Sunday. Sunshine, food, family, and a little Cheltenham recap.

After all that, it was rather a lovely Sunday.

There was walking, with dogs and children, in suddenly clement weather. There was a great deal of cooking. (I made the special little risotto cakes coated with polenta and fried in olive oil, which go down very well with the small people.) I did my HorseBack work, which soothed my frayed nerves.

I missed my mare so badly in the late morning it was like a blow at my heart. It is idiotic to miss a horse, really. At one point I thought: I don’t know how horse people ever go on holiday, ever.

Meanwhile, she herself is lounging about in her field, immaculately looked after by The Horse Talker, supplied with the highest quality Scottish hay that money can buy, probably hardly even knowing I am not there.

But I miss her lovely scent, I miss her dear face, I miss the heavy still feeling I get when she rests her head on my shoulder and goes to sleep. I miss working with her and being amazed when she does something brilliantly clever. I miss leaning over the fence and discussing with the HT every jot and tittle and detail of our small herd. (We are absurdly partisan, and very much like revisiting the subject of how perfect they are in every particular: manners, cleverness, funniness, kindness, outrageous beauty.)

The youngest cousins have just heard Five Years by David Bowie for the very first time. A seminal moment obviously for their mother and me, for whom it was the soundtrack of our formative years. They did a little dance and seemed to like it very much.

I am going to make some prawn and noodle soup with coriander and mint and chillies and drink some Guinness in honour of St Patrick (any excuse) and try not to panic at the thought of being away from my desk, with its hilltops of work waiting for me.
 
A few quick pictures from the archive:

The girlfriends, hanging out, having a bit of a chat:



The sweet face of Red the Mare:



The morning Here You Are faces that I miss:



Mr Stanley is apparently being wonderfully good and sweet, and is having a lovely time with his most excellent dog-sitter, and is visiting The Mother and the dear Stepfather and spreading joy in that house:



Must admit, I do miss that gaze, too:



And the lovely old hill:



But I do get the Smallest Cousin showing me her tremendous dance moves:



And I had the keen pleasure of Cheltenham with the Older Brother:









And the mornings I spent absurdly photographing my racing outfits for the approval of my Facebook posse still make me smile:



Out there in the internets, there are a lot of people asking: what is your favourite Festival moment? Too many to choose, is probably my answer.

The Hurricane flying high again, Sprinter Sacre laughing at them all in the sun, the brave little Bobs Worth sticking his head out all the way to the finish: all go into my Hall of Fame.
But perhaps, if I really had to choose, it was the mighty mare Quevega, who clipped heels round the back, and practically fell on her lovely nose, and still picked herself up, and even when all was lost, and she was ten or twelve lengths off the pace, switched her unstoppable engine into turbo, and roared past the field, storming up the hill into her rightful place in history.

I won’t forget that in a hurry. It’s the mares, again. Never, ever bet against the good heart of a brave mare, and she is one of the bravest I ever saw.

Why Zebras Are Cool.

The thing about the blog that takes the time, I realise, is mostly the pictures. I have to go out with the camera and find the beauty, and shoot the beauty, and sometimes get down on my stomach to stalk the beauty.

Then I have to get back in and edit the pictures and choose the good ones and sometimes even give them captions. I have to think carefully what order they should arrive in. I have to discard ruthlessly the ones which do not come up to scratch.

All this is rather ironic since it is the prose which is supposed to be the point of me. I’m a very amateur person with a pretty ordinary camera, and absurdly self-indulgent with all the pictures of the herd and Stanley the Dog.

The prose itself does take some time, especially if my mind is blank or tired or stretched like a guitar string. Although I can type at ninety words a minute when I’m really cooking, so there can be some speed about the thing. The time is mostly the second draft, where I check for the most egregious errors and fiercely cut whole paragraphs. (‘Throat-clearing,’ I hear my friend The Man of Letters say.)

Anyway, my new idea whilst I am away is to give you the odd bulletin, perhaps sometimes even only five lines, and then one picture, and that’s it. That way, I can have a holiday and still keep up with the Dear Readers.

There are some rather stern blogs with no visuals at all. I would have to be very convinced of my own brilliance with the language of Shakespeare and Milton to do that. One, which is properly successful, not only does unadorned prose, but badly formatted prose, with the paragraphs carelessly laid out and the lines far too close together, so the poor eye has nowhere to breathe. The entire thing is one long wail, without so much as a nice animal snapshot to brighten and lighten it. And yet, it races away with vast readership numbers and national syndication, whilst I grind my teeth in impotent incomprehension.

But that is quite another story. The enemy of happiness is comparison.

My point is, that I could just try a few five minute bursts, and see what happens. It also might be good for my winding habits of prolixity. And, you probably really do not need eight horse pictures a day.

This morning, I had a good conversation with the Smallest Cousin. She is five.

This is how it went:

SC: ‘You know the museums? They’re really interesting. The London one, that’s the interesting one.’

TK: ‘What’s in the London one?’

SC: ‘Lots of crocodiles and dinosaurs and a robot T-Rex.’

A pause, whilst she contemplates.

SC: ‘And there’s triceratops.’

TK: ‘I don’t even know what triceratops is.’

SC: ‘It’s a dinosaur, silly.’

Withering look of scorn. Then she continues.

SC: ‘And there’s fish that I’ve never seen. You know in the deepest part of the sea, there are these fish that have lights on them, so you can see where they are. Nobody normally goes there. Except people who really want to.’

Another pause. This time for dramatic effect.

SC: ‘I don’t want to. BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE SHARKS LIVE.’

Later, as I am writing this, she wanders over.

‘Are you doing the Blob?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ I say typing like a maniac.

‘You really can write quite fast,’ she says, more in assessment than admiration.

Then, in a masterly non-sequitur: ‘Zebras are quite nice and cool.’

I say, genuinely interested: ‘Why do you think they’re cool?’

She gives me a Do you know Nothing look.

She says, patiently, as if she really should not have to explain: ‘Because they are black and white.’

This is what she looked like whilst we were having this conversation:

I’m not even going to tell you the story behind the tiara.

Life in the South. Or, slightly on holiday.

My friend The Horticulturalist arrives. We catch up.

‘How is your blog?’ she says, politely. (I think it amazing of her to ask. Most real world people really don’t.)

‘Well,’ I say, ‘the awful thing is that I have not written it for two days because I was, you know, doing actual life.’

This is the thing that always startles me. I can do the blog and do the Facebook and twitter the tweets, because I resolutely refuse to have any social life in Scotland at all. I occasionally go up for cocktails with The World Traveller, and have been known to accept gratefully a Peroni beer after an afternoon’s work at HorseBack. About twice a year, I put on a frock and go to the Sister’s house for some celebratory occasion, but that really is it. I do all my socialising in my hectic visits south, and then return to my northern fastness and sit very, very still.

Also, I do not do the whole husband and children thing.

Thus, there is space for the blog. What astonishes me is that there are those of you out there who do have the families, and do have the social life, and still find time to write amusing online things and put up lovely pictures and generally illustrate your lives. I have no idea how you do it.

Admittedly, I was tired from the road. Someone over on Twitter told me to Buck Up since it was only five hundred miles and she did that with just one lav stop. More steely stamina than I, is all I can say. I used to do the thing in one go, and now I take it in two easy stages, and I still find my eyes a bit starey and boiled after squinting at the M6 for four hours at a stretch.  

Also, it was one of those weekends where there are many old friends with whom to catch up, and not a moment to be wasted. We have to talk very fast and almost make lists, to fit everything in.

But still, poor effort really. So sorry about that.

This is officially a holiday. Often when I am down here with the cousins, I am still working, carrying my laptop on my back as if I were a snail. This time, I have not had a break since June, so apart from my HorseBack work, I am taking the time off. The blog will be shorter than usual and there may be days missing. You can imagine me doing some lounging. And possibly some drinking. And even a nice little old lady rest in the afternoon. (The Beloved Cousin has the most comfortable beds in England.)

Also, I have to study and re-study the form for Cheltenham. So forgive me if the nature of this thing is a little spotty for the next two weeks.

In the meantime, here are some quick pictures for you:

Southern dogs. I love them. They are very like my old girls:

Apparently, these people have been doing a great deal of outrageous Spanish Riding School of Vienna dancing and prancing since I have been gone, although of course here they have their butter would not melt, dozy donkey faces on:

And this fella is being both good and helpful, and sounds as if he is being outrageously spoilt:

A very shaggy dog story

Quite often, when I am in this cousin visit, I sit down, far too late, to write the blog and say something like: ah well, the day got away from me like a wild horse. Usually this is just because I am not accustomed to the sinews of family life. I always forget what acres of time I have at home. I expand my activities to fill the hours available, which is possibly why I know quite so much about American politics, but there really are hours.

That is why I am always in awe and wonder of those of you who do the parenting.

Today, though, apart from making a chicken risotto, I did not have that much domestic or child life. The hours ran away for quite other reasons. I was concerned with two things which will have serious consequences for my actual life, and how it goes on from here.

I got one done in the morning, and it is not yet resolved. In some ways, it does not matter so much. I am adapting. I discover that, as I get older, I am not calcified into hard habit, as rumour suggests, but oddly flexible. So, one thing did not work out quite as I had planned; there shall be an alternative, there may be a swerve in direction. Perhaps it is because I am still in the early days of life without the Pigeon. Losing a Beloved can make one realise that other frets are small things indeed.

The second, which has been going on for a while, and needed a final bit of logistic, and then some patient waiting for the result, was to do with the Rescue Gent.

I really, really was not going to tell you about this. I did not want to tempt fate; I did not want to have to go into explanations should the thing fail; I did not even especially want my family to know, and have their expectations raised. But the hope grew so great in me that it kept leaking out about the edges. I could not help mentioning it here. I sent a hinting email to The Mother. The World Traveller got a telephone message, and sent one back, transports in her voice.

Part of my pathetic attempts at discretion were, I am slightly ashamed to admit, to do with a completely irrational idea about my two old girls. There was a part of me which felt as if I was committing some kind of betrayal. I know this is absurd, and empirically incorrect, but there we are; it turns out that despite my rationalist self, I cannot help a little magical thinking creeping in around the edges.

Many people, Dear Readers included, say, when an adored dog dies, that you must get another. I was convinced that was a load of buggery bollocks. There must be a pause, a grave mourning period, a time of proper and right grief. Hats must be doffed; respect must be paid. But late at night, when I was feeling particularly melancholy, I could not help wandering around the internet, looking at other dogs.

I kept coming back to the Gentleman. There are literally thousands of dogs out there which need a home. There are pleading beauties everywhere you look. But his face was the one that drew me back, time and time again. And in a particularly odd confluence of synchronicity, it turned out that his foster humans and I had a family connection, through my dear departed dad. It seemed like a sign, even though I’m never quite sure I believe in signs.

So, the application was made. Then I convinced myself that I would not be deemed suitable. I am slightly used to not being suitable, on account of not always following the path most travelled. Besides, writing gets you used to rejection. The pitch is not quite the right one, the profile is not what the publishers are looking for, the market is crying out for anything except for one. I drew on old resources and steeled myself for failure.

The vet was asked for a reference. God knows what he will say, I thought. Last time he saw me, I was sobbing in his office; face scarlet with emotion, eyes pigged with grief.

Finally, all the due diligence was done. I had sent off the last requested piece of information. I sat down and tried to think of something else. Every time my email pinged, I rushed to the computer. I never realised how much absurd email I got (missives from The Racing Post reminding me about the Ten to Follow competition, Google alerts about Kauto Star, kind offers from John Lewis for 20% off for Christmas) until I was waiting for the ONE VITAL MESSAGE.

In the end, it was a telephone call.

It was YES.

I’m afraid to say I put the telephone down and burst into tears. I like to think I believe in stoicism and putting a good face on things, but sometimes that does fail. Just then, it failed. Luckily, the Beloved Cousin and the visiting Old Friend have no fear of strong emotion. They flung their arms out in celebration. I shall always remember the moment I was told that the Rescue Gentleman should be mine, because those two great women were here to celebrate it with me.

One more absurdity, if you will kindly bear with me. (I am used to being slightly absurd, but sometimes I do feel the levels are getting near the Move to the Exit zone.) Everyone here, as you know, gets a blog name. Even the animals get blog names. It’s a nutty privacy thing. But for some reason, I am going to call the Rescue Gent by his real name. It’s such a great name, and I want you to know it.

He is a small lurcher, and his name is Stanley. My dream is that, at some stage, I shall get a friend for him, and the friend shall be christened Dr Livingstone. I cannot tell you how much pleasure this thought brings me.

So, my darlings, welcome a new addition to the blog. Say hello to Stanley the Lurcher, and the start of a whole new life.

 

No time or energy for many pictures today; just past and present and future Beloveds:

My darling Duchess and Pigeon:

Myfanwy the Pony, and Red the Mare, waiting patiently for me in Scotland, reported to have been on immaculate behaviour in my absence:

Oh, that furry face, with its slightly questing look. Luckily she adores dogs, so she shall be pleased about the New Addition.

And here he is, our lovely fellow, to be with us very, very soon:

Stanley the Lurcher. You do see.

PS. I am so tired my eyes are actually blurred, so I cannot begin to do a proof-read, or an edit. There are almost certainly terrible blunders and typos and nonsenses. Please forgive.

The sweetness of family life

I know I may appear slightly obsessed with the doings of the young cousins, but when one does not have daily dealings with children, it is impossible not to find their young minds absolutely fascinating.

The ten-year-old took part in a swimming tournament today, and BEAT THE BOYS. Of course the old feminist in me found this marvellously bracing, but the family partisan was even more thrilled. At that age, the boys really do have the physical edge, but my little mermaid knows nothing of that. She just dives in and goes like an arrow, leaving everyone floundering in her wake. It is quite a remarkable thing. She does not even do the helicopter parent after-school training; she just has the natural athleticism and the determined will to win.

I said to her tonight, at tea: ‘Watching you swim is like watching Kauto Star at Cheltenham.’

Her mother took a deep intake of breath. She looked at her exhausted daughter.

‘Coming from Tania,’ she said, ‘that really is a compliment.’

Meanwhile, the four-year-old, who is so sophisticated that I keep thinking she must be five, has a mania for cleaning. ‘Anything I can wash?’ she cries.

We give her pots and pans. She takes up her place at the sink, and gets out the Fairy Liquid. ‘Rinse it, sparkle it,’ she sings, tunefully.

She is very busy. She turns to me. ‘When Daddy gets back, ‘she says, seriously, ‘everything will be so SPARKLING.’

I go with it. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He will think that the Sparkle Fairy has been in the night.’

The four-year-old cousin beams with delight. ‘But it won’t be the SPARKLE FAIRY,’ she cries. ‘It will be ME.’

It’s been a very tiring day. I had admin, logistics, serious life conversations, swerves in direction. I am still waiting on news of my potential rescue gentleman. I had a sudden, swamping moment of missing my Pigeon so much I could not see straight. But quite frankly, when my small relation talks of the Sparkle Fairies, I think everything must be all right.

There is another old friend here, and quite soon, the three middle-aged ladies are going to sit down and watch an episode of The Killing, and drink some of the good claret. We are a perfect cliché, really. We used to go out and party all night. Now we are all about sparkle fairies and Danish television. For everything, there is a season.

 

Today’s pictures:

So sorry, no energy left for a good selection, but just a short blast from the archives. These are of my beloved girls, two not with us any more, two very much extant.

Duchess and Pigeon, ravishing in the snow:

Myfanwy and Red, at ease:

Another lost day; or, not necessarily what I was going to talk about

My two smallest cousins appear to be singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. They are prone to bursting into song at the slightest pretext. I discover that I like this very much in children. It makes me think, in an idiot sentimental way, of the moment in The Sound of Music when Christopher Plummer looks at Julie Andrews, and says something like: Fraulein, you have brought music back into my house.

The Smallest Cousin finishes singing and comes and gazes at me, quizzically.

‘Are you doing your blobby blob?’ she says.

She laughs immoderately. She is four years old. She clearly thinks that doing The Blob, as the children call it, is a fairly absurd activity, and she might be right.

‘Who are you sending it to?’ she says.

I explain about the Dear Readers, all around the world. I feel stupidly proud, as I tell this small person that I have readers in America and Sri Lanka and Australia and New Zealand and parts of Africa.

‘Have you been to Africa and Australia?’ she says.

‘I’ve been to the very northern bit of Africa,’ I say. (Egypt; one of the greatest trips I ever took.)

‘Do you go on a plane to Africa?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘You could go on a boat, but it would take a very long time.’

She thinks for a bit.

‘I’m not sure they have very much stuff,’ she says. ‘I’d have to take some stuff for them.’

She pauses. ‘There are not a lot of rich people in Africa,’ she says. ‘But there are some.’ Another pause. ‘Maybe one or two.’

She raises her eyebrows. ‘Or four rich people?’ she asks.

This is because of school. They do charity drives; the children fill shoe boxes and send them off. I think how funny it is, that the children of Africa still live so large in the minds of children in Britain. Forty years ago, when I was small, I was told that I must eat up all my supper because there were people in Africa who had nothing to eat.

It’s a lovely thing, in some ways; it makes you appreciate your great good fortune. It leads people like the remarkable Martha Payne to raise money for Mary’s Meals. But I remember being struck by a piece on the Today Programme a couple of weeks ago about Sierra Leone. It is most famous here for the civil war which split the country; now its economic growth is at mighty percentages which any European country would dream of. Not all the children of Africa, it seems, are going to bed hungry. One should not, I remember thinking, write off a whole continent, in a simplistic, patronising manner.

I lost another day today. There was so much to do, and so many things to think of, and so many deadlines to meet. I had logistics a go-go, and some possibly life-changing emails to send. The rescue gent comes closer. There are just some things I must show and tell; mostly that I have a safe garden and that I am a responsible adult, not some random nutter. I sincerely admire the rescue people for their care; they are kind and reasonable in their requirements, and I feel happy and pleased to try and tick all the politely requested boxes.

Part of the thing was to send photographs; I had to trawl through old files. I saw picture after picture of my lovely old girls. I missed them so much it was like a hole in my chest.

But then the four-year-old comes up and sings a song and asks about the blobby blob and worries about the people in Africa not having enough stuff, and my cracked old heart gets a little glow in it, and I know that it shall mend.

 

Today’s photographs:

Are a little odd. They are mostly from the archive, because that is where I have been, and they are of the Dear Departed, because that is of whom I have been thinking:

A very old picture of me with my girls, taken by the Older Niece:

Posh ladies:

Gazing Pigeon:

Noble Duchess:

The sisters together:

I came upon this glorious one too, of my old dad:

And these were the flowers I did for his funeral:

I was really proud of those.

And the living. The galvanising, antic, funny, beautiful, restorative Red the Mare:

Please forgive is this is filled with typographical errors and non-sequiturs and general nonsense. It is another day when I did not sit down to write until after seven, and my brain was good for nothing. But you must must MUST have a Blob.

Sunday. Horses, dogs, family, weather.

The weather stopped for a moment today; there was even a ray of sunshine. We are surrounded by floods, though; one local town about eight miles away is completely cut off.

The Beloved Cousin and I went to check on the horses. As we listened to the downpour rattling at the windows all last night, we had to steel our hearts, imagining the poor equines.

‘They are much tougher than one thinks,’ I said, not very convincingly. ‘It’s just a bit of wet.’

Sure enough, when we arrived in the late morning, there they all were, happy as grigs. There is a fascinating thing about the wisdom of herds; it is like the opposite of the madness of crowds. They had positioned themselves in the most sheltered corner of the valley, ready for the weather to set in again, which they did not need a forecaster to tell them would happen. The bigger and stronger horses had positioned themselves on the outside of the group, as if to protect the more delicate ones. The toughest of all were cavalier, out on their own, grazing as if there was nothing in the world to worry about.

Only one came to say hello, the sweetest and kindest bay mare, with whom I did absurd amounts of bonding. The Beloved Cousin had to drag me away, before the lunch got burnt. I almost wrote to the Old Fella in Argentina to see if she might like to move to Scotland. It turned out she is his fastest and best pony, an absolute legend on the polo field, striking fear into the hearts of all the other players. Yet there she was, in her winter off, mooching about the field like the dearest old dote.

She made me miss my own Red. I thought of the twist of fate which brought that mare to my door. She was almost sold abroad, and would have gone, except the fellow with the lorry never turned up. It makes me shudder a little in my shoulders to think of life without her. If one strange man had not been unreliable, I would not have had this great source of joy. Imagine.

It sounds a bit nuts to say so, but it is the great love I have for Red the Mare which keeps my bashed old heart beating now that the Pigeon and the Duchess are gone. She is consolation with knobs on and flags flying and trumpets playing. In my recording of gratitudes, apart from my health and the family and opposable thumbs, Red is the hugest name on the list.

See? I say to myself; there is always something. In almost all tunnels, there is light.

From next door as I write this, there is the sound of laughter. (There is a lot of laughter in this house.) The Middle Cousin is playing Hallelujah on the guitar, at which she is very talented. I’m going to have some Guinness and then the grown-ups shall watch Homeland, and we two old ladies shall take ourselves up to early bed, and tomorrow shall be another day. And perhaps, perhaps, with fingers crossed and the stars aligned, I move one step closer to the possibility of the lovely rescue gentleman.

 

Today’s pictures are of the day, with some from the archive of my old girls:

The herd:

The outlier:

The Legend:

One of the young fillies, on box rest:

Trees:

Stone:

Chickens:

Smallest Cousin, in her Sunday best:

Cousins’ canine:

My own old girls, from the archive:

It’s funny, looking back through the files for pictures of the dogs. The Pidge was often smiling, but the Duchess was always grave. She was quite a noble, serious dog, hence her nickname. She had gravitas. She would play and vamp and wiggle her stern, especially when flirting with handsome fellows, but her default setting was gravity. Perhaps it was that she did not take all that great beauty she had lightly.

My funny little equines, from the blue morning before I left for the south:

Suddenly remembered the Dear Readers’ request for pictures of the hair, and dutifully took the usual absurd self-portrait. Only problem was I forgot to put my hood down, so you get Nanook of the North instead of scarlet barnet. Shall put right the omission this week. But I thought this was quite funny, so you shall have it:

It actually was not that cold, but clearly I was taking no chances.

Oh, and so you can see what The Old Fella is doing, down in South America, here he is. This was posted on Facebook by the Argentine player he is working with. (The OF backs and makes and brings on young playing ponies.) Not bad, for an old chap: