The big question I cannot answer; the small things I understand.

A sharp frost, the first of the autumn, was followed by wild sunshine and brilliant blue skies. I rode my mare early and then she and her friend, the little Paint filly, were loaded into the trailer and taken to the vet to have their teeth done. Going to the vet sounds a workaday chore, but here it involves driving up a long slope and looking out over one of the prettiest views for twenty miles. The valley opens like a book and the line of high wooded hills rolls away to the horizon. I always mean to take my camera and I always forget.

The mares were immaculate and the teeth were done and we put them back into their quiet field and then I raced to my desk and wrote 2089 words and did my HorseBack work. I had a heartening message from the wife of one of our veterans and she allowed me to reproduce it on the Facebook page. (For any new readers, HorseBack UK is a charity which uses horses to help veterans with life-changing injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I write their Facebook page for them. It’s the first voluntary job I’ve ever done, and it brings me weekly joy.)

I think quite a lot about the wives and husbands, the children and parents, the ones in the background, quietly getting on with it, bravely facing their new reality. For all that we concentrate on the veterans themselves, it is never just one person who comes back changed from a hot war. The ripples spread outwards, from a dark pool. This morning, it gave me more satisfaction than I can say to give those families a voice.

Across the Atlantic, another horror is spreading, another shooting, another pointless set of deaths. There are new families who will never be the same, who have to look their own hideous reality in the eye and somehow take its measure. I don’t know how they do it; I don’t know how those smashed hearts go on beating.

I don’t write much here about the big world happenings. I used to, in the beginning, because I am interested in geo-politics and the news. I have twenty-seven opinions on every current event. I’m not sure whether it is my age, or whether it is the internet and the rolling twenty-four hour news which never sleeps, the websites, the vocal commentariat, the Twitter feeders, but it appears, to my bashed old mind, that the world is growing more inexplicable and sometimes mad. Children should not be dying weekly in the greatest superpower the world has ever seen. (Forty-five school shootings this year alone. Forty-five. If that had happened in Britain, people would be marching in the streets; teachers would go on strike; politicians would resign; Whitehall would be thronged with protest banners; the BBC would talk of nothing else.) America, it seems, can do everything except stop its own citizens from being gunned down. It is a place which fascinates me. It is a land of great gifts, rich culture, dazzling talents, astonishing achievements, glittering hopes and dreams. It gave us jazz and put a man on the moon. It has more Nobel Prizes than the next ten countries combined. And yet, for all its brilliance, it cannot do this one thing. It cannot keep its people safe.

A huge question like that – why? why? – defeats me. The madness and the pointlessness, the sorrow and the pity, beat me, in the end, which is why the blog turned back to the small, ordinary things. The known things, the consoling things, the things the bruised heart and the battered mind can take in and understand: these are the things of which I write.

So, as this shattering news broke over a wounded people, I gentled my horse, and watched my dog race over the ground softened with dew, and looked at the hills, and did something for the veterans, and wrote a book, and made some strong coffee and clung on, by my fingernails. As life gets bigger, the small things grow more important, in a wry paradox. If I can hold on to the small things, the turning earth shall not tip me off.

 

Today’s pictures:

The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

Quite early, before I was really awake, I heard, for the first time, the voice of the father of one of the murdered children of Newtown.

He did not, as one might expect, speak of rage or blame, not even of disbelief or shock or grief. What he said was that he was remembering what a remarkable human being his daughter was, and how lucky he was to have had her.

I wish I could remember the exact phrasing, it was so beautiful and filled with grace. It was an extraordinary example of courage and heart, to speak not of the black act, but to talk of the light that was his child. I was stunned with admiration. It made me cry.

I don’t generally cry during the news, however bleak it is. I cry for specific, personal things, mostly my own dear departed. Very occasionally, if it is late, and I am overwhelmed, and the world has gone very mad, the sorrow and the pity of it all can bring tears. But mostly I have an armour for the news. So much of it is bad and sad, if one were to cry at every awful story there would be weeping all day long. Yet this brave man shot straight through my daily defences. It was his staunch goodness in the face of horror that was so very moving.

I think a lot about the ordinary griefs. They are what I have experienced in the last eighteen months: the loss of a dear old man, the departure of two aged dogs. These deaths were crashingly sad, and the depth of the sorrow for my eighty-year-old father did shock me, rather. I had thought I was prepared, and I was not. But all the same, they are circle of life griefs. This does not diminish them, but it makes them easier to bear. At the time, I got furious when well-meaning people said things like: well, your father had a good innings. What does that matter, when the beloved gentleman no longer exists, leaving a gaping hole behind him? Yet it does console, in the end, when time comes along and does its thing. The innings counts for something. It is why the death of children is so searingly horrible, because there was no innings.

The griefs that are crashing through a small community in north-east America today are not ordinary. They are what I call the rip-up your life griefs. It is as if some unseen hand has come along and trashed a good, hopeful life as someone would tear up a piece of paper. All the hopes and dreams, the optimistic expectations, the mapped futures, are wiped out, in an instant. There is no future, only a black void.

The thing that astonishes and heartens me about the human spirit is how resilient it is, how it rallies in the face of mighty odds. I do not know how a person rallies from this. I do not know how they put one foot in front of another, get out of bed in the morning, clean their teeth, dress in clothes, eat food. I think of them, as Christmas comes, and do not know how they will go on.

The other thing I do not understand is the numbers. Numbers are being thrown about, just now, in furious incomprehension, in outrage, in sorrow. I once had to look up comparative gun deaths between Britain and America, for an article. They are quite hard to find, and are often old. You will find a number from 2008, and wonder if it still stands. After a lot of research, I found that in one year, murder by gun stood at 69 in Great Britain, and 10,016 in the United States. I could not believe this could be true, the disparity was so crazed. The numbers coming out now are pretty much the same; in the end, my baffled mind must accept that they are true.

There is a much worse number. The total number of gun deaths in America, to include, I can only assume, suicide and accident, is over 30,000. A year. If terrorists killed that number of American citizens, there would be a national emergency, a bombing campaign, probably some kind of invasion, somewhere across the world. Troops would mobilise, emergency legislation would be passed. The newspapers would write of nothing else. The warring tribes would put their differences aside and join in bipartisan determination to do something.

As it is, these 30,000 most un-ordinary griefs will hardly merit a paragraph. 30,000 mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, brothers and sisters will weep in obscurity. That is too much damn grief. America is a great country, with a remarkable citizenry. It is so clever that it wins almost half of the Nobel Prizes in science, medicine and economics. Surely, in those massed ranks of brilliance, there must be someone who can work out how to stop its people dying unnecessary deaths. Surely, someone, somewhere, must say: enough.

 

A world away, in my quiet little corner of Scotland, there was a sharp, glittering minus one. I did the sweet daily task of seeing to the comfort and happiness of my horses. I took the hay, carried the water, mixed the morning feed. I checked their legs and straightened their rugs and gave them love. It is one of the happiest parts of my day. There is something very real and honest about doing physical work out in the air, about attending to another creature’s well-being. My fingers may freeze, and my arms ache from carrying heavy buckets, and I may totter about on the treacherous, icy ground, but I have the lovely satisfaction of setting them all to rights.

The pony was particularly enchanting this morning. We did a little join-up, for fun, and she followed me around the field in figures of eight and I was so delighted with her cleverness that I spent ten minutes just stroking her and rubbing at her sweet spots and telling her, over and over, of her own brilliance. The other two ate their hay, and dozed in the sun, and Stanley the Dog did a few acrobatics around the place and tried to pretend that he was not at all disconcerted by these huge foreign creatures. The girls take him amazingly in their stride, even when he gets a bit freaked out and starts jumping and barking.

‘No, Stanley,’ I say firmly, making him sit and calm down. ‘These are your friends.’ He is not yet quite sure whether to take my word for it or not.

It was quiet and ordinary and good. It is that very ordinariness that I do not take for granted. It is ordinariness, today, that I think of as a very great gift indeed.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are, it turns out, of very small, very ordinary things, which are precious to me:

The frozen floods:

Stanley the Dog, inspecting the frozen floods:

My girls, unfazed:

Look at the little Myfanwy face, peering out from below her manger:

Stanley gets some more pictures, because he was looking so handsome today:

Notice the special new collar. It was sent to me, all the way from Northumberland, by my most wonderful and kind aunt, the sister of my late father, who always makes me think of him.

Hill, taken twice today, once before leaving to do the horses, and once on my return:

Glimpses of light; or, one for the Dog People

Rather madly, I decide to sit up all night and watch the election. I have worked out secretly in my mind that it will be an Obama landslide, and I must see if my psephological chops are still sharp.

Actually, this is mostly sheer wish thinking. And partly predicated on my inability to understand how anyone would vote for a man who once strapped his dog on the roof of his car and drove it to Canada.
I slept badly the night before, and am in the blank exhaustion stage of grief, so at first I do not enjoy it as much as I normally would. I start to get a little testy with Chuck Todd and his implements. Brian Williams cheers me up a bit; there is something about his wry intelligence which makes me feel better about almost everything.

Then, something lovely happens. Obama begins to win. He wins because the Americans, whom doughty Britons occasionally think of as rather antic and flighty where we are prosaic, who do not have our obsession with the Blitz spirit or the insane Dunkirk pride, are queuing round the block. Egregious partisans in some states are performing blatant voter suppression, but the voters will not be suppressed.

All the pundits except for Rachel Maddow have been muttering knowingly about the enthusiasm gap. Obama’s base, apparently, has no taste for the fight any more. The feckless young people will not pitch up; the African Americans are demoralised. It is the tea partiers and small staters and the pro-lifers who have the bit between their teeth. Peggy Noonan even writes a hilariously wrong column about how the President seems joyless, how his campaign is ‘small and sad and lost’.

In the end, the African American voters come out in greater numbers than ever before. Somebody says it is because they are so furious at the attempts to deny them. (Voter suppression gets targeted at non-white neighbourhoods, apparently, although my mind has to stretch and twang to comprehend that someone would do something so wicked.) The Latinos come out, and the Asians. The college-educated women, which is another vital demographic, marches out in droves, dreaming of Nellie Bly and the Pankhursts.

Suddenly, there are pictures of happy, smiling crowds. People are still queuing in some states, even though the result is now certain. Some of them waited for eight hours. I love them. Someone on the BBC jokes: if we had to wait ten minutes to vote, we would turn round and go home and have a nice cup of tea.

My Twitterstream explodes with joy. I send incoherent messages to people I have never met, congratulating them on the sweep of the battleground states. Mitt Romney ran an ugly campaign, and I am really pleased ugliness did not have its day. I imagine Paul Ryan consoling himself with a nice comforting copy of Atlas Shrugged.

At half past four, light-headed with tiredness, I go to bed. I cast a glance at the Pigeon’s bed, beside my desk. In 2008, she and her sister sat up with me all night. I say, out loud, to the empty space: ‘You would have been quite bored’. She liked the racing; not so keen on the politics. No barking and cartoon jumping for Cuyahoga County.

This morning, the air is light and mild, and the sun shines, and I spend two hours with the equines. I work the mare; I have a long conversation with the Horse Talker, which soothes me. I think about the election again; I realise that I am really, really delighted.

The World Traveller comes out and I tell her the result. She had missed the news. She smiles all over her face. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I am so glad.’ I too am glad. The very fact that there can be gladness feels like a bit of a sign. It is the first thing I have been properly glad about since Friday. I tried to watch the racing, but even the sight of the imperious Silviniaco Conti putting down his marker for a glittering future could not lift my heavy heart. Now, for the first time, there is a glimmer of lightness.

That’s the thing I have to look out for, the first gleam of light. I find that I have to concentrate very hard on learning loss, all over again. What do I do? Is it chicken soup or small acts of self-kindness or hot baths? Is it writing it down, giving sorrow words so the burdened heart will not break?

It is, I think most of all, looking for the light. I stare, stare, stare until the first watery ray is glimpsed. Then, I know I shall be able to bash on. It’s quite odd that the election of a man in a faraway country should prove to be that first glimmer. But it felt like a triumph of the better angels.

It’s not that everything shall now magically change, and Congress shall do good work, and perfect policies shall fall into place, and everyone shall have jobs. The political situation is much as it was. But there was something profoundly moving about those hopeful queues of voters; I am glad most of all that their stalwart endurance was rewarded.

My friend the Expatriate calls, from Santa Monica. ‘I think that Barack Obama is a proper person,’ she says. ‘I’ve been watching him and his wife, and I think they actually are really good people.’ I think so too. Good people don’t always make perfect politicians, but it is oddly reassuring sometimes to see that virtue is given its due. Obama could have taken his glittering Harvard degree and made millions in the corporate sector. Instead, he went to work with deprived communities on the south side of Chicago. That is a mark of character.

Plus, he is really nice to his dog.

As my sleep-deprived brain grows more whimsical, and I search hopelessly for my final sentence, I think perhaps that is why I am quite so pleased. It was a triumph for the Dog People. It was one for The Pigeon.
 
Today’s pictures:

Morning light:

















The happy herd:







They really were amazingly contented today. They have settled so well, and relaxed into themselves, and that too is a ray of light:



I imagine if the old girl were still here she would be saying – you didn’t really think they would elect a man called Mittens?:



No, no, not they. They remember Seamus the Dog:



The very thought makes me do my Lady Bracknell face:



Forgive me. No sleep really does make for inexcusable whimsy.

The hill, very blue today:

Consider the birds

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I keep trying to push the BP oil spill from my mind. This week there has been Cumbria, and four young soldiers dead in Afghanistan, shot to death or blown up. There was the madness of the Gaza flotilla and that shooting, and then of course everyone had to pick sides and shout at each other, which seems to me perfectly bonkers because in that particular, intractable Middle East conflict it seems there are wrongs and rights in each camp, and no one comes away without stain.  There was not room in my head for this long, overarching environmental catastrophe, against which the most powerful, most technologically advanced, most rich, most advanced nation in the world can do nothing. It's the country that prides itself on solving problems; it can do. It likes conquering frontiers. The moon? Sure. Quantum physics? Of course. Then everyone gallops off to collect their Nobel Prizes. Now it must stand by, like some wounded titan, helpless, and all people can do is say the President ought to sound crosser.

It turns out I could not not think about it. Two of the bloggers I love to read, The Errant Aesthete and Splenderosa, put up long, thoughtful, furious, moving posts about it, here and here. I read them, nodding my head. I wondered what it was that made this thing impossible to ignore, even in a week when I didn't think I could contemplate yet another horror.

I think it is the birds.

I know that is a nutty thing to say. The big picture is surely the most important: the Western dependence on oil, the carelessness of multi-national corporations, the corruption of regulating agencies in a country that takes pride in its own rectitude, the vulnerability of humans when technology fails. As one livid commenter said, in response to a website showing pictures of gulls glutted with viscous oil: come on, they are only birds, not human beings. In one sense this is right: the cost to communities, the endangering of entire industries such as fishing and tourism, the enduring grief of the families of those who died on the rig, even the crashed pensions of little old ladies who invested in BP shares probably are more important than pelicans. There will be a possibly fatal knock-on effect of the spill: if the wetlands are degraded, their role in containing storm surges decreases, meaning that in the next hurricane season more properties will be damaged, and, conceivably, more people will die. It's not just a dirty sea.

So why should it be that a photograph of a bird drowned in brown filth should evoke such a visceral response in me? It is only a bird; there are plenty more like it, whole flocks of them. I think it may be that when it comes to oil, most people are culpable. However organic we might go, unless we never drive, fly, or use a plastic bag ever, we have all made our pact with the devil. I have absolutely no good idea what we do about that, unless we go back to ponies and traps, but it does mean that even the most concerned citizen will have a little of that oil on her hands.

The birds, on the other hand, really are blameless. They don't ask for anything. In turn, humans are not very nice to avians. They shoot them, put them in cages, herd them into battery farms, hunt them to the brink of extinction, steal their eggs, and trash their native habitats. In return, the birds delight us with their plumage, their crazy mating dances, their warbling song, their astonishing migratory patterns. They give us a living link back to the dawn of time, descended as they are from the dinosaurs.

It's not as simple as saying humans bad, birds good. It's just that when I see those beautiful creatures smothered in crude, so I can get on a ferry to go to a Hebridean island for my summer holiday, I feel a horrible queasiness. I think: they deserve better than this. I think: is it partly my fault?

As I write this, a lone oystercatcher, in from the coast for his summer sojourn, is pecking for worms on the lawn in front of my study window. There are ducks nesting down by the burn. We have a heron, the very occasional fleetingly glimpsed kingfisher, squads of bluetits, a couple of bullfinches, several bright-eyed robins, and a small gang of pied wagtails. There are the swifts and the swallows, of course, and flights of buzzards that sail high over the woods. Along the beech avenue, a clattering of jackdaws gathers each evening at dusk. On sunny afternoons, black-faced gulls trip in from the sea. Somewhere, hidden in the trees, a woodpecker taps out his rattling timpani. If someone came and covered them in oil I don't know what I would do.

I don't know what any of us can do. That's the problem. I was going to write you a short, jaunty, Sunday post today, and instead you get a rather plaintive, inconclusive wail about the birds. So sorry about that. Better tomorrow.

Let's look at them, not suffocated in toxic sludge, but as they should be:




Brown pelican and black-faced gull, photographer unknown.



Mallard, photographer unknown.



Green heron, by Alan Wilson. Don't you love the way he is rather grumpily hunched up, like Winston Churchill on a cold day?



Gull, by Paul Friel.



Pintail, photographer unknown.



Seagull, by Keven Law.

And, finally, a quote from Langston Hughes:

'Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.'