galvanised and shiny and efficient, and I ended up being muddly and slow and constantly distracted. There is mud everywhere and I’m cold and cross.

Bizarrely, suddenly, after a year and a half, I really, really miss my dog.

The funny thing is that this morning I was thinking about moods. I was even going to write you something about moods and how to deal with them, because I thought I had cracked it. I’m going to be forty-seven in a couple of days, and I’ve been doing a bit of an inventory of all the things I know. I’d decided I knew rather a lot. That’s what I was getting cocky about. Moods, I thought, pah, I know just how to fix those right up. I’ll even tell people, as if I am some kind of maven.

Now I am fairly scratchy and glitchy and not shiny at all. Bloody weather, I think; bloody life. I know absolutely NOTHING. What was I thinking?

Still, knowing nothing is a fairly good place to start. The really good horse people always say that the one place to which you must return is square one. I think perhaps it’s not just a good place with horses, but with humans too. So off I trot, back to the beginning, shaking my head with rue as I go.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just to add to my sense of wearing a great big hat with D for Dunce on it, I realise that this blog is not very well written, and rather incoherent. I suppose that is appropriate, given my mood. I shall let it stand. I do hear the gusting sound of hollow laughter though, as I recall saying, on Friday, to a man I do not know very well: ‘The one thing I can do is write a really good sentence.’ Oh, oh, the flappy wings of hubris. Oh, the tumbling fall to earth. Oh, the shaming bruises on the arse that is my ego.

Never mind. Better tomorrow.