Pictures.

Crazy working day and there was no time for the blog. Hopeless. Here are some photographs from the last few days to make up for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the smallest of small things – the hills, the moss, the green, green grass of Scotland, the mare, the dog, hunting for beauty and tiny pleasures in each day. I suddenly realise, as I post these pictures, that the small things are all there. The red mare and these Scottish hills are vast to me, but in the scheme of the world they would not even make the back pages. As I get older, the things I love and value are further and further away from the classic headline desires. I’d love my next book to be a best-seller, but only so I can keep the horse in hay. I’d like to make some money, so I can build many beautiful paddocks out of lovely post and rails and fill them with ex-racehorses. I don’t want to be fashionable or famous or feted. I want my fingers to work so I can go on playing with prose, and my body to work so I can still be riding thoroughbreds when I’m seventy, and my eyes to function so I can read and look at the racing and gaze at this beloved landscape. I’d like my reflexes to stay sharp, so I can drive south and see the old friends. I’m starting to think I’d quite like a goat. That’s about the sum total of my ambition.

Love and trees, my darlings. Love and trees.

And sheep, of course. The ewes this year are so elegant I can’t stop staring at them.