A radical thought.

This morning, in the bath, I had a radical thought. What if I was happy, for my mother’s sake?

Here is the ludicrous thing about death. A person you love dies. You cry a lot. You feel wretched. Your throat aches with unexpressed words, trapped memories, tangled regrets. You wash your hair twice because you have no idea whether you did it the first time. You have a bit of trouble behaving in a rational manner in the Co-op. You have no idea what you are supposed to do next. You go to bed at seven because you are so tired you don’t know what your name is. You keep getting wild flashes of the person, some happy, some sad, all lacerating. You have to tell people, which can go either way. You are out of step with the rest of the world, even though, paradoxically, death is the one certainty which knits all human hearts together. You make stupid amounts of soup, so that your kitchen becomes like some kind of industrial production line. You are a little lost, entirely bashed, and very, very sad.

No person you have ever loved would want you to feel any of those feelings.

I don’t have a heaven or an afterlife, although I am occasionally tempted by reincarnation and I do make jokes about the ghostly sound of my father’s laughter from the Great Betting Shop in the Sky. But if there existed a cloud on which my mother was now sitting, she would not be looking down and shouting, ‘Oh, bloody hell, go on, more weeping.’ I really don’t think that is what she would be saying.

I talk a lot about grief marking the space left behind, honouring the dead, but now I’m not sure. I know it has to be done, and you have to get the damn thing out or it will twist itself up and trap you into fatal tendencies like not eating or not sleeping or shouting at random people.

But what is it for?

Not the dead person, who wants only your well-being. I adore my nieces. If I said one word which caused them dismay, let alone pain, I would castigate myself for days. If, when I died, they felt horrid grief and if I had any consciousness left to see that horrid grief, I would be furious with myself. (Perhaps no cloud must be a good thing then, so the poor Dear Departeds, many of whom were rather jolly themselves and loved a party, don’t have to look down and see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

None of it makes any sense. Humans – poets and novelists and playwrights and philosophers and shrinks – try to make sense of it because it so universally is. Even the most devout, who really do believe in choirs of angels and a Better Place, cry like anything when the beloveds go.

If I were the dead, I should be so cross. Have a lovely time, I should be bawling, from my wobbly cloud; have some gin, ride a horse, have a huge punt on the 3.30 at Fakenham; go dancing with your best friend; walk in the rain; read some Scott Fitzgerald; eat a peach. Make more soup if you must, I would be yelling, but perhaps some without tears in it.

So, here is my radical thought. Today, I’m going to be happy for my mum.

It won’t work all day, because I’m not buggery Superwoman, but I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to dig out the little happy moments like a truffle hound. Instead of looking at Stanley and thinking, miserably, Oh, you loved her so much, I shall think of how happy his eager face is and how he is living entirely in the moment. It is a very good moment, because some of the rats have come back to the feed shed, so he is once more in his Steve McQueen Great Escape incarnation, and nothing makes him happier than tunnelling under the feed shed.

He did lay by her side every morning for the last few weeks, as if he knew she was failing, but that does not have to be a sad thing but a happy thing, a really wonderful thing which should make me smile with delight at his fine, devoted, doggy heart.

I’m going to ride my horse for her, because she was proud of what I did with that mare. I’m not going to look at the new mare as I did last night and say Oh, how I wish she had met you. I’m going to laugh like a drain at the thought that although my mother adored thoroughbreds, she did not in fact want me to get another one. (‘What is this Scout?’ Said in a Lady Bracknell voice.) She really longed for me to buy a little Welsh pony for the great-nephews and great-nieces. ‘A little Section A. Just imagine.’

I’m going to write the most absurd gratitude list in the world. (In this spirit, I felt grateful this morning as I came down from my bedroom, because there were actual stairs, to get me from one floor to the other. There are people who don’t have stairs.) For one day, I’m going to peer through the literal and metaphorical dreich and see the damn beauty. I’m going to do it for Mum.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one. This is the one I’m carrying in my head. My mother liked small, elegant, polite dogs. She had unbelievably chic whippets when I was a child, as dapper and dashing as old school Russian aristocrats. Stanley is the most muttish of lurchers – to go with his greyhound half there is anything from Staffie to Lab to Boxer to Australian Cattle Dog. He is antic, unpredictable and very busy. He likes leaping about. He can open every single door on the compound. (He once opened my car door when it was locked, and also amuses himself by turning on the hazard lights and switching on Radio Four when he is bored.) You would think my mother would be horrified. But they fell in love with each other on sight, and nothing after that could come between them.

That is a happy thought. This is a happy dog.

All about Red.

This is an indulgent Red the Mare post, so those of you who are not interested in the horsing, look away now.

We’ve been working on straightness lately. The mare has a tendency to drift, and I suddenly realised that I had spent so much time concentrating on the groundwork, I had rather taken the riding side of things for granted. So I went back to basics, to teach her to go on a true line at a steady pace on a loose rein.

This morning, we had moments of absolute triumph – trotting for a full quarter mile without reins, the pace controlled with voice and seat. (I must admit there were moments when I was madly waving my arms in the air, I was so exhilarated. Some walkers who came round the corner looked slightly surprised.) And there were moments when she tested me – leaning all over the shop and deciding it was time to go back to the home paddock, so I had to grow stern and determined. She even got a little excited and put her sprinting shoes on for a quarter furlong, which she has not done for months. She is getting fitter and it’s starting to show.

So, there were ups, and there were downs, and after one of the downs, as I stiffened my sinews and gave myself a good talking to, and kept on, because one must always find the good note to end on, she suddenly went forward into the most glorious, relaxed, cowboy lope, and she softened, and we were all at once in a rolling, singing harmony. We went in long, wide circles, out in the open green spaces, the reins loose, keeping a beautiful steady pace. Everything fell into place. This was once a racehorse, I thought, and now look.

Then, I let her go, pointed her up a gentle slope, and gave her her head. And there it was, our first absolutely straight fast canter, with not a hint of drift or lean or jink.

We’ve done fast canters before, but they always ended with what I think of as a polo swerve, and I’d let it get a bit too swervy and out of hand. This was a different order of things altogether.

It had taken an hour of solid work. I had followed the brilliant method of an Australian horseman I admire called Warwick Schiller, and I could not believe the transformative effect. His idea is that you do not correct them when they drift off a true line, but simply turn them in the opposite direction. (We were describing wide arcs all over the place, drawing circles on the green grass.) Then, the idea goes, the moment they are moving straight, you leave them alone. I love this technique. It is so much calmer and more graceful than endless correction. Turn, turn, turn; and then – bang – there is the lovely true line. When it comes, it feels as if everything in the world has grown light and possible. There is a feeling of such effortlessness, and a communion, between human and horse, which is impossible to describe.

Although there were moments this morning when I grew frustrated, and had to control that frustration – she is just being a horse, and it is my job to teach and guide, with patience and calm – I looked back and was glad it was not foot-perfect. When she gives me little tests, it makes me better. She is, as ever, my best professor. She reminded me that I had made assumptions, taken things for granted, skipped a step. She took me back to Square One, which is an important place with horses. She keeps me humble, and brings me joy, and you can’t say that about too many people.

When it was over, and I got off and walked her home, the two of us swinging along together in perfect unison, at one with each other and the world, I thought that I can never pay her the debt I owe. She got extra love and food, of course. She got the good apple chaff and the fine new hay. But what she gives me is beyond any price. She makes me feel as if I can fly.

 

Sadly there was no photographer on hand to capture the Glorious Moment, as we were out on our own, but here is a picture of her from a few days ago, doing some impressive ground-tethering and showing off the full duchessy profile. That stretch is where we did the reinless trotting.

Work, horse, love.

The kind of slang I use tends to be very, very old school. It is more likely to be drawn from Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford and PG Wodehouse than the current demotic. But today I would like to say that I absolutely SMASHED my work.

It’s the approach to my second deadline, which is a renegotiated first-and-half draft date. In the end, it was decided that it would be just too scary for the poor agent to read the full mess and muddle which was the raw first draft. But she would like to see something before Christmas, which does not give time for a full second draft, but does allow for a tidied up, nicely trimmed and frankly less alarming version.

The push for this is not as manic as getting the thing written in the first place. There is some sturdy earth on which to plant my stuttering feet. The story exists; the chapters are there. There is, after a fashion, a beginning, middle and end.

All the same, it requires a lot of concentration and effort.

So there may not be much room for blog, as I charge into the final furlong.

Red the Mare very kindly put her shoulder to the wheel and did her bit for my mental health. This morning she gave me a ride of such loveliness that I whooped out loud on three separate occasions and fell on her neck with fervent congratulation and love twice. The Remarkable Trainer, who was on the American Paint filly, discreetly averted her eyes and did not say anything. Really professional horsewomen tend not to whoop and hug. The best horsemen and women, I have noticed, don’t use their voices much at all. Horses are visual creatures, rather than verbal ones. (This is because they came out of the woods very early in their evolution, and their defining characteristics were mapped out on the plains.) 

But I can’t help it.

The red mare makes me so happy and so proud that I can’t contain myself. This is slightly nuts for a middle-aged female who has been round the block, but there we are. When I ask myself what AP would do, I know the answer would be: not this. He might allow himself a small smile; he would give the horse a restrained pat on the shoulder. I holler and throw my arms in the air and hurl myself bodily up her dear neck. As I do so, I can just about see the corner of her face. It seems to be wearing a quizzical smile, as if to say: just let the old girl get it out of her system. She is not only a very clever and beautiful and talented equine, but remarkably forgiving as well.

Usually, when I ride her, my cares all soar away in that very moment. Once I am off her back, I return at once to the normal work frenzy of tension and push. The medicine only obtains when I am with the good doctor. But on this bright, mild Monday, it lasted all day. The shoulders did not go back up; the sense of frazzle and fret did not return. I did my work, acres and acres of it, and it came easily, and I was not lashing myself but enjoying the process. I kept stopping and smiling, as the memory of the beautiful contained trot and the gentle rolling canter flashed into my mind. That damn mare is a miracle horse and I don’t care who knows it.

 

No time for pictures today, just a couple of Herself with her most demure, I am doing my good work face on. Remarkable Trainer up:

Oh, and actually one more which I can’t resist. One of the things I love about keeping the mare out is that she can be her own, horsey self. She can get as muddy and scruffy and filthy as she wishes. Today, she took this remit to its full limit. I love this picture not because she looks beautiful. She looks like an old donkey. I love it because she is a horse at ease with herself:

Feels like flying.

JUMPING.

Jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

Actually, I tell a lie.

We were not jumping.

We were FLYING.

You’ve seen these pictures before, but there was no photographer on hand this morning, and they are the only ones which come near to expressing the joy.

Initially, I did not intend to do any crazed leaping. It’s my first proper day back riding after falling off The Other Mare. I was very, very sore; at one point I became convinced I had actually broken my tailbone. Sensibly, I thought I’d get back into the swing with a bit of gentle walking. On top of which, Red was a bit spooky and resistant when I got on, staring at ghosts and throwing her head about.

I don’t get involved when she does things like this, which she doesn’t very often. I just change the subject. Let’s go this way, I suggest, politely. Let’s do some figures of eight and some transitions and some fiendishly twisty little circles. At which point she stops being a drama queen and gets her mind back on the job.

(Incidentally, ‘change the subject’ is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given about riding.)

And then, I don’t know why, I just thought bugger sense. And off we went. Zoom, zoom; whoop, whoop. She loves it so much it makes me laugh. She pricks her ears and picks up her delicate feet and leaps over our tiny, home-made obstacles as if she were at Hickstead. She’s got a hell of a jump; I can almost physically feel the air whooshing underneath us.

I just concentrate on staying with her and keeping her straight; I let her find her own stride, which she does, impeccably, every time. I think she really is a natural. She was wasted on the flat; they should have sent her over hurdles and she would have been a champion.

As we canter out into the wild grass, with me standing up in the saddle, leaning forward over her neck as if I am riding cross country against the clock, it never occurs to me that this great, powerful thoroughbred does not even have a bit in her mouth. She’s excited, but steady under me, all her early skittishness gone. For precious moments, it’s just me and my horse, in glorious, rhythmic harmony; there is only this great, rushing feeling, of joy and union.

The Horse Talker witnesses the last two great leaps. She says the nicest thing anyone could have said. She looks at Red, and looks at me, and says: ‘You look so....’ She pauses, thinks. ‘Together,’ she says at last. ‘As one.’

And afterwards, as I put the happy mare back in her field, and she heads straight for the shelter where the other girls have gone to gossip in her absence, no doubt to tell them of her great adventure, the HT adds: ‘You really trust that horse, don’t you?’

I smile. It’s the truest of the true things.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I damn well do.’

No saddle, no bridle, no stereotypes.

Yesterday, I was thinking about position. Position is very important. It’s easy for me to get complacent because I sat on a pony practically before I could stand; of course I know about damn position. But the riding really was thirty years ago, and my poor old body almost certainly has no muscle memory left in it. Let alone much muscle. So, just now, I’m all about re-learning position.

I made the fatal mistake of getting on the interweb and typing in ‘perfect position’. Ha, ha, ha, HA, went the internet gods. We laugh at your puny plan. There were all the Brilliant People, with their perfectly schooled horses, and a position that would make angels weep. It certainly made me weep. I contemplated taking up something to do with sheep.

Then, today, the Remarkable Trainer arrived. She is very young and entirely fearless and throws out challenges like confetti. (She was the one who decided rigging up a makeshift arch with a shower curtain hanging from it was a good desensitising tool, and laughed her head off when I rode my thoroughbred mare straight under it. The curtain, I should tell you, was flapping at the time.)

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Position.’

I thought she was going to get me in the saddle and talk about my seat bones and squint at my back and reposition my knees.

‘I think bareback,’ she said.

So we put a pad on Red the Mare, in order that I did not slip about on her shiny back, and tied the ends of the long line to her rope halter and I scrambled on, with a lot of oofing noises (Red did not move a hair) and suddenly I was riding bareback. A little turn, some figures of eight, a lovely low trot. Bareback, which I have not done since I was about ten years old, is buckets of fun. You can feel the horse under you and you don’t have to furrow your brow and think about that damn position, because your body falls naturally into place.

‘Do a canter,’ the Remarkable Trainer suddenly shouted, filled with merriment.

‘What the fuck?’ I yelled in my head.

Out loud, I said, in a slightly wavery voice, ‘Oh, you think?’

Problem is, my dander is very light-sensitive. All it takes is one joking suggestion, and the dander is up, and who cares if I am forty-six and have no muscle memory?

I took the mare down to the bottom of the field. I breathed deeply, into my diaphragm. ‘We’re going faster, we’re going faster,’ I told her, almost singing. ‘If I bloody fall off,’ I said, ‘everyone will howl with laughter.’ Red twitched her ears at me, as if to say: the old girl is rabbiting on again.

Long walk, nice trot. The wide, Scottish field spread open before us. Lots of tempting grass under those thoroughbred feet, to remind her of her racing days, of her polo days, when she was ridden at speed in a double bridle with a martingale complicated enough to please the most dedicated Miss Whiplash. I looked down at the rope halter. I felt her good, wide back under my legs. Bugger it, I thought.

‘Canter on,’ I said.

And there, in the old set-aside, under the dancing northern sun, my ex-flat thoroughbred mare, with her chestnut coat and her three white socks, with every stereotype in the world flung at her beautiful head, rocked into the most enchanting, rolling, collected canter.

I whooped as if I were a fourteen-year-old at a One Direction concert.

Then we did it again, because we could.

I sat down into her and forgot that there was no saddle and there was no bridle and that I am creaky as hell and that the Brilliant People with their Perfect Position would be roaring with derisive merriment if they could see us now. I didn’t care about anything. It felt like we were flying. Bareback, yelled the voices in my head, suddenly delirious with joy; bugger everyone.

(Sorry. I get very sweary in moments of high emotion.)

I slid off and did a little hopping sort of jig, I was so happy. The Remarkable Trainer laughed a lot. ‘I’m so proud of her,’ I said, kissing the mare all over her dear face. She nodded her head, and wibbled her lower lip, and did her donkey ears, and came as close as an equine ever can to a smile.

I do think she was pretty proud of herself. She doesn’t give a hoot about being on the YouTube, or winning gold cups, or learning to do a flying change. But she does know when she’s done something very clever, and she does know when she has made me dance with joy, and she gets this happy, secret look on her face, as if to say: yes, yes, see what I did. If I were only slightly more flaky than I actually am, I would suspect that she likes exploding stereotypes just as much as I do.

 

Today’s pictures:

The brilliant girl, at rest:

Goofy this is bloody good grass face:

Sheer beauty:

(There may be pictures of the Great Bareback Moment later. The Remarkable Trainer took some.)

Meanwhile, Stanley the Dog is also in full fig:

And more Sheer Beauty:

The hill:

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.