The very big world, and the smallest of small things.

Sometimes, I go out of the house in a hurry, and leave my iTunes playlist playing. At the moment, I am writing to a collection of wonderfully obvious classical favourites which I compiled: Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Bach.

I did it today. I came back just now after a lunchtime ride to find Clair de Lune filling the house.

Oddly, even though it was a ride of triumph, and the mare excelled herself, and we even went over our very first jump together, so that I fell on her neck and cried out with pride and happiness, I was thinking of Syria, on the way home. That was what I woke to this morning, as the Today programme brought the news, so dark that they had to issue a warning before they broadcast it. I wanted to turn away but I forced myself to listen.

Syria is intractable because it is a fight of irrational hatred, generational prejudice, old tribal rivalries. It is as if a craze for blood-letting long staunched has suddenly been turned loose. No well-meaning liberal intervention could have any effect, except to make the things worse. There is nothing so reassuring and simple as a black hat and a white hat. It is all bleak and black, and it will get blacker.

I was thinking about how one squares the circle of the big world and the small world. In my small world, small things are delightful and meaningful and important. The older I get, the smaller the important things become. The sight of a swallow, the farmer this morning going out to bottle-feed one of his lambs in the south pasture, the cry of the oyster catchers, the wild leap of excitement in my mare as she realised she had actually jumped a jump. These mean less than nothing in the face of the news on the radio, and yet, I feel more and more, they are what really matter.

I always think of the thoughts on the death bed, and what one will be pleased one did. Will the haters and the fighters really congratulate themselves, as they rattle their last breaths, on letting the other side have it? Will they think: thank God I razed that village to the ground? Or will they remember with gratitude the moments of love, the smiles on adored faces, the family successes, the small acts of kindness?

I get a little confused sometimes between the very big and the very small, because of all the paradoxes that dance between them. Sometimes, when faced with the immense, I think my own tiny life has no meaning at all. It is the old cry of the bleeding heart Left: how can you laugh when the world is so oppressed? And yet, I cling to all those small things, because they are the tiny, unsung bricks of which a good life is built. We can’t all save the world or influence foreign policy or invent things. But I suppose we all can plant a tree, and love well, and be kind. We can all listen to Chopin, and pause for a moment in a busy day, to contemplate unsullied beauty. That cannot be nothing.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack UK morning:

Home:

The girls, after all their hard work, waiting for tea:

The wistful waiting for tea faces never fail to make me smile:

And suddenly The Duchess remembers that she is, in fact, a thoroughbred, despite the fact she has just been jumping round a field in only a rope halter:

Adorable little Myfanwy face:

They are now politely resigned to the fact that I may be some time:

My lovely, lovely, brilliant girl:

And Stanley the Dog still has a bloody great stick, which is the main thing:

The hill:

In which I regain perspective

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

So sorry about yesterday. I mislaid it. Occasionally I lose entire days; it’s as if they have fallen down the back of the sofa.

Time no longer has its usual temporal aspect but seems composed of a series of inexplicable jerks. I start a sentence at five past ten, and half an hour later is it time for tea. I squint out of the window, where the sky is an uninformative dirty white, looking for a tear in the space-time continuum.

I am also afflicted by alternating moments of forgetfulness and whimsy. I think longingly of my university days, when I had to write so many essays and read so many primary sources that my brain was as fit as a butcher’s dog. Now it creaks and groans under sustained effort, like an ancient schooner in a high sea.

The mare though, was an absolute angel this morning. Yesterday, she was not in the mood at all, rolling her eyes at me in schoolgirl defiance. Today, she was like one of those videos that people put on the internet to show natural horsemanship at its crest and peak. It was as if she took a course in the night, secretly. She did not crowd me, locked on to my shoulder like a dream, stopped when I said stop, stood for ten minutes when told to stand as I wandered off to test her. Sometimes, when she does things this well, it makes me laugh out loud.

Then I come back to the book and all is adrenaline and jangle.

Why are books sometimes so hard? Well, it’s mostly redundancy. I might spend a couple of weeks researching an aspect of the subject. I make notes, I think about it, eventually I write it. Then I get to the Dead Darlings stage, and it must be murdered. It might be buggery bollocks, or it might be perfectly fine, but events have overtaken it. I have another, better section on a similar theme, or something has happened out in the world which makes it seem dated, or there just isn’t room. I’ve already done about 20,000 words too many, and I’m still going.

I have to have a tiny wail at this stage of the process, mostly because I need to explain why the current state of blogging is so shockingly poor. And, because I am prone to occasional wailing generally.

But the perspective police are on the march. I listen to the news from Syria, the only thing dark and dramatic enough to burst my current news bubble. I think: there are children being slaughtered in the streets. By contrast, I am having am mild mental wrangle. The only thing I have at risk is my amour-propre: I may write a not good enough book and critics will call it by its name. That is the worst that may happen. It is not life and death. It is not being shot to death in the street by militia goons. So, I step back from complaint and remember my great good fortune and regain the perspective.

On a basic human level, there is one thing I really do not understand. Assad once seemed like a fairly ordinary man. He was an ophthalmologist from the Edgware Road, for God’s sake. Now he is acting like the most unrestrained and barbarous dictator. What he is doing to his people is monstrous. I hate the lazy, melodramatic use of the word evil,  but it fits here: what he is doing is evil. 

What I don’t get is how it can be worth it. How can you steep yourself so far in blood, kill women and children in the streets, murder or lock up any opposition, lose a any sense of morality or remorse, just for an empty title and a limousine? Sure, you are president, but of a small country with high unemployment, diminishing oil, and hopelessly corrupt public services. You are internationally reviled and ostracised. Is the lure of such tarnished power really worth all that killing? I genuinely do not understand the psychology. The cost is so disproportionate to the reward. I mean, he does not look like a homicidal maniac, so presumably he must be calculating some kind of cost and reward; he is not foaming at the mouth mad. That is what I do not get. It seems that Assad has sold his soul for a mess of pottage, and his poor country is paying the brutal, unimaginable price.

 

Pictures of the day. It seems a bit odd to have flowers after that last thought, but I suppose they know nothing of dictatorships; they just grow in the good earth:

 

The rain has come back, as you can see, and the Pigeon is adorably wet:

Red, in close-up:

Where the hill should be:

Well, this is embarrassing

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The blizzards have set in again. The latest one arrived when I was in the shop, buying flour and mackerel (how very Scottish I sound), which was a bit of a problem since my windscreen wipers are on the blink. I had to clear the windscreen with kitchen roll and then drive home very slowly with my head out of the window.

I made my mother and the HS soda bread and smoked mackerel paté, contemplated the making of Florentines, decided it was a bridge too far, and settled instead at my desk, where all I can see from my window is a miasma of white.

It is snowing in Syria, I thought. I heard that on the news this week. I was amazed. Syria. Surely they do not have snow there. It felt like a portent of some terrible shift in the global weather, as if black is white and up is down. Then I suddenly realised I knew absolutely nothing about Syria. This is when the surly dog of shame came up and nipped me on the ankle.

I am supposed to be educated. I crave facts. I read a lot. I like to think I am a bit of a citizen of the world. How can I know nothing about Syria?

I bashed my brain about a bit, to see if something would fall out. I had a picture of figs and orange groves and olive trees. I realised, oddly, that if I met someone and they said they were from Syria, I would be delighted. But why? It made me think of the assumptions that we all hold. I have been thinking of assumptions a lot lately, there is almost nothing that interests me more. I think about where they come from and how they get soldered in stone without us even realising it.

For whatever mysterious reason, my assumptions about Syria are that it is a sophisticated place. Wonderful food, I thought; a great culinary tradition. Muslim, but not Islamist. There must have been some Ottoman Empire, somewhere along the line. (At this point, Mr Woodhouse, my utterly coruscating old history teacher, would be weeping into his tea.) Is Claudia Roden from Syria, I wondered. Or is that Lebanon? I wondered if Syria and Lebanon get confused and conflated with each other quite a lot, and, if so, how that must piss them off. It would be like people thinking that Scotland and England are the same just because they share a border.

I have a picture of it, from where I have no idea. It is of a place with a thick yellow light, and a sense of near history, where people gather outside in the evenings and eat sweet things made with honey and pistachio nuts.

I went to the Google, where I discovered that I am a complete idiot. Claudia Roden is Egyptian. Not even close. She did write a famous book about Middle Eastern food, which must be what made me think of her, but even so. At least I was right about the Ottoman Empire, but it's paltry consolation.  I know that one cannot know everything, but sometimes when I am faced by the vast spaces of my ignorance, I despair. I resolve to learn a little bit about a faraway country of which I know nothing every day. I am going to start my own Open University, with just me and the miracle of the internet.

I go first to the CIA Factbook, which I always find riveting. It is so dry that I sometimes think they are being ironic. 'Slightly larger than North Dakota,' it says, laconically, of Syria. Well, that puts those piddling little countries in their place. (Britain, by the way, is reported as 'slightly smaller than Oregon'.) Although the climate is considered 'mostly desert', apparently there is 'periodic snow in Damascus'. Its natural resources are: petroleum, phosphates, chrome and manganese ores, asphalt, iron ore, rock salt, marble, and gypsum. I have no idea what gypsum is, but I love lists like this; they sound like poetry.

Its population is mostly Arab, with some Armenians and Kurds, and the preponderant religion is Sunni Muslim, with minorities of Christians, Druze, and Jews.

Moving right along, I discover that Damascus is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world. I had no idea. I find this blazingly interesting. It was conquered by Alexander the Great, the Romans (of course), the Muslim general Kalid ibn al-Walid, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Turk Ahmad ibn Tulun, the Qarmatians, the Ikhshidids, the Fatimids, the Seljuk Turks, the Mongols (led by Ghengis Khan's grandson), and the Ottomans, which is another symphonic list. After the First World War, it was handed over, under the shameful Sykes-Picot Agreement, to the French.

Oddly, I did know a little about Sykes-Picot. Rory Stewart did a brilliant documentary for the BBC a while ago about T.E. Lawrence, and he vividly told the story of how France and Britain and Russia were secretly carving up the Middle East between them, in direct contradiction to the promises of Arab independence which Lawrence had given. Lawrence was wracked with guilt and shame, feeling he had urged the Arabs to fight under false pretences. At the Paris Peace Conference, two years later, he toured the salons and tea rooms and corridors, desperately pressing his case to any powerful statesman he could find.

At the time, he said, of Prince Faisal: 'The Emir is speaking for the horsemen who carried the Arab flag across the desert from the Holy city of Mecca to the Holy city of Jerusalem and to Damascus beyond. He is speaking for the thousands who died in that long struggle. He is the bearer of their last words. He cannot alter them. I cannot soften them.'

For all my visions of a golden place with the scent of oranges in the air, Syria has a tortured post-war history, of military coups and geographical disputes, most famously over the Golan Heights. There are also acute political tensions with the Americans, who accuse Syria of sending weapons to Hezbollah. Yet the Lonely Planet Guide says: 'Syrians are among the most friendly and hospitable people in the world, and most visitors to their country end up developing a lifelong infatuation with its gentle charms'.

And while my fantasy of the evening promenade might be not entirely accurate, apparently café life is a big thing in the cities, where people drink the strong Arabic coffee and play chess. And there is a great culinary tradition.

Well, the curtain of my ignorance has been twitched a little, at least. Tomorrow, I may well do the Stans.

 

Pictures of the day are of the new snow.

The view to the south, as the gloaming sets in:

Two views of my dear little garden gate:

The pines, the pines (so good I named them twice):

The shed, looking rather resigned to the weather:

The garden:

The fallen trees:

More southern view:

This is not an especially good picture, but I wanted you to see the moon rising behind the skeletons of the rowan trees:

The lovely flash of colour from the beech leaves:

The Duchess refused to stand still for her photo call, so she is slightly blurry, but I could not resist this. She has on what my friend M calls her Elvis face:

(Interestingly, the Duchess of Devonshire, whom I am convinced this dog thinks she is, is absolutely enraptured by Elvis. Oh dear: WHIMSY ALERT.)

The Pigeon, who actually sits down when she sees me wielding the camera, is perfectly ready for her close-up:

The pot table in winter:

The hill: