Random Friday

Here is a random Friday for you:

1. I’ve been a bit tense and unsettled this week, not sleeping that well, and not getting things done in the way I would like. I thought it was the weather, perhaps. Sometimes I just have a bit of a scratchy week. It’s just a thing, not a three act opera. But last night, I discovered what it was. I have been missing my dad.

The missing comes and goes. Sometimes I remember him with smiles and ease; I laugh when I think of him. Some days I accept quite naturally that he is not here any more. That is life, that is how it goes. And then, usually out of the blue, there are moments of absolutely streaming fury and grief, a feeling of utter unnaturalness, as if the fact that he died ripped some ghastly tear in the space time continuum and spun the universe off its axis.

The violence of this feeling takes me by surprise. It comes up right from the gut. It is elemental and overwhelming. The only thing to do is to let it have its course. I shout and cry a bit, and then it’s all out, and I can move on.

Today, after the swamping tears, I feel lighter and more human. I move through the drear weather with a feeling of being present in the world.

The missing is strange because sometimes I don’t know I am doing it. I suppose one misses the dear departed always, really. The trick is to fold the lack into one’s daily life, to find a good place for it. Because I like reasons for things, and places for things, I think I should almost schedule a moment of missing into each week, so that it does not build up and whack me round the head. There should be a moment at four in the afternoon when I stop the clocks.

This is absurd, of course. There is no order to it. He was a lovely, flawed, funny, brave man, and he lit up every room he entered, and a light has gone out. Of course I miss him. He was my dad.

2. The thing, conversely, that is making me laugh the most this week is that the Etonians have gone viral. Some funny schoolboys have made a video in the Gangnam manner (I am far too great-auntish to know what this is), taking the piss out of themselves. The Lovely Stepfather is sometimes concerned about toff-bashing; I think he finds it rude and intellectually lazy. I could tell him this morning that the toffs were fighting back, through the medium of dance. He looked slightly surprised.

Over at The Guardian, one writer was very snarky about the whole thing. In the comments though, the paper’s Dear Readers were rather staunch, pointing out that it was a cheap shot to bitch up young schoolboys, however rich their parents might be.

Go and look for Eton Style on the You Tube. It’s a perfect diversion for a rainy Friday.

3. The Health Secretary surprised me this morning. In the 8.10 interview on the Today programme, he was asked about his personal belief that abortion should be outlawed at twelve weeks. This is not government policy, and he voted for it on a free vote, but still, that really is something the people have a right to know about. He was asked, most politely, three times, to cite the ‘evidence’ that he said his decision was based upon. He would not answer the question. He said that talking about this would only get him into trouble.

People who know Jeremy Hunt say he is a nice man. He does not have a good public image though. Quite apart from questions of humanity and morality and honesty, surely sheer strategy would tell him that dodging such a question would not endear him further to the population.

I’ve banged on about this before, but I genuinely don’t understand why politicians can’t see that not answering the question makes them look absurd and shifty and rather ill-mannered. Michael Heseltine used to deal with it brilliantly. He would roar with laughter and say: ‘John, you can’t possibly expect me to answer that.’ Quite often, he would say why. He was honest and humorous about his refusal to answer, and the interviewer would move on to more fertile pastures. Now, the operatives revert to po-faced talking points, as if the audience will be too stupid to notice. It is patronising and wrong and I wish they would stop doing it. If only so that I don’t have to shout at the wireless each morning: ‘ANSWER THE SODDING QUESTION.’

3. I’d slightly forgotten my technique, on awful weather days, of looking very closely at the small things of beauty, so as not to be overwhelmed by the dirty brown hideousness of the day. Even Scotland, with her vivid colours and her mountains and forests, cannot look lovely with the weather this stinking. The country looks drowned and defeated. But I managed to find some lovely lichen and some fallen leaves and a bit of moss to get my aesthetic hit. You shall see in the photographs. It brings me back to the little things, which are of paramount importance, especially if the big picture is murky, literally or metaphorically.

4. I think, about once every hour, of Frankel. I think of his brilliance, his grace, his power, his intelligence, his beauty. I think of all the hearts he has lifted. I think of Sir Henry Cecil, who says the horse is his inspiration.

I think: I hope it is not raining at Ascot.

5. Interestingly, despite all the pundits and prognosticators calling the American election as tight as a drum, with Mitt Romney moving ahead in some polls and the slow economy still a drag on the President, William Hill has Mr Obama at five to two on. In racing terms, this is a prohibitive odds-on favourite. Mitt Romney is two to one against. I wonder: does Mr William Hill know something that Mark Halperin and Joe Scarborough do not? (I’m still quite cross with those fellows for being smug and patronising about the whole binders of women thing.)

6. As I write this, I gaze out of the window. The sky is the colour of old washing and the trees are gloomy shadows and everything is wet. I think it is time for chicken soup. This may be the only answer. Also: chocolate. I hate saying that because it’s a lady-cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason, and that reason is that they are often true.

Chocolate it is.

 

Today’s pictures:

Red’s View, drowned in the rain. There should be a whole mountain there. WHERE IS THE MOUNTAIN???:

Moody trees:

But then I saw the silver birch wood was actually looking ravishing, so I took about twenty pictures of it, to cheer me up:

Back at home, there was the old iron fence and the fallen leaves:

The canopy of limes:

One leaf:

Rickety shed:

MOSS!!! I love MOSS:

Leaves and lichen. All the Ls:

The herd was in a surprisingly happy mood, considering. Autumn the Filly:

Myfanwy the Pony:

That nose wrinkle is because she is doing her little whicker of hello. Kills me every time.

Red the Mare:

The good companions:

If we just close our eyes will the weather go away?:

Regal Pigeon:

No hill today. Lost in cloud.

Happy Friday.

A ray of light?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I call my mother. She is very worried by the political situation. We discuss the precarious state of poor old Blighty's Triple A rating and the terrifying level of the national debt and how much blood and treasure the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost. She is also worried about the looming council cuts.

'The old people,' she says mournfully. She has always fretted about the old people, even before she was one.

'And they are threatening to close the libraries,' I shout. I have always fretted about the public libraries, our great unsung national treasures.

Even I, a lifelong Labour voter, have to admit that a change of government may be the only answer.

'Oh,' she says. 'But I would not want to be poor David Cameron.' Because the new crop of politicians are so young, and she has reached a venerable age, she always talks of them with maternal concern, as if worried that they are not getting enough iron in their diet, or they might forget to wear a vest in the cold weather.

'Well,' I say, 'everyone says he is at his best in a crisis.'

'Ah,' she says, brightening. 'Of course. They always say: in a crisis, call for an old Etonian.'

'Mum,' I say. 'Who says that? No one I know says that.'

'The war,' she says staunchly. 'Won on the playing fields of Eton.'

'That was the battle of Waterloo,' I say. 'And it was really quite a long time ago.'

'Oh,' she says. 'Yes.' She starts to laugh, helplessly. 'Oh well,' she says.  'Never mind.'

Afterwards I think: maybe she has a tiny point. It's fashionable to write off Etonians as effete toffs, running around in those penguin suits with their top hats and their privilege. What can they know of the good ordinary hard-working Britons? The lesser-known fact is that this tiny elite school produced thirty-seven gallant recipients of the Victoria Cross. Almost two thousand of its alumni died in the two great wars. (Over ten thousand fought.) The much-admired Colonel H Jones, who fell at Goose Green, went to Eton. It also gave us William Gladstone, George Orwell, Robert Byron, Humphrey Lyttleton and Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International. (Benenson was an extraordinary man, who should be better known. When he was only sixteen, he set up a fund for the orphans of the Spanish Civil War. He went on to serve at Bletchley Park during the second war, breaking German cyphers; founded JUSTICE in the fifties, an organisation for human rights and law reform; and finally, with several others, started Amnesty.)

I don't know how much difference it makes, where you went to school. I usually think the Eton debate is a silly diversion, a shorthand for lazy inverted snobbery and the putting of people into reductive little boxes. I have an old-fashioned liberal belief in taking a person on their merits, not their accent. But wouldn't it be lovely if my old mum was right? Because if ever there was a crisis, we are slap bang in the middle of it, and someone must be called for.

Photographs of the day:

Etonians, by Henri Cartier-Bresson:

A lone Etonian, watched by local boys at the 1937 Eton-Harrow cricket match, by Jimmy Sime: