BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS

Of goats and mountains and climbs

2012-01-27T16:31:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

One of the things I like about the internet is that it is very levelling. There are no ivory towers out there in the prairies of cyberspace. (My only fear about this is that the levelling can go too far, and lead to abandonment of decorum, so instead of saying, ‘I’m not sure I quite agree with you,’ people scream ‘die, bitch, die’.) If ever I should get a bit above myself, I only have to look at the search terms which bring people to my blog.

In my hubristic mind, these might be Universal Verity, or Most Beautiful Canine in Existence. In reality, they include Goat Climbing Mountain.

I should be thinking about serious things like the morality of banking bonuses, and the tottering world economy, and whether poor Andy Murray shall ever stop being shouted at for not winning a grand slam. (I’m not very interested in tennis, but I find the Murray phenomenon fascinating. He works incredibly hard and is very talented; he is at the top of a highly competitive game; the three men who routinely beat him are titans; yet he seems unable to shake off the label of dour Scottish loser.) I should be contemplating big serious questions about government cuts and fiscal austerity and what is going on with Hungary and the IMF.

Instead, I am slightly obsessed by the whole goat climbing mountain thing. I don’t think I have ever actually written about goats. I may have reported on the half-joke plan that The Sister and I hatched in case the entire economy does, finally, implode. We are going to grow vegetables and keep goats. You see how cunning and finely conceived our plan is. Ha. The crazed bankers and know-nothing economists can do their worst; we shall have the goats to keep us warm. However, none of this involves mountains, or, in fact, climbing. How the Google gets to me from the clambering goats is a mystery.

I also love the idea of people sitting down and bashing ‘goat climbing mountain’ into a search engine. It’s either a Dadaist form of poetry, or someone is doing espionage. Goat climbing mountain could be Moscow Rules. Just as I imagine discreet operatives going up to each other in St James’s Park, which as everyone knows is where all the spooks meet in their lunch break, and saying ‘The geese are flying south for winter’, so I could see that ‘goat climbing mountain’ is clearly code for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The other, even more perplexing search is: girl fawn Maddow. This is code so abstruse that even Bletchley Park might be left wondering. I do write about Rachel Maddow quite a lot. I love her. The love might, I suppose, sometimes pitch over into fawning. But I do not think, at 44 years and 362 days old, I could be described as a girl, even by the most unreconstructed patriarch.

I don’t know. Perhaps Rachel Maddow secretly has a thing for fawns. The most brilliant thing about this odd search is that now, every time I watch the coruscating Maddow show, I shall think of baby deer. Which is probably a very good antidote to the latest loon thing Newt Gingrich is saying.

The sun is fading now, and the last of the frost lies still and white on the cold grass. It’s been a long week. I have, as is so often the case, not done quite enough work to satisfy. I bash on and bash on and think: come on, come on, not there yet. More, more, I think.

I have thought a lot about my father. In yesterday’s life post, I wanted to say: remember your dead well. Then I thought: that is a stupid thing to say, of course we all remember our dead. I don’t need to write that down. But then I wondered whether there is a part of mourning where one shies away from thinking of the departed. There is a childish, magical part of the brain that wonders: if I do not think about them, perhaps they will not really be gone.

On my desk, I have a photograph of the first man who ever believed in me as a writer. Since, at the time, I was writing books so bad that I need to invent a new word for execrable to describe them, his belief was a real leap of faith. He was not a relation; he had no skin in the game. He was an artist, who, for some reason, picked me up, and encouraged me. I was twenty. I knew nothing. But he treated me as if I were Virginia Woolf.

He died, much too young, from AIDS, many years ago. Every day, I look at his picture, and feel gratitude, and wonder what he would make of it all. I remember him well.

One day, I think, I shall be able to look at a picture of my dad in the same way, with glad remembrance, rather than a tearing in the heart.

I know it may be rather vulgar to keep harping on about this, and it could sound like the worst kind of pandering, but the Dear Readers have really been magnificent this week. And now I know I have the goat mountain Maddow fawn people on my side, I believe I can do anything.

Pictures of the day.

It was another afternoon of astonishing light. Most of these pictures are of the hills and trees I can see when I look due south. I hope they are not too same old, same old. But there is something about the Scottish light, seen at that angle, that is so magical I can't quite get over it:

This one is completely out of focus. But these are two of my favourite little birches, and I rather love the blurred effect, as if they are in a painting:

The old iron fence. I can't get enough of that, either:

The beech avenue, from a low angle. (More attractive crouching from me, as The Pigeon looks on in bemusement.):

This happy face is because I bought her a new ball. I know I'm always banging on about how all you need are free sticks, but sometimes I like to get her an actual bought object to have fun with:

Here she is, with the bright orange thing in her mouth, doing what I used to call 'bottom in the air', but which I know now from the Dear Readers is actually a serious yoga pose called 'downward facing dog':

As my friend The Playwright says: do admit.

The hill:

Now I really am ready for the weekend. Happy Friday.

This much I know; or, oh no, this is much too long.

2012-01-26T16:26:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Right. Today, it’s life.

Only joking. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could actually do the whole of life in one post? What I really mean is: today, it’s – This much I know. The lovely Lou at Lou, Boos and Shoes did a life lessons blog today, and it inspired me so much that I started scratching my mind to see what I did know. As I spoke to my dear old friend The Expat the day before yesterday, her voice glimmering down a thin line from the west coast of California, I said: ‘My number one sentence at the moment is: I don’t know.’

‘I know nothing,’ she said, with a dying fall.

‘I know nothing,’ I shouted.

I thought for a minute. ‘One of those old Chinese fellows, possibly Confucius, said that the wise man is the man who admits he knows nothing.’ I paused. ‘Probably applies to the ladies too.’

‘Well,’ said The Expat. ‘That must mean we are damn wise.’

It’s the paradox of middle age. You get to the stage when you are supposed to know something, because you’ve had experience, you’ve lived some life, you have lost and loved and failed and won; you have grieved and triumphed; you have counted them in and counted them out. You are staring down the barrel at forty-five (four days to go), and you look up, into the singing blue sky, and you think: I know nothing. Don’t ask me what it’s all about, Alfie, because I do not know. And that’s the truth.

Yet, I do know something. I’m not nearly as sure of the things I do know as I was when I was in my twenties and I was armoured in sureness. I wore certainty like a Dolce coat. I swished about town in it, as if I would live forever. I actually apologised to someone the other day, who knew me well in those days. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really must have been maddening, with all that pontificating.’

He smiled, with grace. ‘That’s quite all right,’ he said. He is a countryman; he can do more things with a young horse than anyone I ever met. He knows all about the follies of youth. (Also, he has been known to pontificate a bit himself.)

The difference is that the things I know are quite small things now. I no longer think I may change the world. The known things are hesitant things. They are subject to amendment. I use the words perhaps and maybe more than I used to.

My old dad used to smile a lot about the certain people; he would describe them as going about ‘making statements’. He had a special way of phrasing it which sounded ironical and slightly indulgent and a little bit surprised. Every time he talked about someone making statements we would all laugh.

You see that even now, when I have decided to do a little life lesson post, I have had to do a great deal of what my friend The Man of Letters calls throat-clearing first. Even now, I lack sureness.

But, for what it is worth, here is what I know:

1. Love and trees. Those are the most important things. When I say this, The Younger Brother roars with laughter, since he is the one who is supposed to be a hippie, not me. I do think, though, you can’t go far wrong with love and trees.

2. I have been saying this ever since I read it in A Passage to India (which I actually did read on a train in India, from Bombay to Cochin): kindness, kindness and yet more kindness. That EM Forster, with his two cheers for democracy and his choice of friend over country, he did know a thing or two.

3. Related to kindness, a lovely annexe to it, and something I think more and more important as I get older, are good manners. I know this sounds hysterically old-fashioned. But the social contract is a fragile thing; it must be stitched together daily. Please and thank you are tiny matters, when the world is so crazed and unpredictable, but I do think they make a disproportionate difference.

4. In this matter, Lou and I are as one: get a dog. Get a dog, get a dog. Most specifically, get a dog which knows how to retrieve. This morning, on our walk, The Pigeon and I had ten minutes of sheer, raging pleasure, which just involved her, me, and an old stick. It cost nothing. You don’t need fancy toys from the pet shop. If your dog knows how to chase something and bring it back, you can be made happy by a stick covered in lichen. This feels profoundly symbolic, in a rushing consumer age.

Of course, not everyone will want a dog. It is not practical for every person. So I add: or equivalent. By which I mean: something which you can love without hindrance or condition or restraint, and will love you right back.

Humans are marvellous, but they are complicated. They have moods. You can’t just hurl yourself on them and kiss their noses; they sometimes do not like that. A domestic animal, on the other hand, will take all the physical affection you can give it, at any moment of day or night.

5. Cooking is an act of love. I know sometimes it feels like a chore, a relentless daily challenge to get all the food groups represented. But feeding those you love, with love, is an act of the heart. Although there are nights when you just have to say: bugger the love, I’m sending out for Chinese.

6. And talking of love: I think the definition sometimes gets blurred. I think love is action, not just feeling. Any old person can get the sentimental swoon in the heart, the twist in the stomach. Any fool can buy roses. Love is doing. It is when you hear a tearful voice on the end of the telephone, and you don’t ask any questions, you just get in the car and go. Its test is in the hard times. It’s easy to be fond and lovely when everything is going well, when you are in the low, even ground. It is what you do when the road is rocky that counts.

7. I like that line at the beginning of The Great Gatsby, which goes something like: when you are tempted to criticise anyone, remember that all the people in the world have not had the advantages you have had. I should go and look it up, to get it exact, but there is no time. It is an excellent sentiment, though.

8. A rider to that one is: the importance of empathy. Empathy has rather a soppy, blah sound now, it has been so over-used by the therapeutic community. In its true meaning, it has a muscular, human quality: the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. It can be hard, a stretch of the imagination. It goes back to love and manners: it is an act of humanity and politeness.

9. Read books.

10. Be specific. I always say this to my writing students in the workshop I give each summer. It’s a fine rule for writing; I suspect it is not a bad one for life.

11. Do not forget the power of song. I missed my father so much this morning I could hardly breathe. Then I found myself in the kitchen singing at the top of my voice. (It is very, very lucky that I live alone.) The louder I sang, the better I felt, as if all the demons were coming out. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, I thought, as I tried and failed to hit the top note.

I think there is some actual scientific, peer-reviewed evidence about the psychological and physiological advantage of belting out a show tune. In my subjective, anecdotal experience, it just helps, especially on a dark day.

The song to which I was singing, in case you are interested, was Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Len has been with me since I was seven years old, and The Brother made me listen to Songs of Love and Hate. He’s been with me through every single heartbreak since. If I were only slightly more flaky than I actually am, I might put, in my rules for life: take a Leonard Cohen album with you wherever you go. You are never alone with Len.

I’m sure there are a few more, but the other thing I know is that one should try not to bang on. I have a fatal tendency for prolixity. So I am going to stop now. I’m not sure if any of this has made any sense, but I liked thinking about it. I think: now over to the Dear Readers. They will have some life wisdom. Then we can pool the lot and it will turn out we did know something after all.

Pictures of the day.

It was very misty when I went out this morning, and I watched the day turn from white to blue. It was quite magical.

Dew:

Grass heads in the mist:

Hedge and mist:

More dew:

Pigeon bravely goes off into the mist:

First shaft of sun:

More brave Pigeon:

Then the light made an extraordinary golden diffusion, as the sun was fighting with the mist:

And suddenly, in the west, there was blue:

Special Pigeon and stick photo essay now. Non-dog people may move swiftly on. After the actual throwing and catching of the stick, she likes to demolish the thing, just to show it who is boss:

Despite the blue in the west, when I got back to my front door, the place where the hill usually is was just whiteness, with the merest trace of tree:

I just went back to Lou's blog, to get the link, and read it again. I thought: oh, hers is all lovely and short and true and like a haiku. It has a poetry to it. And mine is all rambly and filled with tangent. I must must must return to pith.

Then I thought: but no, that's the point. That's why one goes to different blogs, to find different voices. Imagine if everyone approached a thing in the same way. The dullness. And that really is my story, and I really am sticking to it.

In which I stare self-indulgence in the face and wait until I see the whites of its eyes

2012-01-25T16:46:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The weather is flat and dreich and vaguely cross. The economic news is as dirty and gloomy as the sky. I suppose I should say something about that, but I do not have the heart for it. I start to think it is rather like the famous line that William Goldman wrote about Hollywood: ‘Nobody knows anything’. (In my memory, he thought that line was so important that he wrote it twice, just in case the readers had not quite taken it in, although I may have made that part up.)

My old friend The Expat called and I was so delighted to hear her dear voice that I was inspired to write a little paean to friendship. I had started it, fingers tapping away, when I suddenly lost my nerve. I’m not sure whether it was because it seemed too inconsequential when everything is about to go smash, or for some other reason. I am slightly haunted by what someone said recently, not knowing that I wrote a blog. ‘Oh, blogging,’ she said, in magisterial disdain; ‘it’s so self-indulgent.’ She looked really cross, as if self-indulgence was the thing she could least bear, and there were all these damn people, indulging all over the shop.

I should have let it go. If I were restrained and polite, I would have said: ‘Oh, really, do tell me why.’ I’m not being passive-aggressive; it would have been interesting to know. And besides, it’s a perfectly valid opinion.

Instead, I barged in. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I write a blog, and I think if you are going to make that argument you would have to say that all writing is self-indulgent.’

I then launched into a full-bore defence. It’s the usual old thing; I’ve written it before. It’s not so much that blogging is not self-indulgent, but it’s no more self-indulgent than writing a column or an article or a book or a pamphlet. In some ways, all writing is self-indulgent because it’s saying: here I am, I believe I am so fascinating and charming and otherwise worthwhile that I am actually going to publish my thoughts, rather than keeping them quietly in my head.

I’m not sure it’s much of an argument, really. It’s just that when people write off a whole medium, it touches a nerve. I feel protective of my fellow bloggers, whose work I love. I feel defensive, perhaps, of this tiny enterprise, whose worth I cannot gauge. Ever since that remark, as I sit down to write I think: oh, oh, perhaps that woman was right. What am I doing with the rants and the rambles and the endless dog pictures?

Although perhaps I can defend the dog pictures, on account of the raging beauty of The Pigeon, which clearly adds to the gaiety of nations, increases the sum total of human happiness, and puts another gaudy stitch in the rich tapestry of life. She, who has never been self-indulgent in her life, brings smiles to the faces of readers from Sri Lanka to Singapore, from Texas to Tottenham, and that is not nothing.

As for the rest, I remain uncertain.

Actually, bugger it. I can do better than that. I am not going to let doubt and rain and rotten economic growth seep into my soul and sap my spirit.

CS Lewis may or may not have said ‘we read to know we are not alone’, but it is a statement of ultimate truth. Oddly enough, he also said a true thing about friendship, which could apply to blogs too: ‘Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

Despite the hopes for the global village, the modern world is atomised; extended families and tight communities grow increasingly rare. It is fashionable to use the word virtual as an insult just now, but a virtual community may still commune. That’s what happens when the Dear Readers come. It is absolutely something. It is an exchange of words and ideas and kindness where before there was nothing. As I think of it like that, it seems rather a miracle. (I must not now go the other way, and fall into whimsy and sentiment.)

I think blogs are exactly like people. There are absolute crashers; there are ranters and dullards and drama queens and statistics geeks. There are funny ones and clever ones and eccentric ones and inexplicable ones.

As every blogger understands, there are good and bad days, just like in life. There are days when, as the Dear Readers know to your cost, it is all buggery bollocks. The mind is flat, the imagination has gone out for lunch, the grasp of basic language has fled for the border. Those are the days when, as my friend The Playwright says, you can’t write fuck on a dusty blind.

Then there are times when the planets align and the literary angels dance on their pins, and a sentence will dazzle off the keyboard. Some days, one will actually have something interesting to say; on others, it’s back to the dog pictures.

I think I may, as the shrinks say, own my self-indulgence. I do write about the things which interest me. Not all of you will be as in love with trees and politics and the mystery of the human condition and the cooking of soup as I am. There will be days when you really cannot face yet another description of yet another bloody horse race. Oh, you will cry, enough with the Kauto Star already. And I should not blame you for that.

In some ways, it’s right to have doubts. I think a lot at the moment about certainty. It can be a lovely thing; rather restful to have, oddly soothing to be around. But in a flicker of its eye, certainty can harden into prejudice and narrow-mindedness and bombast, and then we are all for the dark. Every piece of writing I do contains doubt, and I believe that is how it should be. The spectre of self-indulgence should haunt the blogger, just a little, if only to keep the word count down to a reasonable level.

At the same time, I think there is something wonderful about the world of the blogs. I love that they give me a flashing glimpse into the mind and life and surroundings of humans I shall never meet. I like that they can bring people together. They can stretch the mind, delight the eye, challenge the received wisdom.

Sometimes, they are inconsequential, but there’s nothing wrong with that. They can also be really good at disseminating information and putting the record straight. As a novel medium, blogging is amazingly agile, as nimble on its feet as a ballroom dancer doing the foxtrot. (Oh dear, strained simile alert just went off. Never mind. Occupational hazard.)

And, and, where else would we all go for videos of small children and cats doing comical things, and pictures of baby penguins? Quite frankly, I sometimes think it is worth it for the penguins alone. And the dog pictures, of course.

Pictures of the day are very few, on account of the risible weather.

There is, amazingly, a tiny bit of early blossom:

And the viburnum is doing its hardy winter thing:

Look, look, the first tips of the snowdrops:

And the hopeful crocus shoots:

Even on the greyest day, the old beech leaves and the mossy wall still work their magic:

And speaking of magic:

This is her Please can we go in out of this absurd rain and eat some biscuits face:

So dreich that the hill is lost. You can just see, if you squint and look very, very closely, the faint outline of it in the cloud:

Leave the introverts alone

2012-01-24T13:02:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Warning for length, and ranting.

This morning, the Today programme had on the American journalist who has just written a mildly controversial book about the Obamas. To the shock and horror of the commenting classes, it turns out that Mrs Obama may not be a doormat person stuck in a 1950s time-warp. She has, apparently, ideas of her own, and sometimes expresses them. This, it appears, makes her both frightening and angry. And again I find myself hurling another socking great double standard across the room.

But the point was not so much about the brilliant Mrs O. Right at the end, the journalist, whose name I stupidly forget, was asked about President Obama’s first term. Justin Webb, who knows something about American politics, said: ‘Why do you think he has been a bit of, well, a disappointment?’

First of all, the journalist did not pause to challenge the premise. I am quite keen on challenging the premise and think people should do it more often, especially on flagship news programmes. (This is not the same as not accepting the premise, which is a politician’s weaselly way of not answering the question, cf Andrew Lansley this morning on the National Health Service.) In fact, she seemed quite delighted to be asked, as if this were the crux of the matter. She had obviously given the thing some thought, because she did not pause or ponder; she came right out with it. ‘Of course,’ she said, conclusively, ‘he’s the most introverted president we’ve ever had.’

At which point, I literally shook my head, like a baffled horse. I practically snorted and pawed the ground. What? You take the myriad, convoluted, labyrinthine complications of running a country as eclectic and mysterious as America, and boil it down to the fact the president is an introvert? And, and, you blatantly imply that this is a bad thing, a terrible drawback, a defining weakness. I do not understand.

Justin Webb, whom I admire, moved on without a beat, as if this were a perfectly explicable answer. I was left opening and closing my mouth like a grumpy carp. It’s not actually the politics of this that interests me, for once. I could argue for hours that Obama has not been a disappointment. I think it is a miracle that he can govern the country at all, since America seems more profoundly divided now than I have ever seen it. It’s not just left and right, there are furious fissures within the ideological camps. Have you been watching the Republican primaries? There is a massive fight going on between the religious right and the fiscal conservatives, the almost extinct Rockefeller Republicans and the neophyte Tea Partiers, the biblical literalists and the radical libertarians, and all points in between.

Within the same party you have Ron Paul, who wants the government to run a small army and not much else, and Rick Santorum, who would like government to be so enormous it can go into your bedroom and your womb. (There’s fun for the ladies.)

The Dems are slightly less fractious, but the coloured bit of the Venn diagram where centrists once met seems to be smaller and smaller, so there are terrible, pointless, childish rows and stand-offs in both House and Senate, where bills are thrown out because of tribalism, Republicans vote against things they once supported, and filibusters grow like mushrooms after rain. Sometimes, when I watch the implacable dislike and mistrust that seems to obtain between the two sides, I wonder that America can be governed at all.

Yet, Obama stopped the economy sailing off the cliff, got the jobs graph to start crawling up instead of plunging down as it had under George W, put through a healthcare bill which at least contained the idea of universal coverage, pulled out of Iraq, tracked down Osama Bin Laden with his supersecret powers, and repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, all against the howls and tantrums of an obstructionist Congress. He has not been perfect, but, in an awful situation, he has not been bad. And he can sing Al Green songs.

But that is not the point. (Turns out I had to say it, because it makes me so cross when people suck their teeth and say he has done nothing.) The point is that his perceived disappointment is being blamed on being an introvert.

There is an element in American politics which is hard for me to understand fully, and that is the glad-handing aspect. British politicians don’t have to do this. Ministers introduce their bills; the party system guarantees most of the time there will be an easy majority; occasionally the whips are called in and glare with menaces; very rarely the government backbenches rebel. As far as I can see, in America the President can rely on almost no one, even his own party.

For each bill, he has to get the votes, and this seems to involve personal relationships. When asked why his promised bipartisan dream did not come to pass, the Republicans say, over and over, that he never came up to the Hill. He never asked them to things, apparently. He did not have them in for cocktails. It’s so strange. It sounds like they are teenage girls who did not get invited to a fashionable party, and now they are throwing a strop about it.

I that this is partly what that journalist meant when she blamed Obama's introversion for his perceived failure. The only inference I can draw from this odd statement is that if he had been a good ol’ boy, yacking it up, and slapping backs, and twinkling and winkling, then somehow everything would have been fine.

I admit, I am entirely biased. I am an introvert. I get so sick and tired of introversion being seen as entirely negative trait. Introvert is used to mean taciturn and shy and anti-social; that is not its meaning at all. It simply means that the inner world of thoughts and ideas is more real than the external world of events. For the extrovert, it is the exact opposite. The extrovert’s greatest terror is being left entirely alone; the introvert fears the collapse of her internal world. Regular readers will know that my biggest fear is that I shall go mad in the night and wake up thinking I am Queen Marie of Roumania. It is a classic introvert terror, almost a cliché of introversion.

Introversion is a bit like handedness. One can go out and dance and sing and talk and laugh; one can be social and make conversation perfectly well. It’s just it’s a bit like writing with your left hand when you are naturally right-handed. It requires a bit of effort.

The difference is that extroverts thrive on people; big groups, social occasions are like fuel in the tank for them. Introverts, on the other hand, are exhausted by going out, however much it might be a pleasure. That is why, after this lovely weekend away, I had to sit in a silent room for the whole of Monday, staring out of the window. My easiest and gladdest default mode is to be alone.

I always used to think that introversion and extroversion were evenly mixed. Apparently not. Someone worked out it’s more like 30-70. This now starts to explain to me why people react with disdain; it’s the old minority thing. It’s other.

Also, on a very human level, people take it personally. Sometimes, I do not answer the telephone. This is because I have been thinking all day and my brain is not fit for human contact. Often, I refuse invitations, because I am not robust enough for many people in a room; I need to be still and quiet. Because extroverts, the majority, the normal ones, cannot imagine feeling like this, they take it as an insult. The conclusion is: the introvert does not like people, rejects company, is somehow superior or disdainful, is horridly chilly and distant.

It’s not that. It’s just that doing more than one human at a time is a stretch for me, so I need to be feeling strong for it. I need a good night’s sleep and all my iron tonic.

Introverts might not always have the easy ability to beam their charm and magnetism at a group, as Bill Clinton or Sarah Palin may; the concentration on the inner world may well be a drawback in strict political terms. What they do have is the capacity to sit in a room and think. I would like my leaders to be sitting and thinking as much as they can damn well bear.

The world is swerving into water where there are no charts. It is the contemplation of introversion rather than the instant action of extroversion that is needed now. I bet you anything all those bloody Joe Cassanos and the other credit default cowboys were extroverted up to their eyebrows. And look how well that turned out.

One of the complaints about Obama is that he is too cool. He does not connect, apparently. I think you can ask the wrong things of a politician. I’m not sure I want hail fellow well met; I want brain the size of Poland. I’m pleased that the President is a thoughtful man; I admire his dignity and grace. I don’t want to have a beer with him, I want him to make good decisions, because what happens to America affects us all.

But most of all, can people stop drawing intellectually lazy, psychologically inaccurate conclusions; could they stop conflating two different things and making baseless accusations? Could they just leave us introverts alone? We are not freaks. We do not hate or fear people, just because we are not doing karaoke every night. We just come at the world from a slightly different angle. Surely that is allowed?

Pictures of the day. I am slightly obsessed with the colours of the bare trees, so there are rather a lot of snaps of those:

This photograph is not well composed. It is not even in focus, which you might think would be the minimum requirement. But it is of Pigeon doing the blinky eyes. I'm sorry, but no blinky eye can remain unseen. So here she is:

Back to focussed gazing face:

Hill:

A brief report from the Borders

2012-01-23T16:48:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Back from the Borders. They are quite shockingly pretty; I always forget. They have those lovely green folded hills and mountains which look as if they are made of velvet. Sometimes, in the thick yellow light, the country looks almost Italian, faintly reminiscent of the slopes of Lake Como.

There were very old friends; one rekindled acquaintance, who had grown funnier and more fascinating with age; and several people I had never met in my life. I laughed a lot, pontificated excessively, drank slightly too much good Burgundy, and wore my red patent wedges. I had to apologise twice for bombast. My social skills are creaking from lack of use, so when I do go out, I get very over-excited and have a fatal tendency to shout and wave my arms about. Thus: slightly angsty apologies. Luckily, everyone was most charming and forgiving.

The Pigeon was a tremendous hit. There were two particularly adorable little girls who fell in love with her. She has a profound affection for children. On Saturday, we were out on the hill when violent wind and rain came howling down the valley. The small girls decided that they would keep The Pigeon warm by rubbing her all over with their gloved hands, to get the circulation going. ‘Oh Pigeon,’ they said with a dying fall, as they gazed on her slightly plaintive wet face.

Tired now after my social exertions. Since I am used to being silent for days on end, forty-eight hours of non-stop talking takes it out of me, as if I have been competing in some marathon athletic event. So today’s blog is shockingly brief. I give you some pretty pictures of the Borders in compensation. They even have snowdrops down there, great pale carpets of them, enchanting the woods. Two hundred miles north, we have no sign of snowdrop yet. Although I did see the first daffodil shoots this morning, which have appeared, like a miracle, in the two days since I have been away. It is the first official mark that there will, one day, be spring.

Pictures:

And, back at home, the fledgling daffs:

The wonderful mossiness of the grass:

I became rather fascinated by the mossy grass, and took a while to work out the best way to capture it in a photograph. There was a great deal of crouching, and bending, and lying down on the ground in order to get the best angle. In the middle of a particularly inelegant squat, a smart gentleman drove up, and asked where he might find The Landlord. Clearly they had some kind of business meeting.

I gave directions. The fellow gave absolutely no sign, not by the flicker of an eyelid or the twitch of a cheek, that he had come upon me squatting down on the ground, taking photographs of the mossy earth. It must have appeared a frankly peculiar thing to be doing. To make it worse, I had my new super-stereophonic headphones on, and was so moved by the sound quality that I was singing tunelessly and very loudly along to Everything But The Girl. And I was wearing my most ancient green velvet coat with the holes in, and bits of tattered lining drooping out of the sleeves, and one shoulder faded to olive by the sun.

He addressed me as if I were the Duchess of Alba. The more I think of this, the more I believe that he must have a most remarkable mother, who taught him the best manners in Scotland.

My own dear hills:

And finally, the perfect canine guest. She really did behave with tremendous decorum:

I am not ashamed to admit I was very proud of her.

In which Lord Bragg leads me to ponder the national character

2012-01-19T13:47:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I love Lord Bragg. There, I’ve said it. It’s out there.

I don’t know what he’s like in life. He might be an utter charlatan, for all I know. But I love him because every Thursday he gets three or four academics, the best in their field, round a table and lets them talk. I sometimes think no other country in the world would have a radio programme like In Our Time, and I bless the dear old Beeb weekly for it.

Today, he was talking about the revolutions of 1848. This made me highly excited. Apart from the First Reform Act and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, almost nothing interests me more. (You think I am joking. Tragically, I am deadly serious.) At the age of eighteen, when I was studying for my history degree, I found the 1848 ructions deliriously exciting. I liked to think I had a bit of a radical soul in those days; I think I rather identified with all that taking to the barricades.

So today was a lovely gallop down memory lane for me, and my love for His Braggship increased. But then he asked the interesting question: why did Britain not have one? The profs muttered and giggled. Constitutional monarchy, they mumbled; reform from within; the Chartists. Queen Victoria, said one of them, suddenly stalwart, was an awful lot better than those cretins on the European thrones. I was rather amazed. Are you even allowed to say cretin on Radio Four?

Of all my history essays, the one I remember as if it were yesterday was on this very question. From 1789 to 1815 to 1830 to 1848, as Europe roiled and erupted, as the paving stones in great cities were ripped up to make barricades, as monarchs trembled and high ministers resigned and new constitutions were hastily written, Britain just kept calm and carried on.

It’s not as if the British were not interested in revolt. The poets and the theorists and the socialites were initially thrilled by the French Revolution. The Duchess of Devonshire was always running off to Paris, as if the fall of the monarchy were a tourist attraction. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, wrote Wordsworth. People got very grumpy with Burke when he foresaw disaster. Then Robespierre went mad, and it wasn’t so romantic after all, and everyone cleared their throats and shuffled their feet and looked at their shoes and changed the subject.

But for all the reform movements and radical ideas, there was no late eighteenth century or nineteenth century revolution, despite the turmoil just over the English Channel. I remember having a very robust notion about this. I said it was because of the essentially conservative nature of the British character. The British did not like uproar and chaos; they liked routine and small certainties.

I vividly recall writing about the minor bread riots which would break out, like clockwork, on Monday mornings. The workers would get paid on a Friday. They would then spend all the cash on drink, wake up on Monday broke and hungover, have a little riot, and then everyone would go back to work. (Can this really have been true? I certainly used it as convincing evidence.) Anyway, according to me, that was how the British did revolt.

Of course my argument slightly falls down when one reflects that we did have a bloody revolution, and killed a king too. The Civil War set families against each other, fathers against sons, brother against brother, and led to rabid witch-hunts and crazed religious tests.

Perhaps it was the folk memory of that awful experiment which kept Britain calm in later centuries. Perhaps it was that the vested interests and the monarchy were very clever at giving away little bits of power and making them look like great concessions. (The First Reform Act was presented as revolutionary, but it only produced a very limited franchise.) Perhaps it was that there were occasional crusading prime ministers who really seemed to be on the side of the common people, like Peel in 1846.

My nutty theory, which I must have dreamed up to be cussed and to excite my tutor, does make me wonder now whether there is such a thing as national character. It’s something I think about a lot. Do all Americans really love winners, and believe in American exceptionalism, and still have the frontier spirit running through them? Are the Germans really that efficient? Do Ordinary Decent Britons truly believe in reticence, and stoicism, and queuing, and the underdog? Is every last French person entranced by good food and intellectual debate?

Despite this, I do wonder if there might not have been a minute grain of truth in my teenage argument. I think the British are historically conservative, with a very small c. All the politics here takes place in the centre ground. Unlike in Europe, extremes and ideologies have never taken hold. Moseley’s fascism was dark and dangerous, but he was mostly treated as a joke. On the other side, the Communist Party only ever had a minute membership. In contemporary times, Tony Blair made Labour electable again by dragging it to the centre ground; David Cameron did the same with the Tories, in an attempt to banish their nasty party image. Perhaps, if there is anything in the idea of Britishness, it is a default setting of the middling sort, a Goldilocks tendency: not too hot, not too cold, just right.

Well, it’s just a theory.

Some quick pictures. There was amazing light this morning:

Pigeon, elegant in black and white:

Carrying her tail like a flag:

With her slightly quizzical face and neat paws:

The hill:

Tomorrow I go to stay with my very old friend M in the Borders. There shall be no blog until Monday. I apologise for this shocking dereliction of duty. I'm afraid the Pigeon and I shall be living it up somewhere south of Peebles. It is very, very naughty of us.

Have a lovely weekend.

In which it appears I do not officially exist

2012-01-18T15:27:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

This is really rather too long. For which I apologise. But I was very, very cross, and fury appears to make me prolix.

The day starts off very well. I am up early, my mind is sharp, I am taking in The Today Programme with forensic concentration.

The sun comes out, the hills look pretty, I have some delicious bacon for breakfast. Then I must face the big task of the day: to prove that I am who I say I am. Which, at the moment, appears to be in doubt.

Sometimes, for various reasons too dull to explicate, people ask me for proof of identity. This is happening at the moment. In a curious and inexplicable way, the identity thing throws me into an existential rage. I have no idea what ancient wound this is opening, but it must be an ancient wound, because the fury is entirely disproportionate. The practical side of me understands that officialdom needs to know that you are who you are. I quite see that. The emotional side wants to scream: I am who I am; I am a human being; someone please believe me.

It is also maddening because it involves tracking down vital documents, doing photocopying and scanning, and other logistical things at which I am no good. It interrupts my work and uses annoying amounts of mental energy.

Today, I finally got all the papery ducks in a row, felt quite pleased with myself, and the dear Stepfather drove me down to the doctor to get the documents franked. (My car is in the garage.) I cannot, apparently, get the things counter-signed by, say, The Landlord, who despite being a very important man, and a company director, does not count. It must be a doc. This sets up a low-level mutter of complaint in my head, but there, it is something I must and can do.

I smile at the lady in reception, ask if a doctor is available to sign, and explain politely what it is I need. There is an instant resistance. It is really interesting. She looks at me suspiciously, as if I am asking for pharmaceutical heroin. She does not like me, is not taken in by my spurious good manners, which are clearly an evil con trick taught to me by my grifter mother, and is not going to say yes to anything, if she can help it.

She starts with a hedge.

‘Well, it should probably be your regular doctor,’ she says, reluctance jutting through her every word.

I explain that I do not have a regular doctor. I am very lucky in having decent health; I have only visited the practice twice in the last five years. ‘The last one I saw was Dr G,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she says, triumphantly, delighted to thwart me. ‘Well, he’s in surgery.’

‘Never mind,’ I say, trying to stay calm. ‘Any doc will do. They don’t need to know me. They just need to see that I am standing here with my driving licence. It’s the profession that is needed, not personal knowledge.’

She looks mulish. It is clear that she will have to call in reinforcements. She goes to talk to her manager. This takes five minutes. She comes back in delighted validation; no, it is not possible. If I want a signature, I must make an official appointment, and I must pay ten pounds.

I am generally an even-tempered person. I very much appreciate the fact that I have an excellent surgery, clean and efficient and modern, on my doorstep. I am grateful that it is free, as they say, at the point of use. This means: I do pay for it, through my taxes, but I do not have to shell out actual cash when I am ill. I am keenly aware of this miraculous side of our national health service. I always remember an American friend, years ago, in St Stephen’s Hospital with a cut hand, who kept trying to get out his credit card. ‘What do you mean, I don’t have to pay?’ he asked everybody. He talked about it for years afterwards.

My particular surgery once saved my index finger, without which I would find it hard to type or write books. I bless them for that each time I sit down to work. But there was something about today’s utter refusal to help, about the jumping through hoops, about the woman’s mulish determination to thwart me, about the ten pounds for a mere signature, that sent me demented.

I am afraid I snapped. ‘No,’ I said, slightly too loudly. ‘We shall have to forget it.’

And out I swept.

‘Absolute failure,’ I shouted at the Stepfather, as I got back in the car. ‘I’m not bloody paying to be told that I exist. It is wrong on eight different levels. I am who I am. They can all bloody bugger off.’

This leaves me with a slight problem. I shall work out a way round it. But the day, which started out so fine, is now clouded with frustration. I wish I could work out why I mind so much. It is a sort of elemental thing. It feels like an obliteration of the self. Here I am, I exist, but that is not enough, and stupid bureaucracy means that I cannot even get a signature without shelling out cash for it. I feel like Liam Neeson in one of those films where he goes to Berlin and says I am Dr Jones and everyone says, oh no, Dr Jones checked out two hours ago, and poor Liam can only stare at them like a maddened bull.

I pause, think, drink some coffee, try to calm down. I refuse to be denied.

I ring up the person who needs me to prove myself. I ask what other professionals count, for a counter-signature. Here is the list: accountant, architect, surveyor, doctor, solicitor. That is all. Do you not think it a most curious and random selection?

I long to know who sat down in a room and said, I know, that’s the definitive list of people whose word we can trust. Why not policeman or postmistress? Why could my honest farmer friend, over whose sheep I watch, who works all hours in all weathers and knows more about the land than anyone I ever met, not count? Why is an accountant more important than a butcher?

Anyway, the miracle is that it turns out The Landlord happens to have a surveyor in his office, which is just over the road. The charming gentleman signs the thing with a flourish. ‘The doctor wanted to charge me a tenner,’ I say, still enraged. The surveyor smiles. ‘I shall do it for a penny,’ he says.

So I give him a penny, and a mighty deal is struck. For one penny, I, at last, have definitive proof that I am an extant human. This feels like a giddy, glorious step forward, a gaudy ontological flourish. See, see? I want to shout. Here I am, and this is my real name.

And now for some quick pictures:

Pensive face:

And….laughing face:

Rather stately hill, today:

Oh, I meant to say, as if you had not had enough of me by now, that I have a guest post up at Lou, Boos and Shoes. This is one of my favourite blogs ever, and I was incredibly flattered to be asked to write for it.

I am not certain the post is a raving success. It is oddly shy-making to write for someone else's Dear Readers, and I fear I was a little stilted. There was a faint sense of best behaviour and pulling of punches. It made me think again of the interesting psychological nature of blogging. Here, amongst the regulars, I feel free to say anything. (I am afraid you sometimes suffer from this liberation.) Out in the wider blogosphere, in front of an unknown audience, I have an odd sense of sitting up straight and putting on my Sunday hat. No idea what that is all about.

Anyway, it's a really beautiful blog, and I feel a great kinship with Lou, even though we have never met in life. You should go and have a look at it anyway, just for the beauty of the thing.

You can find it here.

A tonic

2012-01-17T14:48:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The Pigeon and I went out early. It was minus 13 last night; we were officially the coldest place in Britain. This morning, it was still frigid. It was that kind of suspended, magical weather. Everything was white with frost, but a low, still whiteness, not the antic glittering sort that comes later when the sun is high.

The sky was not cloudy so much as hazy; there was no sunshine yet. A sense of mist, rather than actual mist, hung over everything. It’s very hard to describe, but that is the best I can do. There was a humming blueness to it all too: the frost was slightly blue, the trees had blue in them. It felt as if everything had stopped, as if nothing else existed but this stalled, pristine place.

In the end, I started throwing a stick for the dog almost to prove we were real. I needed movement. But it was breathtakingly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful morning I ever saw. It was so other.

Just as I came in, the first of the sun appeared. Now, as I look out of the window, there is none of that strange blue magic left; everything is vivid and yellow with light. The sunshine lies across the grass in great golden slabs; it has even conquered the frost, so only traced ghosts of the whiteness remain.

I did some work, thought some thoughts, ate some eggs, drank some coffee. I still felt a bit bewildered and stuck. Then The Younger Brother called, his voice stuttering and echoing and swerving down the long distance telephone line.

I told him all of it. I did not make a drama. I just said: this is what I am feeling, and this, and this and this, and here is where it hurts. This is the bit that is painful, and that is the part that is confusing, and this is the balance I am trying to find, and that is the bit which is quite fine. It was like an almost detached status report.

He listened very carefully. Then he gave me his. It was almost identical, except he is currently crosser than I. He is so cross that he ran around his room this morning shouting expletives and words I cannot repeat because we are still in family viewing time. Then he said: ‘And I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror and realised that I was really angry.’ He’s pissed off about everything, from dad dying, to Rick Santorum talking insanity, to the people on a dollar a day. He’s quite cross with Mr Murdoch. He is enraged by failed political systems.

‘That is excellent,’ I say. ‘Everything covered.’

Then he says: ‘you know, we are very lucky that we can feel all these things.’

We talk about several different subjects then, from the psychology of fear to the Republican primaries to the importance of authenticity. I circle back. ‘The thing you said that makes me smile,’ I say, ‘is that we are lucky to feel all this stuff. I think you are right. It is luck. It’s a little shift in perspective. It makes me feel better. I think it is wise.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, politely.

Then we talk about kindness for a while. ‘Sometimes I think it is the thing that counts the most,’ I say.

He brightens. I can hear him brightening, seven thousand miles away. ‘That’s just what the Dalai Lama says,’ he says.

‘Me and the Dalai Lama,’ I say. ‘Two minds with one thought. Write it down, write it down.’

This is our special joke, because the Dalai Lama travels everywhere with scribes, and when he says something which sounds ephemeral their hands pause over the page, not sure whether to record it or not, and he waves at them and says: ‘Write it down, write it down’. For some reason, this story tickles me very much.

Anyway, kindness. Me and the Dalai, and EM Forster too, who wrote ‘Kindness, kindness, and yet more kindness.’ It’s the thing from which all else flows. I think.

It was a good, honest conversation. I sometimes forget how much conversation can make things better. A sense of communion and sanity returns, through the fragile medium of talk. It’s a sort of miracle, really, when you think about it.

Just as I am writing these last words, I hear a squeak and a rattle and a laughing voice. IT IS THE WINDOW CLEANERS.

This feels like a sign. I adore the window cleaners. There are three of them, from the same family, father and sons, and they are the happiest, nicest, funniest men in Scotland. I sometimes think I pay them cash not for clean glass, but for a tonic to the spirits.

I have just been out to get my fix of smiling chat. Now, back at my desk, I can hear them talking and laughing. They laugh big, deep, belly laughs, as if they think the world is a pretty wonderful place. They clean the windows like lightning; they are amazingly efficient, but they still find time for a joke and a laugh. There they are, out in minus nine, with their hats on, laughing like they have the best job in the world. They are a three man fillip, and I love them for it.

Today's pictures, of the frozen world:

Pigeon having fun with stick:

Please please please throw it again:

PLEASE? If I look extra adorable and slightly goofy?:

Blue hill:

Lovely comments from the last couple of days; sorry have not been replying; my time management is all to pot.

Thank you for them.

In which I again fail to locate the vital document

2012-01-16T16:27:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is something happening in the world, but I do not exactly know where or what. It is one of those days when the news swims out of one’s brain like a salmon. It is a bit of a gritted teeth day.

‘How are you getting on with your book?’ asks the kind Stepfather, as he comes to take The Pigeon for a walk. (There are some writers who consider this the cruellest question of all.)

‘Spinning my wheels a bit,’ I say, ruefully.

I am quite rueful generally. I would like to be filled with determination and optimism and certainty; at the moment, I am mostly about the rue. I keep wanting to butch myself up, to get more dogged and muscular. Instead, I seem mired in the ephemeral.

Outside, the temperature is minus four. The frost glitters and glimmers. It is that good, proper, thick frost, that does not melt, even after a day of sun on it. It makes the trees look like something out of a painting. A couple walks past. The man is on crutches, struggling a bit. ‘Good afternoon,’ I say. They look rather surprised.

I am always grinning at people in the street and saying things like ‘Lovely day’. I can’t help it. It is not really The British Way. It can actually frighten some Britons. I like it; I like tiny threads of connection.

Mostly, people stare at me as if I have some kind of condition. Sometimes I do think I have some kind of condition. Another bloody vital document must be sent somewhere, because I must prove who I am. I loathe having to prove who I am. I find it an existential affront. Why can I not speak to a human and explain who I am, and why can they not believe me? Do I sound like an evil criminal mastermind posing as a rather disorganised writer?

Of course, I cannot find the vital document, cannot face going down to the doctor to get it counter-signed even when I do locate it, because only if you understand the intricacies of ringworm do you count as a proper signing person (no members of my family will do, apparently), and have flown into a huge grump about the whole thing. Why, I wonder, can I not just be the kind of spit-spot human who has all vital documents to hand, in convenient box files, arranged in alphabetical order, with the doc on speed dial? (I know I ask you this question a lot.)

Ah well, on I bugger. My post-Christmas malaise continues, fading in and out like radio static. I catch glimpses of the prize of delight. I just need to make a breakthrough with this second draft. I am stumbling about the edges, looking for a way in. I can almost see it. Some mornings, when I clean my teeth and think about the day, I have intimations. It is that, or that, or this? It slips away like quicksilver.

I’ll get it in the end. I am cussed and do not give up. It’s just I do not like this stop-start; this slight feeling of bafflement. It comes with every book; I always forget that. There is a moment when you look at the thing and think: I have no idea what I am trying to say. That’s why it is work, I suppose. And that’s probably just as well. It if were easy, then everyone would do it.

Pictures of the day:

Oh, the amber eyes:

Sometimes, oddly, they are dark, opaque blue. But this afternoon, with the last of the light in them, they are bright amber:

I do not wish to alarm you, but it appears the hill is on fire. It's only the burning of the heather, something that is done around here all the time. It's just I never saw it on my hill before, and it does look rather apocalyptic:

Sunday pictures

2012-01-15T18:14:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Freezing cold, dazzling sun, hoar frost:

A quick day

2012-01-14T17:47:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have now written today’s blog in my head about eight times. I cannot tell you how many philosophical, political and domestic matters I have covered. Unfortunately, events have conspired to keep me from the computer, so that now I sit down at five-thirty, and it’s pitch dark outside, and I am too tired for a long, involved blog. I know you shall be beating your fists on the table with disappointment.

Instead, here is a little digest of my Saturday:

I looked with pleasure at the elegant winter sun.

I ran errands in the village. Everyone was smiling. They said: ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’

I had a disastrous afternoon’s betting, which cut me down to size. But the racing was fascinating. I kept ringing up my mother and saying: ‘That’s one to follow.’ I always do this. Then I quite forget the One to Follow’s name, and it’s back to square one.

I got cross because a rather sneering journalist, of whom I had never heard, derided Britishness on Any Questions. Scottishness, apparently, is the one true thing. Britishness is just a pathetic nothing. I may come back to this subject. I thought she was wrong, but worse, she was very ill-mannered about it. There’s no call for that on the BBC.

I missed my dad. Time does not gentle the missing; if anything, it is keener and sharper now. But the recovery time is quicker; the gaps in between are more solid, and more real.

I laughed at the clichéd middle-classness of my food shopping. In my basket were: duck’s legs, puy lentils, Taleggio, rocket, dried mushrooms, and some yellow split peas. I am a parody of myself. At least I am not quite as bad as the very superior lady I saw in the Co-op last week, who roared at her husband: ‘Go and find the chorizo’. Chorizo in the Co-op? Good luck with that.

I awarded The Pigeon the Little Nell award for pathos. When I examined her sore foot she made little mewing noises, trembled, and gazed at me with ineffable reproach, like an orphan in the snow. The minute we went out into the sun, she got the scent of moles and voles in her nostrils, and galloped off like a two-year-old, with not a trace of lameness.

I listened to an endless debate about the direness of Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party. I can’t quite work out if it is real, or whether it is just a herd meme. It’s a much more interesting story, after all, than Mili Minor does Quite Well. I must say, he does not fill one with confidence and conviction.

I made some minestrone. I am in a serious soup stage, just at the moment.

That was about it.

Here are some pictures for you:

I hope you are having a lovely weekend.

In which I do not speak of Scottish independence.

2012-01-13T17:09:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to do a whole thing on Scottish independence.(Admit, you are on the very edge of your seat.) It’s because there is so much news. I cannot just speak of small, parochial concerns whilst the world is raging about me. I thought it was time to speak of important things.

Then I thought: sod it. People really do know what they think. Everyone else is shouting about it; I’m not sure I need to add my pennyworth.

The interesting thing about it is that really good arguments may be made from either side. There are many imponderables, which are being stated with certainty. Everyone is getting shirty about who really owns North Sea oil. Alex Salmond is looking, as usual, delighted with himself, and very slightly shifty. I keep remembering when he was selling us independence on the notion that we could become like Ireland or Iceland. I am not making this up. Those were his two dream states, until 2008, when he suddenly fell very, very quiet on the subject.

In the end, I think it is probably an emotional thing. I love the union. I could not really give you a coherent reason why. Perhaps it is because I have Scottish and English blood, and I like the idea of the two co-mingling, although this is an essentially irrational thought. But it is Friday. I may be irrational.

In other, much more important news:

The poor Pigeon has hurt her foot. She was gazing in adoration at The Brother-in-Law, who was driving past in his zoomy motor and stopped to talk. She was so busy with the adoring gaze that she stood on a sharp piece of wood and gave herself a shock. She is now curled up in a tight black ball, making little sighing noises under her breath. She really does know how to milk it. She shall be getting extra love and treats for the duration, I know you shall all be vastly relieved to hear.

More thrilling still, I have rediscovered the delights of celery soup. It was a thing in my childhood; I remember it. Does anyone really eat celery soup any more? It feels very déclassé. But I had some slightly mournful celery in the fridge, staring reproachfully at me, so I just threw it in a pot with some chicken stock and a chopped onion, simmered for fifteen minutes, and liquidised, and oh, oh, oh, the goodness. I intend to eat nothing else all weekend. The secret is: a good addition of black pepper at the end. That tiny thing brings it alive.

Outside, the sky has turned a low shade of purple. It feels faintly apocalyptic. I wonder if it is a harbinger of snow. I am bound for the Borders on Friday, and am watching the weather like a hawk.

As I finish writing this, I think: I must have a fact of the day. Nothing like a good fact of the day to round off a rather slight post.

Here’s a fine, topical one. When Sir Fred Goodwin was making his crazed bid for ABN Amro, the one which was done with ‘diligence-light’, or, no due diligence at all, the one which capsized a once-great bank and led to a twenty billion pound bailout, Alex Salmond sent him this thoughtful note: ‘I wanted you to know that I am watching events closely on the ABN front. It is in Scottish interests for RBS to be successful, and I would like to offer any assistance my office can provide. Good luck with the bid.’

Perhaps Wee Eck was having a wee joke. Do let's hope so.

It was a delightful, sunny day, and everything was light and golden. Here are some pictures:

Questing Pigeon, pre foot incident:

Hill, cast into silhouette by the light:

Happy Friday.

The sad saga of the mung beans

2012-01-12T17:05:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The mung beans are disgusting. Who eats them? I mean, really?

I have, as I have grown older, become very grumpy about people with closed palates. When I cook for the small cousins, during my annual month with them in the south, I always say they don’t have to eat something they hate, but they must try one bite before they decide. As a result, they eat my special green soup, and Swiss chard, and Cavalo Nero, and other things which many children would run from. (I am wildly proud of them, I freely admit.)

Because there must be no pots and kettles, and money must be put where mouths are, I must apply this to myself. I have never been good with pulses, ever since they forced me to eat butter beans and lentils at prep school. This once led to spectacular projectile vomiting. For years, I could not go near a lentil. But then, I cranked my mind open, and tried again, and discovered that when properly cooked they are things of beauty and a joy forever. I now love almost nothing more than a nutty little Puy.

I’m still a bit leery of the kidney bean, and even those glamorous little white things that the Italians adore (suddenly can’t remember the name), but I love a good split pea, of green or yellow, and the chickpea is one of my most beloved. The other day, I remembered the health-mad Older Brother always going on about the mung bean, as a perfect silver bullet of nutritional delight. Oh yes, I thought; that can be my next pulse attempt.

I cooked the little brown things gently in chicken stock for the allotted time. About half way through, they started giving off an alarming aroma. It had a faint farmyard quality to it. Still, I could not let myself be put off by that. I was brought up on a farm, after all. The smell of dung is the scent of my childhood. (As a result, I am not too squeamish about smells, although I draw the line at silage and oilseed rape.)

By the time I had finished, the beans looked like a brackish brown swamp. The oddly cloying smell was stronger than ever. I followed the instructions to the letter; I could not have cooked them badly. Gingerly, I tried a few, poised delicately on the end of a fork.

Disgusting.

I mean properly revolting; the kind of thing you would eat if you were punishing yourself for some perceived misdemeanour.

So I ended up with a horrid pot of ghastly brown gloop, so nasty that I could not even contemplate offering it to Virginia the Pig. I had to throw it away. And I hate waste. Please, may we never speak of it again.

Now for pictures. It was the most glorious sunshiny day, but like an idiot I missed the light, and did not take the camera out until the gloaming had come. So instead of dazzle, you get a faint shade of blue. So sorry about that.

Up the avenue goes The Pigeon, her tail held high like a flag:

Trees and hills:

Wall and moss:

My favourite little baby beech:

And the dear old avenue of beeches:

Oh, oh, the beautiful gaze:

Evening hill:

Either feast of famine; or, in which I apologise for too few words instead of too many

2012-01-11T20:01:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Ah, ah, brain has nothing in it. At this point you must imagine a klaxon going off, a disembodied voice shouting: Empty brain alert, please walk calmly to the exits.

I dig and prod a bit. Surely there must be something? Could I not describe the lovely pastrami sandwich I made for lunch (oh, the fascination), or the new row about Scottish independence, or the vigilant sweetness of The Pigeon?

No.

No, I could not.

All systems are down. I stare and squint at the screen, as if English has suddenly become my second language.

All I can say is: I am experimenting with Mung beans. (This is not code.) Wish me luck.

A few pictures for you now:

Oh, and actually I do have one thing for you. I have a Fact of the Day. It is: the great psychologist Alfred Adler died whilst giving a lecture in Aberdeen. Aberdeen is my nearest city, and I love reading Adler, so this gives me an odd kind of slightly spurious pleasure. Even though it is, of course, rather a sad fact.

And, one very final thing: I would like someone to tell the Scottish MP, whose name I did not catch but who appeared on The World At One, that it is 'fewer voters', not 'less voters'. Tsk, tsk. If our elected representatives do not set an example for the young people, then I do not know who will.

In which I contemplate The Void

2012-01-10T15:28:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The Younger Brother calls. He is back at home in the far east, and his voice blurs and cracks down a long distance line.

We talk for a while.

Then he says: ‘How are you?’

I say: ‘I’m still having a bit of trouble with this whole life and death thing. I resist going to sleep at night because it’s too close to death. So I sit up till all hours looking things up on the internet or reading books. As if knowledge will keep me safe. And then I’m tired in the morning.’

‘Ah, yes,’ says The Brother. ‘The Void.’

He talks then of the Sufis, but I don’t need him to explain. I know exactly what he means. It is a brilliant name for it. It is connected, I think, with what Jung called the shadow. He believed that our shadow side is where we put all the dark, dangerous, frightening thoughts. He believed that only by embracing the shadow side could humans find the gold within. In the shadow, lies the light.

The Void is a bit more specific. I think it is what happens when you get to middle age, and your father dies, and a voice in your head says: What the fuck was that?

I thought I mourned my father pretty well. I let all my emotions run free. I remember a great energy, in the early days, an elemental feeling. This is it, this is the real stuff. I talked about it and wrote about it here. I missed him and wept for him and planted a tree for him.

Then, normal life must resume. It’s just a thing, it’s what happens with old people. He was eighty; it was not a tearing rupture in the fabric of life. But little by little, this problematical thinking has crept up on me. However much I try to be usual and pragmatic and stoical, there is a part of me that is running round like one of those hysterical heroines in a B-movie, screaming: we’re all going to die.

Obviously, I cannot allow this maddening character to hold sway. I am a rationalist and an empiricist; I like things to make sense. Now, I sternly tell myself, we all have our allotted span, this is not news. And the point is that you make the most of all the wonders of life, and all the moments of glad grace, and all the fleeting minutes of beauty, and then, when it is over, it will not have been wasted.

‘Love and trees,’ I shout at The Brother. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’

He roars with laughter. ‘You are such a secret hippie,’ he says.

The problem is that even though I know love and trees should be enough, it is not quite, not just now. Even though I have love, and I have trees, the Void is nipping at my heels, like an angry sheepdog. You can’t bloody ignore me, it is saying. It doesn’t matter how many trees you plant, and how much you lift your eyes unto the hills, you and everyone you love will one day die, and no amount of acers will put a dent in that reality. (It is quite dogmatic, The Void.)

The Brother and I discuss this some more. We wonder if it has come on because it was our father. There is something terribly final and symbolic about your first parent dying. In the last five years, I have been to the funerals of the parents of The Expatriate, and The Beloved Cousin. They were men and women I knew and loved since I was eighteen. They had me for weekends and holidays and Christmasses and Easters; they watched me grow up, with a slightly quizzical, indulgent fondness. (I think they sometimes thought my young self slightly eccentric.)

That generation that made me feel as if I were still The Young are going. ‘We have to be the grown-ups now,’ I say to The Brother. ‘Which should not be alarming, but is, rather.’

The Brother thinks you have to walk up to The Void, look it straight in the eye, and make jokes about it. You can’t hide from it. You have to face it squarely, and see it as it is. He can really be quite wise, sometimes.

‘Anyone who isn’t wrestling with The Void,’ he says. ‘Well, I don’t know what they are up to.’

I start to laugh, helplessly.

‘But really,’ he says. ‘What are they all doing?’

We ponder this for a moment.

‘Although, he says, ‘Imagine if everyone was running around wrestling with The Void, all the time.’

‘I know,’ I say.

Then we laugh some more.

As I sat down to write this, I hesitated, my fingers hovering over the keys. I thought: Should I really tell them this? The poor readers; surely they have been through enough. I could just give my nice recipe for minestrone and put up some dog pictures. Do they really need the whole life and death thing?

Also, I have a faint sense of shame. I should know how to do life, by now. I should have the answers. There is an irrational part of me which believes that when I have difficulty with things, when I am having to wrestle, that this is a sign of failure and weakness. I know this is nonsense, but it comes to haunt me, when I am not getting enough iron in my diet.

On the other hand, there is no point pretending to be one of the flashy, glittery, certain people. I am used to doubt; it walks beside me like a faithful hound. I rather love it, as it saves me from bombast. I think it is probably a good thing to admit to weakness in order to combat the nutty voice that says I must never admit to weakness. Balzac said that we love people not in spite of their flaws, but because of them.

I have a terrible tendency to want to say: Look, Ma, no hands. (When I was a very small girl, I was a frightful show-off, always doing dances and songs and jokes, as if I were on the Music Halls, and I wonder if this streak still runs in me; certainly, in conversation, I shall say anything for a laugh.) Sometimes, it is vital to admit that I don’t know what to do with my hands. I imagine that almost everyone has to fight a few existential demons, at least once a week; it would be frankly freakish if I were immune.

So there we are, my darlings. It’s me, and The Void. I quite like that it has a name, now. I’m going to look into the whites of its eyes, and then we shall see who is boss. And for help, because, as I endlessly say, no woman is an island, I’m going to go and look up some of those old Sufis, because apparently they know all about it.

As I finished this, the glorious Scottish winter sun came flashing through my window. I ran out to catch the light, and this is what it looked like:

The Pigeon, looking south:

And doing her special serious, gazing face:

And two hills, one from this morning, one from this afternoon:

This, of course, felt madly symbolic. I had been writing about darkness; now here was the light. The light makes no sense without the shade.

Or something like that.

In which displacement activity takes the form of political pondering

2012-01-09T13:22:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The Co-Writer calls. ‘How are you?’ she says.

‘Quite grumpy,’ I say.

‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘It is scientifically proven that this is the most depressing week of the year.’

The weather is in a gloom too, flat and low and grey. But then a miracle occurs. As I take The Pigeon out, the sun puts in a late appearance, and suddenly the landscape is transformed, lit with amber light, bright and new and clean.

Perhaps it’s not so bad, I think. I start to contemplate a way through the maze of my next bit of work. This is the graft part. There was all the giddy excitement of first draft time, when I was inventing something out of nothing. There is a headiness to that first deadline. Then, the editorial notes come back, and life is earnest, life is real, and I have to remind myself that I am a professional, not just someone doing this for a whim or a bet.

Restructuring is called for; cutting, shaping, the filling in of gaping holes. It is where indulgence ends, and seriousness begins. ‘We are pros,’ I say, rather plaintively, to The Man of Letters, trying to convince myself. ‘This is what we do.’

Of course, my irrational mind is not so biddable. It casts about frantically for diversion tactics. Oh yes, it thinks, cunningly, let’s do a really long and convoluted blog about the nature of conservatism. That will use up an hour, so you don’t have to think about the weaknesses in Chapter Three.

It is such an evil genius, my irrational mind, because it knows that when I spend time doing the blog, it feels a bit like work. I am typing and thinking, at least. I'm not looking at videos of children doing comical things on the internets, or blatantly checking my Twitter feed. Even cleverer, it knows that if I choose a serious subject, then there is a closer correlation to actual achievement.

I did wake up thinking about conservatism this morning. The naughty Stepfather, who is an old school One Nation Tory, with a libertarian, slightly contrarian streak, which I think comes from his Canadian blood, likes to tease me by cutting out articles from The Telegraph and dropping them round in serious white envelopes. His latest is a piece which contains the line: ‘the facts of life are conservative’.

The old liberal lefty in me is a little gentled by time; I lean more to pragmatism as I get older. I am less shouty and ideological; I even have a bit of a utilitarian streak. Despite my love for theory, I have a growing fondness for things that work. Even so, when I read a sentence like that, all my ancient instincts rise up in revolt. No, no, I think; that really can’t be true.

I start arguing it in my head. The very tiring thing about this is that I have the fatal liberal disease of insisting on seeing both sides of an argument. I can’t just go into a tribal crouch. The criticism of the leftist belief in the state, which can sometimes veer towards blind faith, is that it leads to inefficiencies, unintended consequences, and muddled bureaucracy. There is absolute merit in this argument. On the other hand, the hard belief of the right wing in the diamond brilliance of the free market is equally flawed. I give you: Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers.

Then, as I am batting this back and forth, I think: but what does conservative mean, anyway? I’m not sure that Left and Right tell us very much any more. It’s all fractured, and relative. I have heard a perfectly nice, intelligent woman tell me, with horror on her face: ‘But Barack Obama is a socialist’. I have seen absolutely no signs that he wants to nationalise the means of production. In this country, he would probably be on the wet side of the Tory party. ‘But he’s a pragmatic centrist,’ I cry, to no avail.

The right in America has very little relation to the right here; there is no equivalent of God and guns in British politics. British conservatism can mean ten different things. There are the old guard small-C conservatives, who want traditions preserved, the countryside cherished, children to learn Latin; who take the word seriously, and wish to conserve all they see as true and good. There are purist free marketeers, who believe that Keynes is bad and mad. Social conservatism is a dying breed, but does still exist, and worries about ladies and gays.

Social conservatism always strikes me as a complete contradiction. The defining thing of the right is supposedly its distrust of government. People know better how to run their lives than the state, except when it comes to Elton John and unmarried mothers and a lesbian couple with 2.2 children. In that case, government must loom very big indeed, and instruct people to get married at once, to someone of the opposite gender.

There is laissez-faire conservatism, and paternalist conservatism, with its old Whiggish dash of noblesse oblige. (It is often forgotten that Burke, now considered the founder of modern Conservatism, was a Whig.) There are the big business Conservatives, and the small battalions Conservatives. There is the libertarian wing, which blames all ills on regulation, and the little England wing, which blames all ills on pesky foreign workers, coming here to take our jobs and steal our women. (I exaggerate for effect, but only slightly.)

There is the tendency which believes that global warming is a scam thought up by scientists to stop Ordinary Decent Britons flying abroad on their holidays. There is still the occasional whiff of social Darwinism.

Just as the left has its strengths and failings, so does the right. At its best, it has faith in the individual, distrusts unaccountable authority, believes in Burke's liberty under law. At its worst, it can lack empathy, pander to vested interests, show a narrow, moralising tendency. It can also have an oddly conspiratorial streak. It always accuses the left of being victimish, but then insists it is assailed by liberal bias in the media, particularly from the irredeemable pinkos at the BBC.

I should now draw myself up, take a deep breath, and come to my magisterial conclusion. Always go for the big finish, my writer’s instinct tells me. Except there isn’t really one. I just think it is interesting.

And even as I make my thesis, I wonder if anything really changes. I think Left and Right might not mean much now, that we can no longer divide politics neatly into a game of two halves. But then I remember my history, and the rage and fury that Peel inspired in his own party when he repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. He managed to split the Tories for twenty years.

Conservatism meant ten different things, even then. Tories in the 19^th century saw the world in such radically different ways that they could not even manage to hold themselves together for political advantage. It was like some crazed family argument, where drunk Uncle Bernie does something unforgivable at Christmas.

Even if one could work out exactly what conservatism is, I’m not sure the facts of life are it. I admit, I believe in government. For all its flaws, it is a part of what stitches a society together. I don’t want that atomised, libertarian dream, with the free market galloping away over the Steppes like an unbroken bronco. You might say this is my sentimental, bleeding heart self gone amok, but in every list of success – national well-being, low corruption, literacy – the Scandinavian countries come out on top, year after year, with their social contracts and their sturdy governments. I can’t help it. I dream of the Danes.

And now for some pictures of the lovely light, on the morning walk:

Off goes The Pigeon, completely out of focus, but rather delightful for all that:

And, sitting for her close-up:

One of the Dear Readers asked how old The Pigeon was, on a hopeless day when I did not get round to replying to comments. The answer is: thirteen. Not bad for an old girl, is she?

The hill, almost lost in the glimmering:

Sunday Pictures

2012-01-08T15:05:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

In which I put aside weighty matters, and watch the racing instead

2012-01-07T16:42:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A small, quiet day. The police came and talked to me of sheep. There actually is a don’t let your dog chase livestock law, from 1953. I gave a witness statement. It’s rather odd, having a couple of coppers sitting on the sofa in all their regalia, taking down your every word. The Pigeon thought it was too much fun, and shamelessly flirted with the long arm of the law. The law laughed, quite a lot. Quite frankly, any policemen who like my dog are all right with me.

I made some minestrone and ate it. It was really quite good.

I watched the racing. My punting has been rather vulgarly successful lately; the last bet I had was a tenner on Celestial Halo, which scooted up at twelve to one. I got a bit swaggery, imagining William Hill cowering in terror before my might.

Today, there was a crash down to earth. My last fancy was actually pulled up, which really is rather shaming. I reminded myself so much of my father, who was a famously hopeless betting man. I always remember him groaning on a Saturday afternoon as his sure thing got stuffed. Although he did once have to be escorted to his car at Cheltenham by two burly minders, some time in the 1960s, because he had won so much money that he carried it away in a suitcase. (This may be one of those family folklore stories which is not strictly true, but I am not going to check with my mother, because I like the mental picture of Dad tottering off the racecourse, with a case full of what he called readies, accompanied by two bookmaker’s bodyguards.)

Here is the funny thing. I started writing this in the advertising break of Channel Four Racing. I was resigned to it being a disastrous betting day. I had one final flutter in the last race, and heard it come on in the other room, and went back to watch. Because my luck was out, I had no hopes. My horse was anchored in third last all the way round. Ah, he’s not going a yard, I thought. I am channelling Dad, and that’s all she wrote.

Then the jockey, Aidan Coleman, with a perfectly timed run, produced the horse, threaded his way through the pack, and hit the front. I started shouting. The Pigeon started barking. Something else was storming up the inside. ‘Come on, my son,’ I yelled. My fella stuck his head in front and would not be denied. William Hill, I wrote on Twitter, I laugh at your puny plan. Now I shall be insufferable.

One interesting side note, on the inexplicable ups and downs of racing. The horse I won on, Ciceron, is trained by a very elegant woman called Venetia Williams. Until a couple of weeks ago, her stable was suffering a catastrophic run of form. This happens sometimes: it doesn’t matter how good you are, nothing goes right. She said, ruefully, to one of the Channel Four fellows: ‘I couldn’t train ivy up a wall.’

Then, in a volte face of fortune, all her horses started trotting up. Just at the moment, she can do nothing wrong. That’s how it goes, in racing. It’s the same with jockeys, too. One moment, you can be covered in glory, the next you are arse up on the turf at Wincanton, trudging back ruefully to the weighing room with grass stains all over your breeches. It’s a very levelling game, like that. It has humility stitched into it.

The light has faded to indigo, and a laughing full moon is sailing high above the trees. I watch it through my office window. I think of all the lovely horses, and how much pleasure they give me. I think of how brave and gallant they are. I think of my father. He had his flaws, but he was gallant, too.

Here are some pictures of the day:

My little Pidge, with her serious face on:

Two different views of the hill:

Bonus post

2012-01-06T15:27:00.002Z

It really is very vulgar to put up a link to one's other blog. It's quite mad to have two blogs at all. The other one is my virtual commonplace book, where I put the little things that make me laugh or think. Because it is quite new, it only has about ten readers, and today's thing was so delightful and funny that I wanted to share it with a wider audience. So, if you want to have a lovely Friday afternoon laugh, click here.

Another idiotically long post; or, Oh no, what happened to my editing facility?

2012-01-06T14:34:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Now it’s personal. Yesterday was all very intellectual and theoretical. (I use the word intellectual not to sound like a swanky show-off, but in its strict sense of: the faculty of thinking, as opposed to feeling.) The Dear Readers rose to it magnificently, and left illuminating and thoughtful comments. I read them with acute pleasure.

But then, one of the most loyal of the Readers said, rather diffidently, that she had encountered prejudice because of her skin colour. And this is where it got strange. This is a blog, after all, not The Four Last Things. It is a small enterprise. In it, I encounter people I have never met, shall never meet, from all around the world. Perhaps because of its smallness, it has become a tight little community. I really look forward to hearing from the Readers I have come to know. I even know a little about their lives: one has just had a baby, one has got a new dog, one is going through a painful separation. So when I thought of my Dear Reader encountering bigotry, I went from brain to viscera in ten seconds. You fuckers, I thought. LEAVE THE READERS ALONE.

And here is the thing I did not say. This division of people into coloured camps is, as I described yesterday, pointless and useless. But it is also horrible. One can intellectualise it until every last cow comes home, but in real life it causes pain. Why would you want to do that? I always think of the death bed. I use it not as a morbid thing, but as a tool of perspective. My favourite riff at the moment is my little anti-diet tap dance. Oh, I say, when you are lying on your death bed, will you really think, well, thank God I never ate any carbohydrates?

When I heard about the Reader, and felt so furious, I thought, of the prejudiced: will they lie on their death beds, and think, thank God I was rude about people of a different colour? Will they congratulate themselves on a life that included thinking dark thoughts about people from Asia, or Latinos, or Jews, or whichever group they have marked as other? Will Rick Santorum look back over his allotted span and think: yeah, I really socked it to the poofs? (Probably not, since I don’t think poof is a word in the American demotic.)

Life is so damn short. I think of my dad every day, and his death reminds me, in the most immediate terms, that life flies by, and is gone. I don’t want to sound like Doris Day, but really, why would anyone want to fill it with hating, and on such ephemeral and nonsensical grounds?

Ah, that’s better. Just had to get that off my chest.

I went for a walk with The Pigeon, and calmed down a bit. I started to think about my own encounters with prejudice. I am a white, middle-class female, so they haven’t been that many. But I am a woman, and, as everyone knows, we pink fluffy ladies sometimes get put in our own box, on account of the fact we have ovaries.

This works on two levels. There is the general. There are all the assumptions floating about in the zeitgeist, like little particles of wrongness. Even now, in the glittering 21^st century, there is still a humming idea that what women are really good for is home and babies. Oh, and shoes, of course. We are all obsessed with shoes. Women will never rule the world, because our hormonal overload leads us to inexplicable mood swings. What if a nuclear crisis blew up when the Lady President had a bad case of PMT?

What fascinates me is that old prejudices still die hard, even in the face of empirical evidence. Take the women can’t drive meme. (If you live in Saudi Arabia, this is actually mandated by law, because the state is taking no chances.) If you look at the accident statistics, they are overwhelmingly dominated by young men. Insurance companies even used to give women lower rates, until some European court said that was sexist, and stopped it. Yet the notion that you have to have a penis to manoeuvre a car still persists.

Even such a brilliant and radical thinker as the late Christopher Hitchens once wrote a whole article about the ‘fact’ that women have no sense of humour. I don’t know if he was joking (he seemed deadly serious), or whether he had just drunk too much whisky that day, or whether he had had a fight with his wife, but the very fact that he could write such a thing, and that Vanity Fair could publish it with a straight face, is a terrible marker of how far we still have to go.

Then there is the personal. When I was at university, my moral tutor used to have me in for regular meetings, to make sure I was all right. It was a rather touching part of the system. Moral tutor did not mean he was checking my ethical levels, but simply looking after me; raising the eyes from the academic work for a moment, and measuring the ordinary life. He always used to ask whether I was having any trouble on account of being a girl. My college had only recently admitted women, and he was keenly aware of the old school dying hard. He seemed rather to long for horror stories, so he could go into battle, and always looked rather disappointed when I said no.

Over the road, at Oriel, they had their very first intake of women, against gnarled opposition from the old guard. The joke went about that they had only admitted Amazons, because if they had to have the monstrous regiment, they might as well get some rowing medals out of it. I don’t know if this was true, but I do remember Oriel women dominating the river that summer.

In my college, I detected no trace of resentment. I had lovely Dr Stuart, who called me Miss K and laughed at my jokes, and liked that I wrote my essays in coloured inks. I had a very grave Anglo-Saxon scholar, who mostly listened to Mahler. I had brilliant Dr Haigh, who cared about nothing except what I thought of the Tudors.

Even though I was already a feminist, I think I was a little spoilt by this. It did not occur to me that there might be things I could not do because I was female. That was all in the past. It was the eighties; we were post-Thatcher; women could do anything. It took me a while, out in the world, to catch the whiff of walls closing in and drawbridges being pulled up.

It was very subtle. It was that men, especially older ones, would be surprised if I spoke of serious things. They would look amazed if I knew about Turgenev, or the ERM, or the intricacies of the American political system. I think it did not help that I was running around at that stage with short peroxide hair; they took the blondeness as a flag for idiocy. Once I caught on, I rather liked playing a little game with them. I would let them make their assumptions; I would allow them to get into their stride. Then I would drop something about Oxford into the conversation and watch their frontal cortexes implode.

This was not nasty prejudice; no one has ever called me names. It was just an old, subliminal idea that women are somehow less than. It was the assumption that we are weaker, sillier, less informed, less capable than the male. Luckily, I am very cussed; it did not beat me down, but made me grit my teeth even more. Because I have been self-employed for the last twenty years, I never got the office prejudice. My friend S tells war stories of meetings where she said something, and everyone ignored it. Then a man would say the exact same thing and everyone would say, oh, yes, that’s a brilliant idea. My other friend S was once asked what she did. She said she was a wife and mother. The man she was talking to turned on his heel and walked away. (Sorry about too many italics, but really.)

My worst one is the breeding thing. I don’t want children; never have. To me, it is a perfectly ordinary decision, like knowing you don’t want to be concert pianist, or a welder, because that is not your talent. To others, with their ovary assumptions, it is a radical tear in the space time continuum. It is an inversion of the natural order. A gentleman actually once said to me: ‘You have a womb, you have to use it.’ I have had all the old tropes: ‘you’ll change your mind when you meet the right man’, and variations on that theme. It used to drive me to despair. I hated being seen as a freak. Now I am old and ornery. I think: everyone can just bugger off.

Still, my small experience is a mild one. No one has bashed me, or called me a bitch, or refused to promote me because I have lady parts. But there is a strange thing about being part of a group that is routinely derided. I have always taken the feminist idea of the sisterhood very personally. I think of John Donne, and believe that no woman is an island. When you disdain my sisters, you disdain me. I think this may fall into the category of: things which are slightly nuts, but incontrovertibly true.

Oh dear, I have now been deadly serious for two days in a row. This will not do at all. It is not the British Way. Tomorrow, I shall make ironical observations about the dog and the pig, and all manner of things shall be well.

And now for the pictures of the day.

It was a gloomy, murky sort of day, so I didn't take that many of the trees and hills:

Instead, I decided on a Pigeon photo essay. The pictures themselves are not that good, rather blurry and ill-composed. But they struck me as funny and sweet, and just the ticket on a gloomy Friday.

This is how she gallops off, when we go out. She canters this way and that, filled with eagerness, determined to sniff out mice and moles and voles:

Up goes the tail:

Sniff, sniff, sniff, eh Mr Gibbon?:

I'M ON THE WALL. I'M ON THE WALL:

And, by the way, I am bringing in this unfeasibly big stick:

You want me to pose with my Grace Kelly face on? Oh, all right:

Close-up of the hill, with its dusting of snow, from a slightly different angle than usual:

Have a happy Friday.

In which a small rant blows up out of the west

2012-01-05T13:13:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Apologies for length. Also: possible overuse of the words 'reductive', and 'signifier'.

Ah, excellent. A new Twitter controversy blows up out of a calm blue sea. I am sitting at my desk, doing my work, when I have to look something up on the internet. (The life story of Mary Pickford, for various obscure reasons.) The fatal thing about having the internet on all the time is that it sings the siren song of displacement activity. I’ll just have a quick look at Twitter, I think.

Diane Abbott is trending. The trending thing is always rather alarming; one tends to think that someone has suffered a fatal accident. This time, it turns out that Abbott has written: ‘White people love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game.’

Wow, I think. That’s a little bit crazy tunes. What can she mean?

It seems she was having some kind of argument with a journalist about the nature of the black community. Now, people are hurling toys out of prams, and stamping outraged feet, and leaping onto high horses and galloping off in all directions. They are demanding that she resign. They are calling her a racist and a fool and worse.

I like Diane Abbott. This is because of my excessive fondness for This Week, in which she used to sit on the sofa and flirt with Michael Portillo, as they dished the dirt on the political news. They were one of the best punditry double acts in the business, informative and sharp and funny. There was a keen pleasure in watching the old leftie and the old rightie sparring and teasing.

I even like the fact that she is a flawed politician. She is not a cookie cutter, on-message automaton. She was brilliantly defiant about sending her son to a private school, at the very moment that Tony Blair was on his messianic drive for education, education, education. It was a high class of hypocrisy, and she did not mutter or shuffle or try and change the subject. She pretty much just said: yes? So what? She took the punches.

What interests me about this scandale du jour is not so much her, though. It is the wider ramifications of black and white. Only yesterday, I was puzzling over what Rick Santorum meant when he made a statement about not giving ‘black people’ other people’s money. (I still don’t quite understand what he was talking about, but the more I think about it, the more I think he must have meant the ‘other people’ were white people.) I’m slightly obsessed by Santorum now, he is so very odd, and since I wrote of him, I’ve been doing a bit more checking.

It turns out, he has form. He talks about ‘black people’ quite a lot, it’s a recurring trope with him. He once told a television interviewer that he was astonished that President Obama did not take a pro-life position; he said he thought that was extraordinary from ‘a black man’. Again, I was left shaking my head. One report on it drily remarked that abortion was quite high in the African-American population, as if that should explain what he meant. I still think he may be doing some kind of Edward Lear nonsense joke, possibly for a bet.

Now, Diane Abbott, a prominent black Briton, is talking about ‘white people’. Where they both lose me is in this use of white and black, not as simple observable fact, but as a signifier for something else.

I admit, I have never fully seen the importance of pigmentation. I am not being Pollyanna-ish or disingenuous; it is one of the strands of human thought with which I struggle. Viscerally, I don’t understand why it marks and divides; I am with Martin Amis, who once wondered why anyone thought white was best. It’s so random, so ephemeral, so literally skin-deep. In evolutionary terms, it is only a blink of an eye ago that we were all black. Humans originated in Africa. In most societies, ancient pedigree is something to be boasted of. If oldest is best, then black should be the gold standard.

Pushing aside the bigotries and prejudices, if that is possible, what really bothers me about this black and white signifier idea is that it is not useful. It is so intellectually lazy. It tells one nothing. It does not illuminate or elucidate.

When Santorum says ‘black people’, what can that even mean? Black, in the United States, covers a rainbow of possibility. There are black people who have been in America since the dawn of slavery, descended from stolen Africans. There are black people of West Indian origin, and of South and Central American pedigree. These four groups alone have keen cultural differences.

There are newer immigrants, all shades of black and brown, coming from everywhere from Liberia to London, from New Delhi to New Guinea. To put them all in a box because they are not snowy white bleaches them of all meaning.

Interestingly, President Obama exemplifies this very thing; he is the walking embodiment of the reductiveness of the word black, when applied as an indicator of character or attitude, or a predictor of behaviour. His mother was white, and he was brought up by white grandparents. He was schooled in Hawaii; he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia, with an Indonesian stepfather. He went to Columbia and Harvard Law; he settled in Chicago. His father was a black Kenyan; his grandfather worked for white colonialists. Contemplate that fascinating and various background and early life, and then consider how all of it is denied and reduced when he is described as a ‘black man’.

It seems to me that the importance of his skin is an external, observed thing. It does not define him, or tell us anything much about him as a human, or a thinker, or a politician. What it did do, on that bright, frigid day in January when he was sworn in, was allow millions of non-white people to see someone who looked a little like them rise to the highest office in the land. In a country still scarred from segregation, where the back of the bus still burns in living memory, that was important. But to use black as a suggestion of how someone might think or act is reductive idiocy of the crassest order.

So too with Abbott. ‘White people’ means nothing. To which ‘white people’ is she referring? Do the ice white Norwegians adore divide and rule? Or is that the white Australians? Or the pale Danes?

Even if she were only talking of white Britons, massive cultural and ancestral differences still obtain. In terms of genetics, Britons are descended from Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Celts, Romans, and Jews of all varieties. In terms of geography, there are dividing lines all over the shop. The proud Scots and Welsh would not like to be lumped in with the inhabitants of Hampshire and Surrey. The Cornish are, as everyone knows, a law entirely to themselves. The Ulster Irish see the world a little differently from the East Anglians.

Forget the worn north-south divide, here in Scotland there is a passionate difference between the culture and dialect and outlook of those who live on the east coast and the west coast. When I go to the west, I am always struck by the amazing contrast to my part of the east. It’s there in the accent, the slang, the attitudes, the underlying assumptions, the jokes.

I hope I am not living up to Abbott’s idea of divide and rule. I see contrasts, but I also believe that humans are more alike than different. The fundamentals of human yearning, the desire to love and be loved, to live useful lives, to bring up happy children, are found pretty much everywhere. But the overlay of distinct cultural identities is something that has always fascinated me, and I find it illuminating that there is so much of that still in these tiny islands.

It is particularly interesting in this age, when one might think that the global village, restless internet, breaking down of national barriers could lead to a sort of homogeneity. Not a bit of it. Only a couple of weeks ago, I listened to an antic discussion on the wireless between people from Birmingham and people from Manchester. Those are two British cities only eighty miles apart; to hear the proud Brummies and Mancunians talk, you would think they came from two distant stars.

I could bash on about this for hours. It is one of my favourite subjects. I dream of going to Shetland, where people tell me that the accent and culture is more Nordic than Scottish. But the point of it all is that even on this small set of rocks in the North Sea, there is vivid proof that ‘white’ means absolutely nothing.

You could argue that what Abbott says was racist, and people who have never liked her are hurling that word about. What bothers me most about what she said is that it is both wrong and meaningless. It is a crashing instance of an intelligent person saying a stupid thing. When someone herds humans into groups on such a superficial criterion as skin colour, it is not just bigoted; it deprives any statement of interest, complexity, nuance, meaning, and thought. It takes all the glorious variety, paradox and subtlety which flesh is heir to, and boils it down to one vapid, hollow archetype, signifying nothing.

And now for the pictures of the day:

The Pigeon is in black and white today, for symbolic reasons. (No, no, only joking. It's just because it makes her look pretty.):

And, two hills for the price of one:

Oh, and I meant to say: thank you so much for the kind comments of the last few days. Have hopelessly not been replying due to post-Christmas malaise, lingering vestiges of head cold, scrabbling attempts to get back to some useful work, and general hopelessness. You know I read and love them all.

In which I do not talk about Rick Santorum

2012-01-04T15:36:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to do a whole thing about Rick Santorum. I was going to write about Biblical literalism, with specific reference to the bit about the entire town stoning the adulterous daughters to death. Oh, I was on a roll, in my mind, at that point. I was going to do moral relativism, moral absolutism, Leviticus, separation of Church and State, the finer points of Catholicism.

Since Santorum’s views on abortion are so strict, and he has stated categorically that he would have doctors arrested and imprisoned for performing the procedure, I was going to go into a whole existential exploration of personhood.

The definition of personhood (horrible word, but the one that is used in this context, I’m afraid) is absolutely fascinating, once you get to thinking about it for more than five minutes. It can’t be thought or language or even self-consciousness, since babies have none of those things; nor do some very mentally disabled people, or those who suffer traumatic brain injury or are in the end states of Alzheimer’s disease.

Ah, I thought, as I walked down to give the pig a treat of carrots and tomatoes (she adores tomatoes), this is properly interesting. I shall be like the majestic Lord Bragg on In Our Time: I shall unpack it. Melvyn Bragg is always unpacking things. He is the shining light of unpacking. I think he must think a day wasted if he does not unpack something really recondite.

I got back from the pig. She was in ferociously fine fettle today, skipping across the walled garden with her little twisty tail high in the air. She actually wags her tail when she sees me, like a happy dog. I made some yellow split pea soup. I had forgotten quite how good the split pea soup is.

Sustained, I sat down at my desk, fingers itching to get to the bottom of the Santorum madness. I watched a couple of his interviews, I found some very, very strange quotes. I began to write. Two sentences in, the will to live drained from me. I could not do it. It was too depressing.

I know I am supposed to be a fearless examiner of the human condition. Oh, look at me, shining a light into the darkest corners, without favour or fear. I don’t believe in pablum or whitewash or glossing over the nasty parts. There must be the truth, or nothing. I have always been faintly disturbed by those people who refuse to read the news, because it is too demoralising, although occasionally I have a faint envy for them. My own idiot construction is that one must face the news, in order to be a concerned citizen. How earnest and po-faced I sometimes am. But today, faced with the full strangeness and sadness of a Rick Santorum, I could not do it.

Oh, said the tired part of my brain, please can we think about puppies or penguins instead? Tell them about the pig with her wiggly, piggly tail, eating the carrots and grinning all over her sweet porcine face. Come on, said the post-Christmas exhaustion, you really don’t have to go into battle against every piece of egregious reasoning that you encounter. And, said the low realist, are you really going to change anyone’s mind? Is that even your job? You are, I tell myself firmly, not Lord Bragg, King of the Reithian imperative.

This last thought is rather a relief. Although of course, it then sets up a new dilemma: where is the fine line between practical reality, and copping out? One should fight for something, after all. Yet it is fabulously dull to be lecturing people all the time. There is something very tiring about that finger-wagging conviction of one’s own rightness. On the other hand, without conviction one is just a straw in the wind. So that is the new conundrum that I shall be pondering for the rest of the day.

Now for the pictures.

It was another dull, dirty day. The sleet and gales have subsided, and there is just a flat, brown nothing. I cannot complain. Looking back over the pictures of the last weeks, I see day after day of dazzling sunshine. And in some ways, the bad weather is quite good, because it makes me look at the small things of beauty. The only loveliness one can find outside on a day like this is in the minute elements: the texture of the stone walls, the bark on the trees, the moss and lichen. I always feel there is something rather symbolic in that.

The Pigeon did her every-good-girl-deserves-a-treat pose:

And her I'm really bored of this now, can I please move pose:

And her little blinky eyes face, which is almost too much to take:

Funnily enough, even on this drab day, with its flat grey sky, the hill looked rather vivid and glorious:

Oh, and in case you think I am being a bit melodramatic about the strangeness of Rick Santorum, here is just one quote from him from the campaign trail. He told a crowd in Sioux City: 'I do not want to make black people's lives better by giving them other people's money'.

I'm not being funny: I genuinely, genuinely do not understand what that means. I mean: why black people? It's like a nonsense poem. Those are recognisably English words, strung together in a phrase, but making no sense at all. I do, however, think that anyone who could come up with such a bizarre sentiment should not be taken seriously as a potential president of the local Rotary Club, let alone the United States of America.

If you have the heart for it, you can see the whole thing here.

In which I turn to TS for help

2012-01-03T14:20:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

This is a fairly accurate representation of the sound of my brain. (Sometimes, when I write these things down, I think: if a shrink should read this, would they cart me off to the bin? There is a reason, after all, why most of us put a faint social veneer over our raggedy selves. It’s not just to avoid boring people to death; it’s also so we shall not be diagnosed as being nuts in the head.)

So sorry about yesterday; the broadband went down. Actually, it was rather restful. I took the bank holiday at its word, and took my final day off. My head cold was still roaming about, looking for smallholdings to devastate. I moved very slowly, and read a book. It was a tremendous book, I could not recommend it more. It is called The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, and it’s all about the line between lunacy and sanity, and what he calls the Madness Industry. It’s funny, and shocking.

Now, the internets are back on, and I must gather myself and return to normality. Ha, shout the voices in my head, good luck with that. There is furious sleet outside, high winds, a filthy sky, and not a trace of beauty. I have work to do and thoughts to think and admin to administrate, and I do not feel like doing any of it. Oh how I long, sometimes, to be one of those glimmering, gleaming, shining people, the ones who are neat and smart and sensible and know how to Get Things Done.

From which, you may deduce, I am having a grumpy day. Too much excitement, I think to myself. All that Christmas and the racing and everything; it all got me rather carried away and now there is the bump of reality. I think I had, as a Texan of my acquaintance use to say, too much fun. (You have to imagine that being said with an ironical Southern twang, and a lovely drawl on the word ‘fun’, so that it seems to go on forever.) Christmas was rather lovely. Despite a power cut, the lunch was perfect. The family was all in harmony. The small people were enchanting. It was all high days and holidays, and now I have to get serious, and I don’t feel serious at all.

I wonder if I must view this next part as a sort of training exercise. I used to bang on, in my younger days, about the brain being like a muscle. I am sure this is not neurologically correct, although there was that famous study which showed that the hippocampus of London cab drivers actually grew as they did The Knowledge. My feeling is that you have to exercise the thing to get up to peak fitness. At the moment, mine is sitting on the sofa, flabby and liverish. I have to get it up to racing strength again.

I contemplate ways to do this. Perhaps I shall start with the poets. I think it is time for TS. The Wasteland shall be my new year training. I love it, partly because I do not understand a word of it. There are so many references I do not know, even languages I do not understand. It’s like that line in The Big Chill, when William Hurt is watching some monster B-movie, and Tom Berenger starts asking him questions about what is going on. (Best moment: twenty men wearing Trilbies turn in alarm, and Hurt says, slowly: ‘I think the man in the hat did something terrible.’) Anyway, Berenger keeps asking about this stupid old movie, and Hurt says: ‘You are so analytical. Sometimes you have to let art wash over you.’ Even though that was a joke, I feel that way about The Wasteland. I shall let it wash over me, and slowly get my poor old brain back into shape.

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.

No pictures today, on account of the filthy weather. I could hardly make it halfway down the beech avenue against the wind and the sleet, although The Pigeon seemed to take delight in the hard weather, and plunged into it as if she were off to a ball.

Here are some from the more clement days:

Pigeon:

Hill:

In which I can only apologise. Or: the entire, unexpurgated story of the King George VI chase, 2011.

2012-01-01T16:25:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Happy New Year, to all the Dear Readers. And as a special January 1st absurdity, I am giving you the story of Kauto Star's historic victory. I had said that I might. Then I thought, oh no; the poor readers. They shall have hangovers to tend, lunches to cook, people to see, lives to live.

But in the end, I could not resist.

This is stupidly long. It is call off the dogs, take the telephone off the hook long. So really, I can only apologise.

The story of a great race:

Half an hour before the start, there is the first glimpse of Kauto Star, walking calmly round in his red rug. He surveys the racecourse with his head held high, as if he owns the place. My mother calls: ‘The look of eagles,’ she says.

Ruby Walsh looks tense. ‘We’re here today with a fighting chance, but we are the underdog, there’s no point pretending that we’re not.’ He smiles, a little rueful, as if he suspects this might be the last spin of the wheel. 'He’s a privilege to ride,' he says.

Long Run is the evens favourite. He looks wonderfully well; fit as a butcher’s dog, his coat gleaming, his ears pricked. The interesting thing about the two horses is that they are completely different physical types. Long Run is long and lean, with a slightly thin neck. Kauto Star is big and bonny, a strong, compact, rounded horse; he carries his head high. He has a great, strolling action, where Long Run has a quick, athletic gallop, a bit on the knee.

Parading in front of the stands, to the applause of the crowd, Kauto nods his old head as if in acknowledgement. He looks as beautiful as any equine I ever saw; he is relaxed and serene. Down at the start, he still has his ears pricked, collected as a show pony. Long Run is chewing at his bit, his ears back, impatient to get on with it. He is young, after all, and at this moment, it shows.

And, off they jump.

Kauto pricks his ears, canters to the front, on the outside. The first fence is always a sign. Kauto Star sails over it. Quickly to the second, he puts in two long strides and stands off a mile, quite effortless. Round the first bend, he starts carrying his tail high, like a flag. Lobbing along on the outside, he takes the next two neatly and easily.

Then comes the open ditch. I have stood in an open ditch, and looked up to the stiff birch towering over my head. They are about six feet across and almost five feet high, fearsome obstacles, especially to take when galloping at thirty miles an hour.

Kauto Star sails over it.

All great champions have their signatures. With Desert Orchid, it was his outrageous standing off, sometimes outside the wings, and his habit of tearing along in front. With Frankel, this season, it is his dancing, raking stride.

With Kauto Star it is this sailing thing. When he meets a fence just right, and arcs high over it, it is as if, for a moment, he defies the laws of physics. There is a split second when it almost appears as if he has gone into slow motion, as if someone has pressed pause. His other brilliance is that he can jump very big, and lose no ground in running. He jumps, as the racing people say, out of his stride, and at this moment, the stride is a perfect one.

On he goes, to the next plain fence. Another sail. He is almost in the lead now, and has fallen into a lively, bouncing gallop, something joyful in it. One should not get too anthropomorphic, but at this stage in the race, he looks happy. If horses could smile, he would be smiling.

Round the next bend and into the straight, Kauto puts in another immaculate jump. Ruby is sitting very still on him, with a tight rein. Long Run is three lengths back, doing nothing wrong.

As he approaches the stands for the first time, Kauto Star pricks up his old ears and puts in an exhibition leap, flicking his heels up into the air behind him, as if to say: here is your Christmas present. ‘What a jump,’ says Simon Holt, who is calling the race. Kauto raises his head, and goes to the lead.

At the fence which will be the last next time round, Ruby sees a stride from way out, the horse makes a streaming, flying leap, and the crowd starts to holler and roar. ‘They’re getting a tremendous cheer,’ cries the commentator. ‘Cheers and applause.’ Kauto flicks his left ear back towards the noise. As I have watched the race again and again, I have wondered: can they hear that, the horses, out on the track? Does the auld fella think, in his horsey old head: that’s for me?

Behind him, Long Run has no such sentimental thoughts. His head is down, his ears are back; he looks dogged and determined.

And off they go, out into the country again, with nine huge fences still to jump. Kauto is bouncing along, on the outside of dear old Nacarat, the front-running grey, still looking as if he is having more fun than anyone else.

At the next, he comes as close as he has so far to making a mistake. It’s not really an error; it’s just he gets in a bit tight. This is not a sail; this is just a working jump, no poetry about it. It does not stop him in running though, and he keeps right on with the wonderful rhythmic stride which Ruby has got him into.

At the next, another open ditch, it is as if Kauto thinks to himself: well, that last one wasn’t so pretty; now I shall show you how it is done. He takes off a stride too soon, and lands as far out on the other side. It is the kind of thing that makes you gasp, every time you watch it.

At the next bend, something interesting happens. Ruby has not moved an inch on Kauto Star; the reins are still tight. But old Kauto gathers himself and seems to put an extra spring in his step. I remember watching a film about Desert Orchid once, when Simon Sherwood, his jockey, said something like: ‘I said to him, come on, we’ve done enough poncing about, time for business, mate.’ It is as if, with seven to go, Kauto thinks to himself, without being told, it’s time for business. He pricks his ears, lengthens his stride, and dances past Nacarat.

It’s another perfect, high, sailing jump at the next, and now Kauto is out in the lead. Here is another new thing about the horse in his old age. In his younger days, he used to be covered up a bit; he’d go along in mid division, and Ruby would worry about getting to the front too soon. Sometimes he had to, because the horse was going so well, but it was never considered an ideal tactic.

Apart from the real, instinctive front-runners, like Desert Orchid, who always put his ears back in fury if anything headed him, most horses do not like being out on their own for long. I’ve never heard it actually said, but I assume it’s a ancient herd instinct thing; most of them need something to chase. This bold, prominent style is a new thing for Kauto, and it paid off magnificently in his last win at Haydock. It is also a joy to watch.

But it is a risk. It’s asking an awful lot of a chaser to be up at the sharp end for three long, hard miles. At this stage though, Kauto looks as if it is all he wants; just the clear blue sky and the straight green sward in front of him, and he gallops over it as if it is his spiritual home.

Six out, and a good, efficient jump, nothing showy about it. Ruby has a quick look under his arm, to see the white noseband of Long Run looming up behind him. But Kauto is full of running, and the young champion gets a slap down the neck, to remind him to go about his business. ‘Kauto Star is turning the screw,’ cries Simon Holt, his voice rising with the excitement of the thing.

Five out: a magnificent leap. Long Run is not quite so fluent behind, and Sam Waley-Cohen is having to ride him now. Kauto is now galloping a double handful, well within himself.

Four out: a good, unshowy jump. All business, mate. Kauto runs on, still beautifully balanced, his stride long and true. Long Run, in second now, looks a tiny bit out of kilter, scrabbling a little. Sam Waley-Cohen starts riding him hard, pushing away, the reins flapping.

By contrast, two lengths in front, Ruby still has a tight rein, his hands firm and still on Kauto’s neck. The camera comes in for a close-up, and you can see the hard quality of the gallop. Simon Holt’s voice has risen: ‘It’s familiar territory to the horse in front.’

On the final bend, Kauto eases away from the field. Long Run looks in trouble, three lengths behind. I suddenly think the auld fella is going to win by a mile. He is just not stopping; the farther they go, the farther he gallops. But there are still three fences to go; Long Run has won this race and a Gold Cup, and is no mug; and the eleven-year-old has been out in front for a long time. He could make a mistake, get tired, pack up.

Coming into the straight, Ruby lets out the reins for the first time. I notice what beautiful hands he has. In racing speak, this means not finely shaped fingers, but the kind of hands which are gentle on a horse’s mouth, which can feel the horse, which can send and receive signals down the reins. It’s a bit hard to explain, but it’s a lovely gift, and not something all jump jockeys have.

It’s the first time he has had to ask Kauto any kind of question. It’s a mild question, a little shake-up. The horse responds with a perfect, neat, collected jump. He is running straight, which is always a good sign at this stage of a race. When they get tired, horses can wander about a bit. Kauto still looks full of running.

At the second last, he pricks his ears. ‘Another perfect jump,’ shouts Simon Holt. Behind him, Long Run is a bit ragged, and Sam Waley-Cohen has to concentrate to pull the horse together as they land.

There’s one to go. Everything else is going backwards. Ruby is riding Kauto Star seriously now, with hands and heels. Behind him, three lengths back, Long Run will not go away. Will the years tell? Will Kauto bash the last, as he has sometimes done in the past? The crowd is going nuts. ‘He’s being ROARED on,’ shouts Simon Holt, roaring himself.

They are going flat out now. Anything less than pinpoint accuracy will lead to disaster. Kauto raises his head, collects himself, measures one, two, three strides, takes off at the sweet spot, and soars over the last, Ruby’s head almost on his neck as they take flight together, man and animal in perfect harmony.

In mid air, Kauto stretches out his hind legs, and almost gives the fence a little slap, as if in salute to the obstacle. He lands quite perfectly. Pausing the tape now, as I write this, I see the ideal racehorse, all his muscles stretched and defined, his front legs carving the air like scythes, his tail flying like a flag. Behind him, Long Run, who has made a bit of a bosh of the fence, has put down all wrong, his back legs in a tangle, and his jockey has had to lean right back in the saddle so as not to get unshipped.

But it’s not over yet. That mighty leap at the last should have been enough to seal it; Long Run’s mistake should have cooked his goose. High credit to the young pretender; his wins last year were not flukes. He is talented, and determined, and he has been brought to a peak of fitness. He picks himself up, and gets galloping again. Kauto is still going well, but Long Run is finishing like a freight train. This is an incredibly impressive thing to watch, after three long miles, and 19 fences.

It was at this point, watching the race for the first time, when I still did not know what would happen, that I was shouting and screaming and jumping up and down on the sofa. ‘Come on you beauty,’ I was yelling. ‘Hold on, hold on. Come on, my son.’

‘Kauto Star by two lengths,’ shouts Simon Holt. He is having to yell his head off to be heard over the howls of the crowd. ‘Long Run is getting to him.’

Where is the bloody finishing post? I think. The crowd is sending up a noise I’m not sure I ever heard before. Ruby has his head down; he does not use the whip. He just rides the old beauty out for all he is worth, in complete rhythm with the horse, keeping him straight and true. Long Run is closing all the time.

‘Kauto Star, can he be the king of kings?’ shouts Simon Holt.

And suddenly, I know he can be. He is not just brilliant, he is courageous and genuine. He does not give up. He keeps galloping, all the way to the line, and flashes past in front, with a dogged Long Run only a length and a half behind.

‘Kauto Star, a sporting sensation,’ shouts Simon Holt, his voice hoarse with emotion.

Ruby stands up in his stirrups, punches the air, his face split into a smile of delight, and slight disbelief. The horse, as if knowing what he has done, pricks up his ears, and falls into a relaxed, rolling canter, as the cheers of delight buffet about the grandstand.

The crowd is throwing hats, papers, racecards, into the air. The beaten jockeys crowd around Ruby Walsh, shaking his hand, slapping his back, leaning down to pat Kauto on the neck. They might have lost, but they know what this sport is all about; they know a legend when they see one, and they are gentlemanlike enough to want to salute him.

There is a great sporting tradition in National Hunt racing ; one of the first things Kauto’s trainer, Paul Nicholls, did after the race was to shake the hands of his vanquished rivals, and say, with complete sincerity: ‘Well done.’ He meant it. Long Run and Sam Waley-Cohen made it a magnificent race, and nothing should be taken from them in defeat.

I have had my doubts about how good Long Run really is, but seeing him battle to the line like that, just refusing to admit he was beat, made me tip my hat in respect.

It was not his fault. He came up against one of the best horses of the last fifty years, in his majestic pomp, a horse who was loving his work, who did not put a foot wrong, who was racing on a track he loves, in front of massed crowds cheering him home until their throats were sore.

The rest of the field was seventeen lengths behind, and they were not window dressing. They were good, tough horses. If Kauto had not been there, Long Run would have won that grade one chase by seventeen lengths, in a canter.

There are three things I think about that race, which is one of the best I ever saw. One is that Kauto Star mostly won it with his jumping. When Long Run comes under pressure, his jumping falls apart, just a bit. He does not make catastrophic errors, but he goes flat, bashes through the birch, has to get himself back together. It is to his credit that he can whack a fence and still keep on running.

But Kauto Star was foot perfect. If you are being strict, you can say he was a bit close to the first fence round the back, but that was it. Everything else was right on song. Some of the leaps were prodigious, the kind you don’t forget. It was an amazing privilege to watch the eleven-year-old veteran, literally jumping for joy.

The second is: as John Francome said, he can go over two, he can go over three; he can go on good, he can go on soft; he can go left, he can go right. As someone added, a couple of days later: he can go up, he can go down. Quite frankly, at this stage, you would believe it if someone told you he could fly. The remarkable thing about this horse is his versatility. The remarkable thing about his training team is that they have kept him galloping over all those distances, in all those conditions, for all those years. Just keeping a horse sound over six seasons is a feat of training; to keep him at the top of the game is extraordinary.

The third is: in a way, a length and a half doesn’t do justice to the thing. It was very exciting and thrilling and everything, but what I mean is that the triumph was easier than that margin suggests. Kauto won his last King George by a distance, which basically means so damn far the stewards can’t be fagged to count. Someone later calculated it was thirty-five lengths. I think his last Gold Cup was about fifteen lengths; he cantered away with it, anyway.

This one sounds less imperious, more hard-scrabble. When it’s a length and a half, people can say: oh well, if the winning post had come a few yards later, or if only Long Run had jumped the last, or if Kauto Star had hit it, it would be a different story. The jumping did probably win it, but there was something else too.

Long Run was never going to catch the horse in front. Kauto Star and Ruby Walsh are two canny campaigners; they did just what they needed to. It was a close finish, but it was a definitive one. I think Kauto Star had that race won on the final bend. I think, in the end, it was that joyous, relentless, rhythmic gallop that did it. It never faltered. It was the gallop of a horse with the heart of a lion.

Now some pictures of what the first day of the new year looked like:

Up the avenue I went, with The Pigeon:

The light glimmered on the trees and the hills:

And the old mossy wall:

Herself was looking most regal:

And the first hill of 2012:

One more thing I should add, as if I have not gone on long enough. The mighty Master Minded also ran in the King George. I have written before about luck in running. He did not have it. He struck into himself and damaged a tendon. He was driven at once to Newmarket where the vets operated on him. He is comfortable, but we may never see him run again.

He was a glorious horse on his day, and I have won money on him and shouted him home. When he was a young two miler, he would win in a blue streak, leaving everything else legless behind him. I am sad that I shall not see that brilliance again.

Oh, and one final note of vulgarity. It's easy to get carried away in the wake of a great victory. But I would like to record that in the week before Christmas I damn well put my money where my mouth was, and had a serious punt on Kauto Star at 4-1. Although I had my doubts, on the day of the race, thinking I was indulging heart over head, that no animal could really win five King Georges, I really did believe. And the lovely old horse paid me back in spades.

Photograph by the Press Association.

New Year's Eve; or, a story of sheep

2011-12-31T15:41:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Down the stairs at noon I stumped, still not up to much. I wish there were a poetic way of saying this but there is not: my entire head is filled with snot. Luckily, the incredibly kind Stepfather had been round to give the dog her morning walk, so all I had to do was make some eggs, take some iron tonic, and think about the blog. Because this is the day; it’s the absolute mandated day when you must do round-ups, and write end of year lists, and record stirring events.

For a horrible moment, I could not remember a single thing that happened this year. Was it Libya? Was this the Arab Spring? It seems so long ago. Was this really the year that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed? I do remember that each week the Euro was going to crash, that Greece tottered, and riots broke out.

All right, said my addled brain, yes; it was that year. I suppose I have to write about that. Everyone will be writing about that, because that is what is decreed on this 31^st day, but occasionally I don’t mind spying a passing bandwagon and leaping aboard.

Then I thought I should really go out and take you some pictures. I heard on the wireless that it was raining in the south, but it was lovely here, the sun gentling the hills. I should take a picture of them on the last day of 2011, for posterity. So I swaddled myself up, on account of my cold, even though the weather continues mild, and took The Pigeon out to look at the view.

I was so glad I did. Everything looked quite shimmeringly lovely. There were the sheep, white as paper, gathered in a tight huddle in the meadow. They made a perfect picture. Then they started moving, quite fast. My brain is very stupid with this cold, so it took me a moment to work out what was going on.

At first I thought the farmer was moving them. I could see a black dog. But then they started charging about, much faster than normal. And I suddenly registered that I could hear barking. Sheepdogs do not bark at their flock.

The sheep split, veering into two tight groups, galloping in different directions. Even from three hundred yards away, I caught the sharp air of panic.

Shit, I thought. They are being chased.

My neighbour was out, saying goodbye to some Christmas guests. ‘J,’ I bawled. ‘I think a dog is chasing the sheep. The sheep are going nuts.’

The neighbour is a man of doing. He is always performing wonderful practical things, of which I know nothing. He fixes my outside tap, and checks the gutters. He always knows what the weather will do. Without pausing, he leapt into his truck, and roared off down the drive.

I was too far away to get to the sheep, but I was so enraged by the crazed dog that I started yelling: ‘Hey, hey,’ in some vain hope it might hear me and stop. I could see it quite clearly now. It was laying about the poor sheep left and right. I could not see if it was biting, but prayed that it was only chasing. The terrified ladies were running up and down the sloping meadow, racing for their lives.

Come on, J, I thought. Come on. Suddenly there he was. If it were a film, this would have been the moment when the Indiana Jones music broke out. The black truck streaked across the turf, going straight for the errant dog. It stopped, and the neighbour leapt out, trying to corral the animal. I could hear him yelling in fury, his voice shaking with anger. The dog dodged him, back and forth. Back into the truck the neighbour got, for more wild chasing. It was like the Dukes of Hazzard. If it had not been so serious, it would have been funny.

The neighbour saved the sheep. They huddled in a tiny, dense flock, under the trees to the west. I hoped that they were only exhausted, not hurt. The worry is that this kind of shock is exactly what leads ewes to cast their lambs. Watching the whole thing unfold, I realised keenly why farmers are so protective of their sheep. They are such vulnerable creatures. As the neighbour charged to their rescue, like some knight in an old-fashioned book, I felt like cheering and hanging out flags.

Once the drama was over, I turned to find The Pigeon standing like a statue, at my heels. It was as if she sensed that something very serious was going on. I blessed her good temper and obedient manners; even when she was young and predatory, going after rabbits like a panther, she never chased sheep. Sheep and deer were the two things I trained her never to go near, and she took the lesson well.

And so it turns out, on this last, sunny day of the old year, that instead of recalling world events, and cataclysmic geo-political shifts, and events on the home front, I give you a little story about sheep. I smile as I write that; for some reason it feels appropriate. I have no idea why. Anyway, if I had gone over the old year, I would have had to write of all those funerals in May. I’m not sure I want to write that, just today. Better, perhaps, to have a little ovine tale, with a happy ending.

This is what the last day of 2011 looked like, in the north-east of Scotland:

It's a bit stupid to get sentimental about dogs, just because it is New Year's Eve, but the greatest constant this year has been the sweet and loyal companionship of this dear creature, and I don't take that for granted for a single moment:

And, of course, there is the hill:

I suppose that, away from all the antic world events, this will always be the year that my father died. I miss him very much.

And I miss my darling Duchess, who was as fine a dog as I have ever met, elegant and funny and charming, and not quite as others. She died the night of my father's funeral. I think of her every day, as her sister and I take our morning walk.

But there were joys as well as sorrows. I planted a lot of trees. I saw many of the oldest friends. I watched the magnificent Kauto Star rewrite racing history to win his fifth King George, something no horse has ever done. It sounds a bit strange to put a horse in the joy column, but in times of trouble and uncertainty, there is something amazingly simple and profound in watching a brave and true creature doing what he was bred to do, with such brio:

Wonderful picture of him acknowledging the cheers of the crowd, by Steve Parsons for the Press Association.

Oh, and if we are talking of great horses, I was also privileged to watch the mighty Frankel drive all before him on the flat. He was another once in a lifetime horse, and I'm not sure I shall ever forget him blasting off in front in the 2000 Guineas, leaving everything else trailing in his wake.

And, of course, in the joys versus sorrows, The Dear Readers are writ large. I did not expect, when I started this blog, that it would demonstrate to me so clearly the kindness of strangers. But that is what it has done. You are magnificent, and I wish you all a happy and peaceful New Year.

More Women

2011-12-30T17:32:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Feeling very ropey indeed, so this shall be brief. But there must be some more women of the year. I am all about the women, now.

Baroness Trumpington – who, at the age of 89, flicked Lord King the V-sign as he was making a speech in the House of Lords, when he looked at her and said something about 'some of us getting pretty old'. The fuck-you look on her face was beyond price. She served at Bletchley during the war, which I always think one of the noblest and loneliest of callings. It has been calculated that the work at Bletchley shortened the war by two years, but the people who worked there were not allowed even to admit of its existence until quite recently. They are getting some of their due now, but not enough.

The women of the Military Wives Choir – I watched the brilliant documentary about them on the BBC, and it made me cry. Here was a group of stoical, rather overlooked women. Their job was just to get on with it, as they counted the days until their beloveds came home from Afghanistan. Then a miraculous choirmaster took them and made them into a shining entity that took the Albert Hall by storm, and beat all the boybands and manufactured X Factor nonsense to have the Christmas number one. In fact, on the strength of that, I'm going to nominate Gareth Malone too, as my honorary woman of the year, even though he, of course, a gentleman.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – I've always been a huge admirer of hers, ever since I saw a programme on the BBC in which she featured. She is one of those women who is almost too wonderful to be true. Nothing seems to faze her. She has brought good governance to Liberia, and is the first women ever to be elected head of state in Africa. This year, along with Leymah Gbowee and Tawakel Karman, two other remarkable women, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Elizabeth Warren – I love her for so many reasons I cannot count the ways. I love her calm intelligence and her coolness and grace. But this year, most of all, I love her for her stirring defence of the social contract, which you may see here.

All right. That's enough now. My head feels like it's about to fall off. No pictures today, except for one of another tremendous female, without whom no day would be complete:

Women of the Year

2011-12-29T17:30:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Ill in bed. Feel most doleful. It’s only a stupid Christmas bug; I have been reading about it on Twitter and hoping it would not reach the north east. I missed a high, windy, sunny day. The Lovely Stepfather came and brought medicines from the chemist, and took The Pigeon out for a walk.

‘Was she good?’ I called, wanly, from my bed.

‘She’s always good,’ he said, sternly. ‘She is a good dog.’

She came and lay down next to me, her coat cool and smelling of the outdoors.

Then I slept until tea-time, when I stumped down in my pyjamas to heat up some watercress soup.

I have decided, in my swimmy, not well mind, that I am going to do the women of the year after all. That BBC thing is still making me quite grumpy. Not the panda, I really don’t care about the panda, but the woman who married Prince Albert is sticking pins into my poor, seared, feminist eyes.

Since I am not feeling at all butch, I’m going to do them in gentle stages, three or four a day until we get to the New Year.

And, according to the woman rule which cannot be broken, we start with:

Aung San Suu Kyi – she is my woman of every year. She covers all the finest qualities in a human: courage, grace, fortitude, intelligence, wisdom. Now that she is released from house arrest and the generals appear to be thawing a bit, there is a glitter of hope for Burma.

Hillary Clinton – this is slightly surprising. I used to have a visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton. I remember when she was campaigning against Barack Obama in the primary for the Democratic nomination, watching her and thinking she was a phony. She seemed brittle, and inauthentic. Now, as Secretary of State, she has come into her own. She does not have to showboat about in front the cameras, she can just get on with a serious job.

It turns out she is very, very good at it. Her formidable intellect is being stretched at last. She would go on this list alone for the speech she made about gay rights. She made one very simple, very profound declarative sentence, and you know how I love a declarative sentence. She said: gay rights are human rights.

Rachel Maddow – I said I would put her on my list, and I do, with bells on. Her show is consistently informative, fascinating, funny, and often shocking. She has a lovely habit of digging down into the news and finding the nugget that the received wisdom has missed. I also like the fact that in a rather feverish climate, where the people who hate The Gay, as Maddow calls it, really do seem to hate and fear it, she quite naturally refers to ‘my girlfriend Susan.’ (Susan should probably go on the list too.)

Most impressive of all, in a political atmosphere of unprecedented partisanship, she routinely invites Republicans onto her programme, where she questions them firmly, but with unbelievable good manners. She may be the politest political host I have ever seen. And above all, she has a really delightful black dog, not unlike The Pigeon.

Clare Balding – There has been a big fuss this year about women in sport being overlooked, especially when the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist was exclusively male. Quietly, without fanfare or fuss, Balding goes on being one of the finest sports presenters in the business. She heads the BBC racing commentary team for The Grand National and The Royal Meeting at Ascot, and she never puts a foot wrong. She is impeccably well-informed, always humorous, and really loves the horses that she commentates about. I think she should quite soon be made a Dame.

Now my head has gone quite swimmy, so I am stopping. More excellent females tomorrow, including The Military Wives, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Obviously no pictures today, but here are a few lovelies from the last two weeks:

In which I write about absolutely nothing at all

2011-12-28T14:34:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I don’t know that to write about today. I hate that. I quite often start the blog whilst cleaning my teeth in the morning. (I hear the voice of Bagehot in my head: don’t let the daylight in on the mystery. Because of course my blog is identical to our gracious Queen.) Then I think about it a bit more on the morning walk. Then I obviously have to concentrate on work and other things, but it comes back to me when I am cooking lunch.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were a great, gaudy stream of consciousness? Imagine if I just sat down and all the words in the world streamed out. But, unlikely as it may seem, I do think about it. Some days, there is an obvious subject. Sometimes, it is instinctive. I may be feeling an emotion in which you must share. (Oh the poor readers, I think, as I am taken over by a strong force.) There may be a vast political event, although I have found that sometimes I avoid those, because they are too big, and I am too paltry. Some days there is a big, fat nothing, and you get extra Pigeon pictures and I hope nobody notices.

Then there are the days like today: a series of false starts. Hares begin running in my mind, and just as they look promising, they bugger off over the horizon, never to be seen again. I did think of giving you the entire story of the King George, fence by fence, and don’t breathe a sigh of relief, because I shall almost certainly do that before the week is up. But I am quite tired today, in that rather deflated no man’s land that comes between Christmas and the new year, and even half a bottle of iron tonic would not get me up to par for that big post.

There was the huge fuss on Twitter, which has now been called Pandagate, because the BBC put up its twelve female faces of the year, and one of them was the lady panda from China. Yelps of outrage on one side; calm down dear on the other. I wandered vaguely in half way through, and it was rather like coming late to a cocktail party and only getting the tail end of the scandale du jour. (I found it much odder that one of their faces was a woman called ‘Princess Charlene’ who married the bogus Prince Albert of Monaco. Brain could not compute that on any level.) I wondered if I might write about that, but then I decided it really wasn’t that interesting.

Then I thought I could do my own women of the year, but that needs thought and care and a great many visits to The Google, and I am still on holiday, and really want to return to my secret indulgence of catching up with my favourite American political programmes on the MSNBC website. (Rachel Maddow might go on my women of the year list.)

Finally, I just opened my fingers and began to type. And this is what came out. It’s not marvellous, is it? It’s what the pundits would call a process story. It’s a faint wander round the rather desultory functioning of my post-Christmas brain. But there must be blog. The fingers must tap tap tap on the keyboard. Sentences must form, and paragraphs be created. I still feel slightly angsty that I gave you only pictures yesterday. There must be prose. That’s my mysterious imperative.

The winds are getting up outside my window. The sky is the colour of aquamarines. My house is quite silent. The Pigeon is curled up like an apostrophe on her bed. I have made some watercress soup for strength. Later, for a real treat, I shall watch the King George again, and read my special Christmas copy of The Banned List by John Rentoul, which I gave to myself. I love it so much I have to read it very, very slowly, to make it last. Then, who knows, I might go back to Twitter and see if people are still cross about lady pandas.

Raining now, so cannot take the camera out. Here are a few pictures from the last days:

Lovely Younger Niece, on our Christmas day walk, with the wind in her hair:

Can't resist another picture of The Pigeon in her Christmas bow:

And with her Grace Kelly face on:

And the lovely, glimmering hill:

No Words Today

2011-12-27T18:28:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

On account of far too many yesterday. Today I am silence de glace.

Here are some pictures for you:

Oh, and because I can't resist, the magnificent champion from yesterday:

By David Ashdown, from The Independent.

HE DID IT

2011-12-26T15:42:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

After this morning's crazed post, I have to give you the news.

I thought it would be: ah, the old fella could not quite do it. Not at eleven; not after that gruelling race at Haydock; not against the brilliant young pretender. I thought I would be out in the air, with The Pigeon, rationalising defeat in my sad mind.

Instead, I can tell you:

HE DID IT.

The old king is still the king.

I am not at all ashamed to report that I am still crying. I was a fairy tale after all. It really came true.

No horse has ever won five King Georges. FIVE.

I shall tell you the story of the race when I have gathered my wits. By the state of the wits, that may be sometime next week.

I have seen a lot of great races in my time. I think, I think, that this was the best thing I ever saw in racing.

I wish my dad had been here to see it too.

A Boxing Day fairytale; or, the Old King versus the Young King

2011-12-26T13:00:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

This is another of my shaggy horse stories, and very long, so you might like to get yourself and nice cup of tea and sit down. I would apologise for length, but it's Christmas, so I am giving myself the present of self-indulgence.

I grew up in a racing household. My father was a jockey, and then a trainer. This should make me less sentimental about horses, not more. We wept over horses disappointed, horses lost, horses failed. But at the same time there was a brusque, all in a day’s work attitude to the whole shooting match. I remember looking, with clinical fascination, when I was six, at the hole in the neck of a horse called Dolge Orlick. He had a breathing problem; in those days, the vets used to cut into the windpipe, and insert a silver plug. Being plugged, it was called. Looking back, I think it was quite macabre, but as a child I found it interesting, and normal.

My dad was a man who regarded racehorses as the tough, working creatures that they are. He was a hard betting man. He generally bet with head over heart, although he did have a fatal tendency to listen to the last person he met on the way to the rails. There’s a whisper for this, they would say, and Dad would throw all his morning’s studying of the form out of the window.

So it is quite odd that I have developed a passionate love for certain horses, which waxes stronger as I get older. I still sit up late at night watching my old Desert Orchid videos (so old that they are actual videos, which are practically museum pieces), and weep ancient tears of joy each time I see him win the Gold Cup against impossible odds.

The horse I love the most, just now, is Kauto Star. The regular readers will know something of this; I have written of him before. Today, he goes out to do the improbable, perhaps the impossible. He is, at the age of eleven, attempting to win his fifth King George VI chase.

The King George is the great Christmas tradition of the National Hunt world. It is second only in prestige to the Gold Cup at Cheltenham. In some ways, it is a tougher race to win. Kempton is a flatter track than Cheltenham, but this means that the horses run faster and freer. As a result, you will often see the field strung out back to Sunbury, as John Francome likes to say; there are times when even good horses get pulled up, having gone much too fast in the early stages; sometimes, only a handful of the starters actually finish. It is a classy, tough, questioning race. It requires great talent, and great stamina, and great guts.

Last year, Kauto Star, the owner of that race, got beat out of sight by a young fellow called Long Run. He had already been beaten in the Gold Cup; in his last appearance of the season, at Punchestown, he was actually pulled up, something almost unheard of for this mighty animal. Everyone said he was finished. He was too old, he had lost his enthusiasm, his majestic talent had faded. He was now a footnote, in the racing history books; a nostalgic memory of Christmasses past.

Then, in November, he came back to Haydock, for one last try. Long Run went off hot favourite; Kauto was a patronising six to one. People were even saying that his brilliant trainer, Paul Nicholls, was an idiot to run him. There was an air of crossness, that the old horse was being asked too much.

He jumped like a stag; he galloped and stayed; he had his ears pricked as if it were a joyful walk in the park. To the screaming delight of the crowd, he came back to his great glory, and won by eight easy lengths. Long Run looked ordinary, tired, prone to amateurish mistakes.

And so the debate began. The interesting thing about racing is that there are so many unknowns. It is very much like that mad Donald Rumsfeld pronouncement: there are the things we do not know we do not know. You can follow the form book religiously, and still something will trot up at 20-1, out of a clear blue sky.

Thoroughbreds are high, aristocratic creatures; they have temperaments, and delicacies. They have moods. There have been days, in the past, when the real Kauto did not show up. No one knows why. I have seen him be so good that nothing could touch him; I have seen him be pedestrian. This is why, sometimes, after a race, you will hear trainers, or jockeys, say: there are no excuses. There is just the mystery.

For some reason, the old Kauto Star came back to his glorious best that day in November. So the debate is: was that an anomaly? Did Long Run, the great, youthful challenger just need the race? Will the form book be vindicated today, and the old king relinquish his crown?

People who know, people who follow these things, are saying: head, or heart? What they mean is that in their heart they want the auld fella to have one last, valedictory, victory, but they think the young monarch will stamp his class on the thing.

I am all heart. In this, I am not my father’s child; I defy my upbringing. I want this great, old horse to win so much that I can feel it racing through my body like electricity.

As I write this, I think: why do I love him so much? I have never met him, have no connection to his yard. Paul Nicholls was not one of the trainers I knew in my young life; Ruby Walsh, his marvellous jockey, is a man I have never encountered.

It is all about the horse. I love him because he is beautiful. I love him because he often races with his ears pricked, which is quite rare. I love him because he can jump so outrageously that it makes you catch your breath. I love him, at the same time, because I have seen him make crashing mistakes and still stand up. He is a very well balanced horse; what this means is that he can commit an error which would bring anyone else down, but he somehow finds a fifth leg.

There is something else too. Sometimes, with very talented horses, when things do not go their way, they fold under pressure. This sounds slightly counter-intuitive, but it is true. It is a bit like humans; those who are brilliant at something are often not grafters, because they never have to be. They are not trained in it; things come too easily to them; there is no muscle memory of scrabbling and scraping. But I have seen Kauto Star fight, through the mud, under great challenge. I have seen him stick his damn neck out in the closest of finishes and refuse to give up. For all his perfect conformation, he’s not just a show pony. He’s a battler. I think perhaps I love him for that most of all.

My head says: that day at Haydock was his last great glory day. It is too much to hope that he could smash all records, defy the experts, rewrite the history books. The young fella has everything on his side: the form, the age, his own considerable talent. On top of this, racing is such an imponderable business, there is quite likely the possibility that some rank outsider should come and steal the crown. When Desert Orchid first won this race, he was 16-1; everyone who knew anything said he would not stay. To the utter amazement of the experts, he jumped out in front, tore along like a child off to a party, and never came back to his field.

And beyond all that there is what the old boys call luck in running. This means: no one bumps into you, squeezes you out of the rails, causes a traffic jam in front of you. There is the thing called half-lengthing. This happens when two horses are running up alongside each other. One is a half length ahead. It takes off at a fence; the one just behind takes off, instinctively, at the same time, without being in striking distance of the fence, and crashes into it. Kauto is too canny a campaigner to be caught out by such a huckster’s trick, and yet, it is always a danger.

And there is the old, old thing, that the real Kauto might not show up.

I want him to win because he is the most marvellous, complete, brave, talented racehorse I have seen since the unforgettable Desert Orchid. He is a once in a generation creature. But my low realistic mind says: if he does not do it, that’s all right too. He has given us so much joy. He has nothing left to prove. His name is already carved with pride. He has broken more records than I can count. I have cheered him home, watched Ruby’s gleaming smile, cried tears of joy.

Perhaps it is too much to ask. Perhaps all I want is for the auld fella to come home safe.

By 3.45pm, the result will be in. I shall either be literally jumping for joy, whilst The Pigeon barks her head off, or the two of us shall be stumping up the beech avenue, coming to terms with a fairy tale that could not quite come true.

Here are some lovely Kauto pictures for you.

On the left, with the great Denman on the right, photographer unknown:

Battling through the mud to beat Imperial Commander by a nose, by the Press Association:

After this year's Betfair Chase, photographer unknown:

Ruby riding with one hand, by the Press Association:

At this year's Betfair, with Long Run trying to get on terms on the right, photographer unknown:

Winning his 2009 King George, by Getty Images:

This year's Betfair. That is an eleven-year-old horse who everyone said had had his day. Watching him leap like that I think: he does not know he is past it:

I love this one, by Edward Whitaker. The lovely fella out in the field, free as a bird:

And by Tom Jenkins, loafing away in his box:

This was one of the Gold Cups, not sure which one; photographer unknown:

Another lovely shot, photographer unknown:

Ruby pats him as they win their fourth King George, photographer unknown:

With his trainer, Paul Nicholls, photographer unknown:

Right. That's enough Kauto madness. Here is a quick avenue, Pigeon and hill:

One of the Dear Readers hoped that The Pigeon would get a really, really big stick for Christmas. SHE DID:

Rather moody hill:

Well, my darlings, let's wish the old horse the best of British luck.

PS. Suddenly realised that, in all the excitement, I have not even mentioned that the lovely Master Minded is also running in this race. He is a two and two and a half mile specialist; we have not seen him stay before. There is so much attention on the Kauto-Long Run clash, that the brilliant Master Minded is almost forgotten, even by me. I am not quite convinced that he is a three miler, but who knows? He could be the one who springs the big surprise. I love him anyway, and I hope he jumps a clear round and goes well.

Bonus post: Christmassy Pigeon

2011-12-25T21:55:00.001Z

You will be glad to hear that a member of my family tied a piece of Christmas ribbon round the Pigeon's neck. She looks so pretty in it that I am considering getting her a ribbon for each day of the week.

I hope you all had a lovely day.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

2011-12-25T12:17:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Happy, happy Christmas to all the dear, Dear Readers. You are all absolutely bloody marvellous and I hope you are having the finest day.

All good Christmas wishes from The Pigeon, The Pig, and me.

Pictures taken this very morning, on our bright Christmas walk:

And now off I go, bearing my bread sauce.

Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T22:10:00.001Z

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

What a day of contrasts. There was black cloud; there was bright sun. Like the weather, I was sad, I was happy; I was grumpy, I was blithe; I was exhausted, I was exhilarated.

I can’t quite work out if this is to do with the year I have had, or just the extremes of the Christmas season, or the very essence of life itself. Possibly all three.

Despite starting off stumping about quite crossly in my gumboots, I did, in the end, manage to do all my tasks. The Co-op was not the zoo I imagined, but quite calm. I got all the ingredients for the bread sauce, and the carrot and neep pureé. Then I went up to the village shop for Madeira for the gravy. In a last minute panic, I got a bottle of Marsala as well. Then I thought: oh, so now there will be a Madeira Marsala stand-off over which goes in the special Christmas gravy. As a good liberal, I solved the problem by using both. Third Way, Schmird Way. It's like breathing in and out for me.

I made the bread sauce the hard way, steeping onion, cloves, bay leaves and peppercorns for six hours. That sauce will have flavour if it is the last thing I do. I made a chicken stock. I did the gravy. I pureed the hell out of those damn carrots. (All these things are, I insist, better on the second day. Also, it means that tomorrow I may have a quiet morning.)

I cooked the ham. Three hours simmering in stock, and then half an hour in the oven with a ginger conserve and mustard glaze. I should say I am not usually this domestic. But oh, oh, oh the goodness. I sometimes forget how sad shop ham is. When you cook your own, it is an entirely different animal. It is not just the flavour, but the texture. Regular readers will know that I am a bit of a texture queen.

But still, there was the wrapping to do. I started to get a bit grumpy at this stage. For some reason, this year, I have chosen amazingly unwieldy objects for my family. Why, I thought, as I surveyed the present table, could I not have chosen small, neat, square objects? The lovely Stepfather’s present was so impossible that I gave up completely and put it in a nice bag with some tissue paper. I do hope he does not mind.

I did the wrapping, as is my tradition, whilst listening to the carol service from King’s. The moment the high pure voice of the lone chorister started singing Once in Royal David’s City, I burst into tears. I don’t know what it was. I thought of my dad taking me to midnight mass at the church in Lambourn when I was six. I don’t know why I remember that night so well, but I do.

So that was it, for the rest of the hour and a half. I wrapped, and listened, and thought about my father, and cried. I sang along to the carols, at the top of my voice. Then I cried a bit more. Once I got used to the idea that it was going to be a weeping hour, I just went with it, and it turned out very cathartic. Tears, I thought, are not always a bad, sad thing. Sometimes they are quite the correct reaction, and a relief for the good body. (Better out than it, as strict ladies used to say in my childhood.)

Then I marched the Pigeon through the gloaming, where we stopped to gaze at the evening star, hanging in a sky the colour of forget-me-nots. I sang a few more hymns, to the hills. I suddenly thought that if anyone saw me, they would think I looked like one of those tremendous lady evangelists, from the 1920s. I was Mrs Melrose Ape, from Vile Bodies. All I needed were a couple of angels called Humility and Divine Discontent. I never sing hymns. But it was the time for Oh Come all Ye Faithful, and that’s all there is to it.

I was due to go up and take the great-nieces and nephew their Christmas books. It was important they got them on Christmas Eve, because one was called The Night Before Christmas. I was so tired I almost chucked, but in the end I took some iron tonic and got in the car.

That was one of the best decisions I ever took. The Smalls were sitting up in their beds, ecstatic with the thought of Father Christmas coming. They loved their books. It is rather amazing to me that modern children are still excited by books. Oh, the hugs I got. I said, as I had two little girls on either side, their arms about my neck: ‘You two are the very spirit of Christmas.’

Then I went downstairs and drank a strong vodka cocktail with their parents, The Landlord and The World Traveller, which was also the very spirit of Christmas. We talked of politics, friendship, state funerals, and family, and had a lovely time. We parted on a note of perfect fondness. I thought, as I drove the mile back home, how very lucky I am in my extended family.

And now, I am back. I have checked on all the gravies, stocks, sauces, and other animals. Everything looks happy. The Pigeon is dozing at my side. Frank Sinatra is singing Merry Christmas as only he can.
I think: it will all be quite all right.

Pictures of the day.

Present wrapping station. Before:

The Banned List, by the tremendous John Rentoul, which I am giving to everyone this year:

He is not my friend, or anything. It's just that when anyone writes a book against jargon and cliché, I want to plug it with all my might.

And present table after:

Yet another fold of eucalyptus, because this year I cannot get enough eucalyptus:

General Christmassy room:

The Pigeon was looking so majestic today that she gets three whole photographs to herself:

And the dear old hill:

Obviously, I shall wish The Dear Readers an official Happy Christmas tomorrow, very much in the manner of our own Dear Queen, but I still say a very,very Happy Christmas now. That goes especially to the readers in Australia and New Zealand, who shall already be up and tearing open their stockings.
May your Christmas be merry and bright.