A vote for love.

This morning, in the dreich and the drizzle of my beloved Scotland, I voted.

I voted No.

No has been caricatured, in the white heat of this frantic race, as a negative. But no can be splendidly positive, a cry from the heart. When Rosa Parks said no to the men who told her to go to the back of the bus, she was striking a blow which echoed down the years. When Nelson Mandela said no to bitterness and division on his long walk to freedom, he was setting a shining example of the human spirit. When the Pankhursts said no to the querulous plea that ladies should keep quiet and know their place, they were inspiring generations of women.

Saying no can be a fine and splendid thing. You can say no to bullying or demonisation or prejudice. You can say no, I shall not be silenced. You can say no to received wisdom or cheap assumptions or category errors. You can say no to confirmation bias or lazy thinking or taking the easy way out. No is one of the great words in the language, two little letters which can mean so much. Give me a lever and I can shift the world – no can be such a lever.

I voted for the Union because I think people are stronger together than apart. I voted for it because I hate waste. Something can be wonderful even if it is imperfect. The answer is to change the imperfections, to work on a better tomorrow, not to throw the whole thing out. Preserving this United Kingdom is not saying it is flawless or spotless or without fault. She is an old lady, this Blighty I love, and like all of us old ladies, she has creaking joints and a bashed heart and moments of grouchiness and grumpiness. She sometimes gets it wrong, but that does not mean that wrongness defines her. She can still brush up and put on her dancing shoes.

I voted for the Union because I remember the fine parts of its history. There are plenty of dark episodes, of imperial adventures and social exclusion and nasty prejudices. But the dark does not cancel the light. The clouds do not mean the sun never shone. Today, I think of the Great Britain which outlawed slavery, and repealed the Corn Laws, and enacted Catholic emancipation, and gave women the vote, and changed the law so that two men or two women who love each other may marry.

I think of the Britain which survived the Blitz and fought them on the beaches and never surrendered. I think of Winston Churchill, who once said: ‘Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts’. I think of him standing like a lion and insisting that ‘we will defend our island nation’. It is this island nation for which I voted.

Much less famously, Churchill also once said: ‘Although an Englishman, it was in Scotland I found the three best things in my life: my wife, my constituency and my regiment.’ He fought bravely with the Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front, and earned the respect of his men by insisting that they had dry socks. I love that story. It goes along with my faith in the small things. It speaks of my belief that love is not in flowery words or romantic gestures, but may be found in the most mundane actions. Dry socks are sometimes better than roses.

I voted no because I love the wideness and openness of Britishness, which stands for me against the narrowness of nationalism. I like that you can be black British, or Jewish British, or Welsh British or Scots British. I like the fact that it encompasses so much, from The Last Night of the Proms to the Edinburgh Festival to the Eisteddfod to the Royal Meeting at Ascot. It is the place of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady and Auld Lang Syne, of Macbeth and Black Beauty and Molesworth. It is the gardens at Kew and the Western Isles, the Peak District and the wild Yorkshire moors, the Cornish coast and the mountains of Snowdonia. It is ‘Very flat, Norfolk,’ and ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, and ‘We few, we happy few’. It is five days of Test cricket and the mighty roar as champions gallop up the Cheltenham hill and the sound of a massed pipe band. It is understatement and rain.

I like what Martin Bell said about Britishness. He said: ‘It's tolerance, decency and determination to talk about the weather on all occasions and a tendency, when a stranger stands on one's foot, to apologise.’

I voted no because my ancestors came from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, and I do not want to have to choose between them. I voted for inclusiveness and old bonds of affection and history and culture. I voted for the poets and the playwrights, the jokes and the stories, the landscape and the sea, the wisdom and the folly.

Most of all, I voted for love.

I love this place. I did not realise quite how much I loved it until I feared it might be gone.

 

Today’s pictures:

I voted in my scruffy doing-the-horse kit, with the muddy earth of Scotland on my boots:

At station three, which will today witness history:

With the lovely Stepfather, who is not covered in mud:

You’ve been WHERE?:

Over there????:

I suppose I had better come and check:

The democratic process, you say?:

And yet even on this glorious day, you still make me work on my canter. I suppose everyday life must go on:

If I were only a bit more flaky than I am, I would believe that she really thought today should be some kind of school holiday. The fate of a nation is at stake, and yet I still insisted that she do her transitions.

I still wrote 2125 words.

I still made soup for lunch.

I still tried to pick the winner of the 4.10 at Ayr.

It is an extraordinary day, but the ordinary still has its place.

All my loves were represented, in that ordinariness – the red mare, the green soup, the fleet racing horses, the English language, the family, the Scottish earth. And in the extraordinary – the cross in the box. And now, there is just waiting, and hope.

The education league tables are out. Everyone panics.

On the radio, a nice, intelligent, articulate man says: ‘I have worked with thirteen ministers of education and none of them has done much good.’ He is not making a party political point. He is making a why the children are not learning point. The international league tables are out and poor old Blighty languishes in the doldrums. The gnashing of teeth can be heard from three fields away.

The shadow education secretary was on the Today programme this morning, and all he could offer was his worry that teachers are not qualified enough. He had no explanation for why all the money and attention spent on education through the Labour years seemed to have so little effect. People got terribly cross with Tony Blair about many things, but I remember my real rage being that the children still could not read. I was one of those who was all fired up about New Labour. I believed Blair when he said education, education, education. I was ready to be delighted, and then the great leap forward never came.

The good news is that the rankings themselves are not completely reliable. Statisticians are casting doubts. Perhaps Britain is not doomed after all. But at the same time, there does not seem to be the shining city on the hill that one hoped might be built, full of bright-eyed pupils in shiny classrooms, their teachers gleaming with enthusiasm and devotion.

All governments of all political kidneys have had a crack at it. Neither the left nor the right has any stranglehold on cleverness or correctness. My excessively unfashionable opinion is that most politicians and ministers are people of goodwill who want the best for the next generation. They study excellent models elsewhere; they get advice from brilliant experts in the field. They do not go into Whitehall in the morning thinking bugger it, who cares whether the children can read?

If it is not as simple as hopeless politicos or failed ideologies, I wonder whether it might be a more profound cultural problem. Britain is sharply contradictory when it comes to education and cleverness. On one hand, it is rightly proud of having Oxford and Cambridge, two of the best universities in the world, setting gold standards since the middle ages. On the other hand, there is little an Ordinary Decent Briton hates more than someone who is too clever for their own good. There are rumblings about elitism, which has become a dirty word; newspapers regularly run pieces about how the country is run by Oxbridge elites, who, apparently by definition, can know nothing of the Real World.

When I was a little girl, I was a swot. Even at the age of nine, I was keenly aware that this would make me hated. I compensated by becoming a jester. If I could make the class laugh, then I would not be persecuted for all that prep I did. On a wider scale, the British have always been intensely suspicious of intellectuals. We are not like France, say the old guard, laughing scornfully. Very few national treasures are beloved for their academic brilliance. I suspect that Britain would much rather win the World Cup than a Nobel Prize in physics. Cleverness generally should be covered up, hedged about with self-deprecation, masked by jokes or eccentricity.

And there is a broader argument still, about different forms of intelligence. Thoughtful people rightly make the point that empathy and emotional intelligence and creativity are as important to the good life as knowing what Einstein said or when the Battle of Hastings was fought. When these annual league tables come out, and hares are set running all over the shop, someone always comes up with the hoary old chestnut about this entrepreneur dropping out of school, or that brilliant musician never passing an exam. And then the whole thing falls into a mess of he said she said and no useful conclusions are drawn.

I am not certain I have any useful conclusions myself. I wish that dear old Britain was not floundering below Liechtenstein and Estonia and Slovenia. I do think there are severe problems in education here, and I believe in education as an article of faith. Yet America, which has more Nobel laureates than the next ten countries put together, is in an even more lowly position, nine full places below us. This makes me wonder whether a single test can really rank entire nations in any satisfactory sense. Perhaps the criteria are too narrow; perhaps the whole idea of grading in such a way is reductive and misleading.

What about the other things which make life worth living, like songs and novels and manners and the countryside and a sense of humour? If there were a league table for bands or comedians, Britain would be surely higher than South Korea, which beats us hollow in maths and science. Even those of us who believe passionately in learning must admit that learning is not the only thing which counts.
On that awful Friday night in Glasgow, ordinary citizens ran into the scene of the helicopter crash, to help their fellow humans without thought for their own safety. A sense of community, which the doomier commentators say is now confined to a mythical golden age, still coheres. People are kind and generous and good in this country. I believe this to be true on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, but there are objective proofs. Britons are the second most generous people in the entire world, with 76% giving money to charity. That good news never made headlines, but it is a keen reminder that competence in maths is not the only mark of a good life or a civilised society.

I do not have a nice, neat final sentence for this. I have no definitive conclusion. I think the children must read. But I also suspect that perhaps the picture is less bleak than it is being painted. I am channelling Dad’s Army, and saying quietly to myself: ‘Don’t panic.’
 
Today’s pictures:

Too gloomy for the camera today. Here are some snaps from the archive:




This one looks as if I have put it into black and white. In fact, those were the actual colours that day:












Can you believe I wrote an entire blog post without mentioning Red the Mare? Goes against all muscle memory. She was glorious this morning, before the rain came, doing her dowager duchess canter up the hill. She was happy too, deep in one of her Zen calm moods, the ones which make me love her more than almost anything else:


 


Although I say Don’t Panic, I am of course in a small panic of my own. The panic is always that when I write a serious piece on a subject such as education, I may include a most uneducated grammatical error or typing mistake. And then people shall laugh and point. I squint at the text, desperately searching for howlers. I know I will have missed one. Ah well, I think – I must publish now and risk it for a biscuit.

Going to extremes.

I try to do work, but my mind keeps going back to Woolwich. It shocks and horrifies in so many ways that the brain feels battered, trying to take it all in. It is, most of all, so un-British. A man ranting on a city street, his hands shining with blood, fanatical hatred in his eyes, his familiar London accent at odds with the extremist platitudes falling from his mouth is not what one expects, in this country.

We are not the nation of warm beer and cricket and maiden ladies cycling to church which John Major once nostalgically conjured up. I’m not sure Britain ever was that, even in the lost age to which Major was clearly harking. Blighty is, however, a battered old warrior, who has been round the block more than once. Extremes have not flourished here, in recent history.

It might have been a wild, untamed place, centuries ago, when the Marcher Lords went untrammelled and kings and their favourites were murdered in unspeakable ways. There were crazed extremes when the country divided into Roundhead and Cavalier. But when Europe was torn with internecine strife in the 19^th century, Britain did not join that particular party. There was no 1815, no 1848; no barricades in the streets of London as there were in Paris or Vienna. (Admittedly, the British did protest for specific reasons: they rioted over the unjust Corn Laws, and marched for the Chartists. But these were movements of quite a different kidney.)

Later, in the twentieth century, when the Fascist and Communist movements roiled Europe and Russia, the equivalents of right and left here petered out into damp squibs. The Blackshirts could gain little purchase. The Communist Party of Great Britain was characterised through much of its history by squabbling and swerves in policy, before it finally disbanded.

In its recent history, Britain really does seem to exemplify the middling sort. In contemporary life, there is absolutely nothing to compare to the God, Gays and Guns wing of the Republican party in America. No member of the House of Lords would ever take to the floor to insist that the world was created six thousand years ago and that this should be taught in schools, as has been expressed by august senators. (This is not swishy one-upmanship; Blighty has other weaknesses to American strengths.)

There is, even now, in the sometimes intemperate age of the internet, a sense of restraint, pragmatism, stoicism. The best way to be beloved in Britain is not to be passionate about any cause (this is considered a little too much and dicing with dullness) but to be ironical and self-deprecating. Humorous self-deprecation may be the defining characteristic of ordinary decent Britons. Even in usual conversation, the centre holds; the Goldilocks principle applies. The classic British rejoinder to the polite question of How are you? is Not too bad, thank you.

So what happened yesterday had layers of ramifications to its shock. It was not just an horrific murder in itself; it was The Extreme, walking and talking on a London street. And then, out on the internet, other extremes began to join in. Send them all home (who? where?); time for Britain to grow a backbone; Enoch Powell was right. This last one made me genuinely puzzled. ‘But,’ I said to my mother, ‘the Tiber is clearly not foaming with blood.’ Some of the comments were so vile I do not have the heart to write them down here.

The English Defence League and their cohorts began to join in. There was a strong flavour of Take Our Country Back. From whom was not explicitly stated; the foreign, the other, the in any way different, I could only assume. The irony was that the killer who spoke to the camera was a Briton, born in Romford, whilst the incredibly brave woman who talked calmly to him, as he held his bloody knife, who tried to distract his attention away from vulnerable mothers and children, was not British at all. Are we supposed to send this extraordinary person back too?

Just as I began to despair, to believe that my reading of the British character was all wrong, that perhaps it was the nuts and lunatics and extremes who now held sway, the gentle voice of reason began to assert. People called for calm, begged not to meet hatred with hatred. One man who lived in the neighbourhood said he was just going to get on with his ordinary life, because that was the British way.

It is hard to remain reasonable in the face of such visceral horror. I suppose it is human, in some ways, to want to find a scapegoat, demonise The Other, identify a neat, convenient group to blame. But extrapolation is a dangerous and misleading game. One Muslim does not mean all Muslims. By this warped logic, one might as well say that since 93% of the prison population is male, all men are criminals.

There is also the almost congenital inability to process risk. When something like this happens, there is always a shout for hard-line tactics, the cry to ramp up the war on the terrorists. But in the cool halls of statistics, where fact lives, you are six times more likely to die in your bath than be killed by a fanatical fundamentalist. (Latest figures: annual deaths in bathtubs – 29; averaged annual deaths over the last ten years by terror attacks – 5. Those numbers are from England and Wales; there do not seem to be national figures.) Are we to insist that everyone take showers? That is before one even goes into the big numbers, the ones that run into annual thousands – road deaths, suicides, poisoning, falls.

I think the thing that makes me saddest is that in amidst all the noise, the central tragedy gets lost. There was a brave man who gave honourable service to his country who is no more. He will have family and friends and comrades who mourn him. The ragged shouting voices do not honour their grief or his passing, but merely try to hijack a human loss for their own, frightened purposes.

 

Just one picture today, of these Scottish hills, which always act as consolation for me when the inexplicable happens:

The Last Day

A really funny thing has happened. Practically every single British columnist is writing the same column. I read Blake Morrison in The Guardian yesterday morning and I had to check the date. I thought: I’ve read this before.

In fact I had not, but it was the same thing Jonathan Freedland wrote a few days ago, expressing the same sentiments that Simon Hoggart did (only without Hoggart’s excellent jokes), saying the same thing that every single pundit has on television and radio. I think I even wrote a version of it myself, somewhere on this blog. The identical sentiments have been everywhere on Twitter. A vast, joyful consensus has broken out, joined with gusto by everyone except for Charles Moore, Richard Littlejohn and one cross fellow on Newsnight.

Here is how it goes:

Everything was clearly going to be a disaster. Waste of public money, Zil lanes, traffic chaos, corporate greed, idiot copyright rules. Strikes! Strikes! Heathrow queues, lost bus drivers, creaking old London, Boris bumbling; oh the shame.

Bugger off Mitt Romney. Hurrah for Danny Boyle. Danny Boyle is a LEGEND. Everyone loves Danny Boyle. Sheep! Industrial Revolution! Isambard Kingdom Brunel! And did those feet, in ancient time?

Dancing nurses, Mary Poppins, the NHS. We love the NHS. Will any of the rest of the world understand? My God, we really did invent the internet. (We did not, of course, Tim Berners-Lee did that, and gave it away, but by this stage a huge national We had taken hold.) This is us, reflected back at ourselves. Suddenly, we really are all in it together. We turn out to be a nation oddly at ease with ourselves. Who knew?

JAMES BOND!! THE QUEEN!!!!!! James Bond and the Queen!!! Bloody hell.

Small reality check. Slow start. Oh, no, Cav. Never mind. Stiff upper lip. But then: THE ROWERS, THE ROWERS. Suddenly the word Eton can be spoken without shame, as the course at Eton Dorney is packed with delirious crowds.

And then the mighty Wiggo, and the shooting, and more rowers, and the three-day-event, and the cyclists, the cyclists. Hoy-tastic.

Super Saturday! Jessica Ennis, go go go. ANDY MURRAY!!! A nation at last takes the young Scot to its heart. First show-jumping gold for sixty years; first dressage gold ever. The smile of Nicola Adams beams round the world. Mo Farah soars to glory; Tom Daley fulfils his youthful promise.

The sceptics are converted and take it all back. We might be grumbly and used to being a bit crap, but, amazingly, it turns out we are quite good at quite a lot of things. Dear old Blighty gathered her dusty old skirts, kicked up her heels, and put on a show. The BBC was magnificent. The sun even shone. The crowds, THE CROWDS; lifting the athletes over the line. But sporting too, not just blind with jingoism.

Everything will go back to normal on Monday, but for two weeks, we caught a dream of glory.

Copyright: Absolutely Everyone.

Of course, it’s not absolutely everyone. In great British tradition, there are the grumblers, as there should be. Matthew Parris told Radio Four this morning that it’s very difficult to be a wet blanket, but that he would continue to be one. And quite right too. There probably will be a bit of a national hangover; there should be questions about all that money spent and what it shall achieve. There are many people out there who have not at all been entranced, who have no interest in sport, who care not a jot for gold medals. Someone must speak for them.

An awful lot of ghastly jargon-words like legacy and inclusivity have been floating about. Despite the warning spoof of Hugh Bonneville in Twenty Twelve, everyone has been talking about Britain ‘delivering’. (I generally think of delivering as something a man on a moped does with a pizza, but that may be just me.) People are bending over backwards to insist that these games will have inspired the young people, will transform school sports, may change Britons’ very idea of themselves.

Some of this might happen. Hurrah if it does. I wonder though if it’s asking too much of a sporting event. The happy columns are lovely; the idea of national possibility is tempting. There is something wonderfully hopeful and profound and significant in the fact that one of our greatest double Olympians came here as a refugee from Somalia. When Mo Farah was asked if he regretted not running under the Somali colours, he looked amazed. ‘This is my country,’ he said; the union flag is his flag.

But really, I wonder if it comes down to something much more plain. Asking too much significance of a festival of physical prowess can cause it to buckle under its own weight.

I think: what really happened is that for two weeks, an awful lot of people were really, really happy. That’s not nothing. For two weeks, instead of the daily diet of civil war and economic decline and Eurocrash, we saw good news. Smiling people who had worked their arses off won things. Underdogs were clasped to the national bosom. Joyful crowds screamed their heads off. Dark horses, literal and metaphorical, sprung surprises. The national anthem was played in celebration, as athletes whose names were previously unknown stood tall, with a tear in their eye.

In my idiotically soppy way, I kept thinking of all those mothers and fathers who must have been so proud. The British medallists, many of whom were very young indeed, were not only really good at what they do, but also unbelievably polite and gracious. I lost count of the times they gave all the credit away – to their coaches, their team, their families, even to the Lottery who paid for them. ‘May I just thank?’ they kept saying. How very well brought up they are, I thought, with my great-aunt hat on.

The joy has not been unconfined; it has not spread to every corner of these islands. But I’m not sure I remember a moment when so much sheer pleasure was given to so many by so few.

It’s nearly the end now. The dear Olympics; I shall miss you when you are gone. I did not expect to get quite so excited, or see so much drama and excellence, or to feel so proud of people I had never even heard of before.

As I write this, the marathon is going on. The streets of London are absolutely packed with a roaring, whistling, whooping sea of spectators. Flags are being waved; all nationalities are being clapped and cheered. The sun is shining. The volunteers, who have been one of the great successes of these games, endlessly smiling and helpful, are lining the route. The noise of jubilee is so mighty that the men calling the race have to raise their voices to be heard.

The BBC commentator has perhaps the best last word. He says, with a smile in his voice: ‘The number one, running its personal best every day, is the great British public.’

 

Today’s pictures:

Red’s view:

Red the Mare:

Pigeon:

The hill:

PS. In all this list of achievement, there are too many names I have not space to mention. If you are anything like me, you may be affronted that your personal favourites were not mentioned. No Brownlee brothers? No Rebecca Addington? No Grainger or King or Ainslie or Campbell or McKeever? And what about the brilliant soldiers, who stepped into the breach when G4S failed, and have been uniformly fabulous? Or the techies and sound people, the camera operators and grips, the builders and architects? There there were so many people involved in these games who deserve credit that one tiny blog cannot contain them all. They need an entire book.

In which I teeter right up to the brink of sentimentality; or, the Olympic horses make me cry

The day ran away with me like a brumby. Family, horses, work, Olympic show-jumping final, and suddenly it is after tea-time and I still have eighty-seven things to do. The problem is that I am rather in bits after watching the medal presentations. I had great hopes for the British team, especially the lovely young Scot, Scott Brash. But despite the most gallant efforts of horses and riders, there was a vital fence down, and they were out of the hunt. That is all it takes at this level: the merest brush of a hoof on a piece of wood.

In the end, though, it all worked out rather well. Britain got the team gold yesterday; it would be bad manners in a host to win every damn thing. Other riders were suddenly in with a chance, and the one who rose to glory, with a foot-perfect double clear, was Steve Guerdat of Switzerland. (That’s revenge for Andy Murray annihilating Roger Federer, wrote one of my tweeters.)

There were two particularly touching things about his joy. The first thing was that, as he rode his lap of honour to the roars of the crowd, he kept pointing down at his bonny horse, the immaculate Nino des Buissonnets. Cheer for him, he seemed to be saying; he’s the one who did it. (Tom Queally always does this when he comes in on Frankel, making sure full credit is given to the equine superstar, although everyone in racing is now so in love with Frankel that the gesture is hardly necessary.)

Then, the cameras followed the smiling Swiss out of the arena. He is a hardened professional of thirty. He has worked and strived and won many competitions at the highest level. But when he slid to the ground, he hurled his arms around his horse’s neck in a wild hug, with as much abandon and gratitude and love as if he were a six-year-old boy. The horse ducked his head, as if in acknowledgement, and the rider hugged him again, holding on for dear life. And that was when I lost all my composure and wondered if I should be able to write this at all.

Horses do just make me cry. I wept like a baby at Ascot, in front of a bunch of happy Australians, when Frankel stormed home in the Queen Anne. I sobbed like a child when Kauto Star won his fifth King George. I still remember the tears coming out at right angles when Desert Orchid fought through the ground and the weather to win his Gold Cup, all those years ago. I sometimes get a little teary when Red is leaning her head on my chest and going to sleep, as I rub her neck and murmur nonsense in her ear, just because of the beauty and the sweetness and the incomprehensible connection across the species divide.

I don’t know why they make me cry so much. I think it is because they have a purity to them. Humans are complex and contradictory and complicated. (Although I admit they make me weep too, but not in quite the same way.) Horses are gloriously simple. If you treat them right, they will do anything for you. They will even try for people who don’t treat them right at all. They will run their hearts out, and jump insane obstacles, and learn new things, and put up with vast amounts of human nonsense.

I was thinking this morning, as I worked with Red, how the wrong words get applied to horses. I’ve written of this before. People say, oh he’s a bit nappy, or rather spooky, or very naughty. I’ve said these things myself. But the more I work in this new partnership, the more I realise that, with a very few exceptions, the horse is almost always doing its best. Naughtiness or nappiness are more usually confusion, because the human is asking a contradictory question, or fear, or an ancient sense memory of pain or ill-treatment or moments of peril. (Horses, like elephants, do not forget.)

I love them because they are so willing, and so honest, and they try so hard. And for some idiot reason, that brings tears to my eyes.

 

Today’s pictures:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare:

Here is someone else who tries hard. In contrast to yesterday’s melancholy display, today she is happy because I THREW THE BALL:

The hill:

Of horses, gold medals and secret projects

It turns out I have a secret project. I love a secret project. Most of these go nowhere, but merely occupy my midnight hours. This one, however, may have legs. It was suggested to me by The Playwright, and since he is the wisest man I know, I usually do exactly what he says. (I always know he is serious when he starts a telephone call with a firm, yet faintly quizzical, ‘Now...’)

Anyway, this morning I just sat down and wrote 1695 words of the secret project, on top of my other work. So I feel rather surprised and industrious.

I watched the dressage in the afternoon as a treat. Everyone rode beautifully and the horses did the impossible things that dressage horses do, and madly, Britain won. Blighty has never won a dressage medal in its life. Roumania and Mexico have more dressage medals than we do, and one does not necessarily think of them as the home of the English style of riding. But suddenly everything shone with perfection and not a hoof was in the wrong place and everyone practically fainted with astonishment and pleasure.

Every time I turn on the wireless now, I hear an excited reporter saying: ‘Britain’s won another gold medal.’ I literally heard that exact sentence on the way up to the mares to do evening stables, and on the way home again. What is rather sweet is that it is not said in any triumphalist way. Britain is used to being a bit crap, her glory days behind her. She watches, like a tired and indulgent old aunt, as the boisterous teenagers, America and China, take over the world. They expect, I suspect, to be world-beaters. It always astonishes me when I hear American politicians or commentators state with certainty that theirs is the greatest nation on earth. I am slightly envious of such self-belief. If asked, most Britons might mutter that their country is ‘all right, I suppose’. It’s the same mindset that replies ‘Not too bad,’ when asked how one is.

So the sports reporters sound not like mighty titans, certain of British glory, but like little boys, absolutely giddy and astounded that these things are happening to battered old us. Even the BBC newsreaders who are on strict instructions from the grave of Lord Reith never to get excited about anything (impartiality at all times) cannot keep an antic delight out of their voices.

I love it. I love that people are getting excited about sports they never heard of until two weeks ago. My mother follows everything, and now is quite knowledgeable about archery and judo. Who knew that Britons were brilliant at the dressage and the pommel horse? Someone on Twitter got very cross when I dared to suggest that the national mood was light, pointing out, quite correctly that there isn’t really any such thing as national mood. But there perhaps are moments of national spirit, when the imagination of the public is caught, and something in the dusty zeitgeist shifts, and I think this might be one of those times.

The mare, catching a whiff of Olympic fever in the air, decided to perform her very own dressage test out in her field. It was sort of polo dressage: tight turns, sudden flat gallop, floating extended trot, stop on a sixpence. She loves doing this when the mood is in her, and it makes me double up with laughter. What always astonishes me is that when the bronco is out of her, she immediately reverts to her dozy donkey state. She turns to me, lowers her head in a little bow, and offers her forehead for scratching. The lower lip wibbles and the eyelashes flutter, and the wild thing becomes a dope, who only wishes for love. It’s very touching. At moments like that, my heart bursts in my chest, and I run out of words for love.

 

Today’s pictures:

Here goes Red the mare, with all her high ancestry thrilling in her:

And then, when she has calmed down and had a nice brush, she looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth:

Myfanwy the Pony, who did excellent work this morning:

This is the face the Pigeon makes when I make her pose for photographs instead of throwing her ball:

Isn’t it pitiful? I think she may be developing into a bit of a drama queen in her old age:

Hill: