Mostly pictures

1024 hard-written words today. Sometimes, when I am really motoring, I can do five hundred in an hour. Some days, I have to pull each phrase out of my head with tweezers.

The Younger Brother calls from Bali, where he lives. ‘We must pat each other on the back,’ he cries, for no special reason. ‘We must cheer everyone on.’ (This is the kind of thing he suddenly says, overcome with his own exuberance.)

He is so filled with optimistic certainty that I can practically see the pom-poms. I was feeling a bit grouchy; the weather had turned dour again, I have a dull head cold, the words were hard. Now, thanks to the unfeasibly happy voice of the Balinese Brother, I feel my spirits lift. I contemplate the miracles of the Skype.

Through my work storm, news from the outside world filters in. The economy seems to be recovering. Dear old Blighty is growing again. Ordinary Decent Britons know better to throw their hats in the air over one set of figures, but I can’t help but feel a small green shoot of hope. It’s so long since we had any good economic news.

A Republican politician has said something unspeakable about rape. This appears to be a pathological daily occurrence, so I’m not sure it counts as news. It never ceases to amaze me, though.

Donald Trump has done something idiotic and self-promoting, which is also too usual to be worthy of print. What should be news but is lost below the fold, because the papers are still obsessed with the Jimmy Savile scandal and bashing the BBC, is that two soldiers were shot to death in Afghanistan.

That’s the one that always stops me in my tracks. I don’t know what to say about that. It’s where words fail; even the language of Shakespeare and Milton is not good enough.

Here, in the far north, the trees are turning and the weather is coming in over the hills. There will be snow tomorrow. I feel the faintest flutter of apprehension at the arrival of the serious winter chill. It is time, I think, for stew.

 

Today’s pictures:

Autumn colours on the hills:

And in the garden:

The herd:

The impossible dignity of Miss Pidge:

The hill:

A day of two halves; or, the perspective police read me my rights

The morning started badly. It was an ugly, brown day, everything dour and muddy and blank. The mare seemed in a fairly decent mood, but once I was up on her she decided to be mulish and difficult, spooking and mucking about. Even though I know well that horses are horses, they are not naughty or wicked but just doing their horsey thing, even though I know that the faults come from me, I felt furious and frustrated and took it all horribly personally. We had a disastrous ride, redeemed only by the fact that I bashed on and bashed on, until there was the glimmer of hope.

I felt my confidence falter, and had to concentrate incredibly hard to bring it back. My last act was to walk Red past the spot where the ragged spook happened, with no reins, with my arms in the air to convince myself that all would be well. Finally, she relaxed and went forward sweetly, so we could end on the good note. You must always end on a good note.

I know that we have not been together long, and that I am asking her to embrace an entirely new life, radically different from the one she was used to. She is so good and offers me so much joy. But on days when everything goes wrong, it is easy to forget all that. I have to dig deep into my reserves, and sometimes they feel a bit sketchy. This is character building, I say to myself. Nothing worth doing in life is ever easy.

In the same way, sometimes when I write, everything falls apart. I can hardly remember how to construct a sentence, all the adjectives are the wrong ones, my rhythm falters, just as it did in the field today, and my prose falls dead and leaden onto the page.

I get the exact same feeling of humiliation and failure. The danger is that then the extrapolation express takes over, roaring down the track like a freight train out of control. It’s not just one bad ride, or one rotten writing day, it’s that I am clearly pointless and feckless and useless. There is no health in me and I might as well give it all up and breed goats. (I’m not sure why it is always goats, but that seems to be my default failure option.)

Then I pulled myself together and went up to HorseBack, for my weekly visit. I am doing quite a lot of work for them just now, in a proper and meaningful way. (Sometimes I feel I just go up there and meet remarkable people and charming horses and hear fascinating stories and the benefit is all on my side.) As always, apart from the fact that it always soothes me because everyone is so funny and nice, I get the excellent corrective of talking to actual humans who have actually been blown up.

In the American elections at the moment, thoughtful commentators like Rachel Maddow are complaining that the war in Afghanistan hardly gets mentioned, as if the eleven-year-old conflict does not exist, as if both the populace and the politicians would almost like to forget about it. It strikes me that many people incline not to mention the war, as if they were in an old episode of Fawlty Towers; they especially do not want to see the consequences. Soldiers coming home without legs is just too difficult to contemplate.

This is understandable. It is common instinct to shy away from the more inexplicable, gnarly aspects of life. Let us paint over the cracks and carry on. I like HorseBack not just because of the brilliant work it does, but because it allows me to face reality. There is the authenticity; this is the thing that has in fact happened. I may not put my dizzy head in any convenient sand. It is salutary, and a keen privilege. It brings me perspective, and reminds me of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

So, as I get back to my desk and return to work, I think, of my frustrating start to the day: it was just one bad ride. Everything is not crashed and broken and sullied. It really does not have to mean I am a hopeless person who should not be let out in public. I can butch up and take it on the chin.

Tomorrow, I shall ride better. Who knows? I might even write a dazzling sentence. But even if I do not, it shall not be the end of the world.

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack, junior division:

No courses today, so just gentle work with the horses:

Yawning competition:

Love:

Coming in from the field:

The lovely equines:

The dreich, looking south:

At home in the garden, some autumn colour and a brief glimmer of light:

My herd:

Yeah, yeah. That butter would not melt in your mouth look is not fooling anyone.

THE GOOD NEWS is that The Pigeon has bounced back from her operation like a Trojan. A polyp an inch big was removed from her ear, she had a general anaesthetic, and she is running about like a puppy. There is still a biopsy to come, but I am hopeful. She is so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed:

Oh, that beauty.

No hill today; hidden in the cloud.

Why I love the internet

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Andrew Marr is very, very cross. It is the bloggers who are making him so grumpy. Apparently, the blogosphere is trashing every last thing he holds dear.

Here is what he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival:

'Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.'

This is interesting for about five different reasons. I think the most interesting is that it shows that Marr only reads a very particular kind of blog. There are some angry writers out there, and some of them are angry for very good reasons, several of them in the great tradition of the angry, crusading journalists of old Fleet Street, with the same kind of fury at the madness and sadness of the world. But there are many, many bloggers who, rather amazingly in These Troubled Times, seem not angry at all.

I read a lot of blogs. My Google Reader is like a jostling corridor filled with crowds of people from all ages, places, walks of life. I read political blogs, and scientific blogs, and celebrity blogs. I read style blogs and interior design blogs and food blogs. I read those blogs which are snapshots of lives, with no theme or axe to grind. People write about their babies, their dogs, their houses, their best beloveds, their passions, their frustrations, their operations, their midnight fears. Perhaps this is somewhat self-selecting, but the common thread which seems to pull almost all of them together is: a deep sense of the humane. Sometimes people do get crazy furious, and sometimes who can blame them, but much more often they are overwhelmingly funny and kind.

Apart from the good hearts that beat out there on the highways of the blogosphere, what I love the most is that a blog will often take me to places I have never been. Today, I was directed, by the blog Sociological Images, to a ravishing and surprising photo essay on Afghanistan.

(You can see the full set here.)

I was fascinated by these pictures, and wanted to know where they had been taken. It turned out that the photographer, Benjamin Rasmussen, had gone right up to the north east of the country, to a place called the Wakhan Corridor.

I had never even heard of the Wakhan Corridor. Now, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I know that it is a thin strip of land artificially created by the Russian and British Empires at the height of the Great Game. Marco Polo rode through it on his silk route. It is home to the Wakhi people and a small population of Kyrgyz nomads.  They are great riders, and play a fierce game called Buzkashi, which is like a kind of polo, only played with a dead goat. They tend sheep, goats, yaks and Bactrian camels and take their tea salty. Snow leopards are very occasionally sighted. Literacy is confined to about ten percent of the population, although the Aga Khan is putting money into educational schemes. There are no shops, apparently, although every photograph I have seen of the people of the Wakhan show them wearing rather splendid clothes. (Some are obviously made by hand, but some are not; where do they go for their jackets, I wonder.)

None of this would have been known to me were it not for one of those blogs that Mr Marr despises so.

Here are a few sociological images of my own. The Dee Valley is not quite the Wakhan, nor are the Grampians the Pamirs, but we have our own loveliness.

There are the sheep:

 

The coos:

The ducks:

The dogs, of course:

The apples on my little apple trees:

The twisted old tree trunk, as beautiful as a sculpture:

And all manner of things in the shade of green:

See, Mr Andrew Marr? Before you go painting with your very broad brush, you might like to know that we are not all enraged, actually.

PS.  If you are interested, I found more riveting information on the Wakhan Corridor here.

PPS. I have been dilatory about replying to comments in the last few days. You have left me many lovely ones, and I thank you for them.

Read of the day

This is slightly demoralising, but awfully true:
http://www.theagitator.com/2009/12/02/in-which-the-terrorists-win/
The most shocking number: the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in shame and disarray after ten years. America and her allies have been there for eight.

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