What do you think?

I need to do some crowd-sourcing for one of the secret projects. Even though they have both now been read and green-lit by the agent, they still feel like secret projects to me. I rather enjoy this small absurdity, as if, in the mazy corridors of  my own mind, I am an International Woman of Mystery.

The crowd-sourcing is because I have read the experts, wrangled my own brain, mined close, observed experience, and now I want the view from the internet. This is where the internet is brilliant. In my own tiny corner of it, I find people I should never, ever meet in real life. There is the intensely kind lady in Sri Lanka, who is one of the original readers of the blog, and the brave woman who went through the Christ Church earthquake. There is the Dear Reader in Canada, who also loves horses. There is the number one Stanley the Dog fan, and the lady who adores chickens. There is my friend in the north, who knows all about animals breaking your heart, and missing departed fathers. (I say friend, because she feels like a friend. I don’t expect we shall ever see each other, face to face, but that is how this odd intimacy works.) There are my blogging sister-in-arms, some of whom I have actually met, but whose support comes most keenly through the ether, which is our place of mutual connection.

I feel that connection, with everyone who comes here, and one of the things I think over and over again is what a great leveller the internet is. We may have very different life experiences, but it comes back to that meme which did the rounds a while ago: be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. I feel that everyone here is fighting their battles. There is death and divorce, professional set-backs, illness and physical pain, aging parents and the daily frets of bringing up children. Everyone, it strikes me, is really trying their best, sometimes against long odds. There is a lot of quiet courage, and a lot of stoical grace.

Because of this, I sense there is a wisdom in this crowd, and that is what I want to tap.

My subject today is irritation. I was thinking about the things that drive me nuts in the head. I was thinking about the human things which are the most annoying. I don’t mean the big catastrophic faults, like war crimes and corruption and corporate greed. (Although, this morning, I felt a twisting spasm of rage at the man in charge of Nestlé, who has said that water is not a human right.) Those are horrors, and deserve a stronger emotion. I don’t even mean things like unkindness, which is a serious ill and should be regarded with gravity. I mean the small things which don’t really matter, but which produce a disproportionate response. I mean the things which make you want to throw heavy objects, and then, afterwards, you say to yourself in puzzlement: what button did that press?

On my own list would be: people who do not listen, people who are rude generally, but in particular to waiters, people who look over your shoulder at parties to see if there is someone more interesting or important to talk to. Also: personal remarks, bad-timekeeping, dangling modifiers, jargon, condescension, smugness, and being cheap. I get the nails on the blackboard feeling from people who say one thing and do another, who never listen to the other side of the argument, and who jump on bandwagons, particularly those that involve conspiracy theories or intellectually lazy received wisdom.

But at the moment, my number one, five star, ocean-going, fur-lined bête noire is: people who offer unsolicited advice.

Why should this drive me so demented? It really does not matter, in the wider scheme, not when Israel and Palestine are going up in smoke, and the refugee camps spread on the Syrian border, and Mr Putin grows daily more unpredictable. It produces a visceral reaction, a desire for violence, when I am by nature a pacific person.

I can perfectly well listen to it and let it go. I do not have to follow it. I can politely nod and smile and ignore it. But oh, oh, it makes me want to scream and shout.

I think: why would anyone tell another human what they should be doing when they have not asked? Why should someone think that other people are such idiots that they cannot manage their own life or make their own decisions or know their own minds? To me, it is the height of bad manners. The implication is that they are such fools that they need a dose of superior wisdom in order to straighten themselves out. It is, psychologically, an act of aggression. It is an invasion of personal space. It is a denial of autonomy and agency. It is a way of saying: I am brilliant and you are stupid. It is almost a negation of self.

I need to go back and have a hard search in the darker regions of my soul, in order to work out why this small irritation makes me go bat-shit crazy. Almost certainly it is some kind of failing in my own self. I have many failings. But one thing I can say with certainty is that I have never, ever told another person what to do unless they have requested the advice. I think it is an affront.

The line that comes to me now is – I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. I smile as I write it. No busybody, however well-meaning, can take that away from me.

I want your own irritations. Will you tell me? I am consumed with anticipation and curiosity to know what they are.

 

No time for pictures now, just this one of my best beloved:

We did our big practice run into the heart of the village, to get ready for the old people tomorrow. There were huge hissing buses, rattling dustbin trucks, squealing schoolchildren in high-visibility vests, men hurling building waste into industrial skips, and all sorts. The red mare spent her competitive life on quiet grass, working always with other horses, away from the hurly-burly of humans. Until she came to me, she had never been out on her own or seen anything busier than a tiny country lane. This was a lot of stimuli for a sensitive thoroughbred.

All the hard graft I have been putting in paid off. She was a little more reactive than I would like, which means I need to go back and check my working. She had a damn good snort and a look around. But the lovely fact remains that I took a fine thoroughbred into a completely new environment, riding only in a rope halter, and for all that she was sometimes uncertain and alarmed, she listened to me. I was very, very proud of her.

In a most touching moment, she stopped kindly and made friends with the small children, and she stood graciously and sweetly as they gazed up at her and stroked her nose. ‘She is very big,’ said one. ‘And very beautiful,’ said another.

Then we met a smiling old lady. Again, we stopped to talk. The lady told me that she had been in signals, in the army, in 1946. ‘With Louis Mountbatten in South-East Asia Command,’ she said, beaming. ‘It gave me a taste for travel. I’m off to Africa next week.’ I was so awe-struck by this extraordinary piece of information that I reverted to the language of my teen years. ‘That is so cool,’ I exclaimed.

She smiled up at Red, and gave her a gentle stroke down the neck. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid of horses. So that’s something.’

That is something. I rode home grinning all over my face.

The kindness of strangers.

I was going to write a lovely, wandering blog for you about love, and the true meaning of the word amateur. I wrote it in my head as I was riding my red mare this morning. But it was a HorseBack day, and that ate up the hours, and I have absurd amounts of work still to do, and miles to go before I sleep.

So there is hardly time for words.

My glorious girl was at the height of her magnificence today. We had one of those rides that live in the memory. A beautiful, athletic walk, some dandelion dressage, a delightful collected canter, and then I let her go and she put her sprinting shoes on and I felt her power. For a moment, I thought I’d given her too much rope, and we would end up in Coull. But even as she hit full stretch, the moment I said ‘walk’, she walked. Oh, the cleverness of her. I was so proud I practically fainted.

She also made me laugh helplessly. After yesterday’s old person Rocky Horror Show, she has clearly done some hard thinking. As we wandered down the lime avenue, all dozy and in harmony and on the buckle, I spotted a horde of ramblers. Ramblers!!! With their mysterious poles and their ordnance survey maps and their hidden agenda. (I am convinced there is something the ramblers are not telling.) They were also, shall we say, of a certain age. Not quite old enough to have been in the SOE, like the ones yesterday, but not in the first flaming flush of youth. What would the red mare do with her new terror of the oldsters?

Answer: give them a courteous, faintly dismissive nod of her duchessy head, and walk past without so much as a blink.

This makes her three act opera of yesterday even more mysterious. Perhaps it is part of her mission to keep me from falling into complacency. Perhaps I got it quite wrong, and she was not alarmed at all, but merely acting out the vicissitudes of modern life through the medium of interpretive dance.

Anyway, since I have no time for words, I’m going to hand over to a Dear Reader. The comments that come here make me smile, astonish me with their generosity, and often cause me to laugh out loud. I love them all. Sometimes I get one that flies through the ether like an arrow to my bashed old heart. I get one that makes me feel keenly the kindness of strangers, and makes me realise that all this wandering about on equine tangents does actually have a point. As you know, I often wonder what the point of this whole shooting match is, and why I do it. I have no good answers to those questions. But sometimes, the Dear Readers reassure me that perhaps there is a point.

Yesterday, I got this:

‘Five in the morning here and I am belly laughing so hard one of my baby cats came running to see if I was having a seizure. These wonderful, magical creatures provide the best therapy. I mean the horses, not the baby cats. My trainer and I have worked mostly on desensitising, too, this past year - the mare needed the kitchen sink kind of stuff and I had to learn how to overcome my fear of horses in general and this thoroughbred in particular. We are at a nice place now; I trust her enough to get on her back and she has learned that I will not spook so bad so as to cause her a heart attack! In fact last week, she even decided I was ready to try to hang on while she jumped an exercise pole. Smart mare! I did not leave the saddle. So we are making progress. Plus, those feel- good hormones all the baby books promised would flood my system when presented with my newborn which never materialised, are now making an appearance every time I show up at the barn and she runs toward me. This mare could be the greatest love of my life. She has taught this 47 year old woman with an acute fight or flight response to chill the shizz out, as the kids would say. Heading into open heart surgery in the next week or so to fix a congenital heart condition so my riding will have to be put on hold for a couple of months, but sure would appreciate the link to the decent forum of which you speak. I have noticed during my short time as a horse owner that there are a lot of crazies out there and figure I actually don't need to add to my own particular brand. Thank you, Tania. I found your blog last September and you have been my inspiration in all things equine.’

There are several things I love about this, not least the baby cats. I love that someone else of my exact age, many miles away, is going through the same sort of journey. I love that the story is so sweetly shared. I love that across an ocean, someone else, of whom I would have known nothing if it were not for the miracle of the internet, also has a mare who is the love of her life. I love that suddenly, almost shockingly, there is the shining note of stoicism, as open-heart surgery is glossed over as if it is nothing more than going to the shops.

Thank you Elyse. You made my day.

I assume you are across an ocean, because you use the word barn, and smart to mean clever. I’d love to know more about you and your mare and where you both live, and I hope your operation goes well and you are back in the saddle soon.

And while I’m on the subject: thank you all, Dear Readers, for coming back, for being kind, and for so graciously putting up with all my nonsense.

 

Today’s pictures:

After our perfect ride, quite pleased with herself:

Waiting politely outside the shed, as I made breakfast. Raincoat on, as the mercury has plunged to a paltry eight degrees and it is going to rain all day and all night:

Having a little doze, as I appear to be taking my time:

Is it ready yet?:

Please say it’s ready:

YES!!!! BREAKFAST!!!!!:

The sweet Paint:

In other news, the lilac is out:

And finally, one of my HorseBack pictures. I was quite pleased with them today:

PS. Back with the PEN today. The smart loaned Nikon is smart, and the quality of pictures is probably better and sharper. But the dear, battered old PEN does do something magical with colours, and I’m quite tempted to stay loyal to it.

PPS. Whilst I am on the subject of pictures: Blogger has started doing something peculiar with my photographs. It seems to do a sort of auto-enhance as it publishes, like Google Plus does. I hate this, as I edit my pictures very carefully, and get the exact right mix of light and shade. Also, the enhanced pictures sometimes end up having far too much grain in them, which drives me nuts. I can’t find a relevant settings button, and wondered if there were any fellow bloggers out there who know about this oddity.

Ha. Turns out there were quite a lot of words, after all. Same old, same old.

Happy New Year

I had a whole, big, end of year blog for you, ready to go. It ran around in my head, filled with life wisdom and vital perspective and tremendous observations on the human condition. In the absurd echo chamber of my mazy head, it was an absolute cracker. (Quite frankly, as I think up these things over the brushing of the teeth, I sometimes astonish myself with my own cleverness. Then the flappy wings of hubris falter, and I crash down to earth, as I fail hopelessly to translate the spurious brilliance to the page.)

Then I thought: bugger that for a game of soldiers. What I really need to say today is -

THANK YOU.

This year has been The Year of the Horse. Some of you may not be quite as entranced and fascinated by the equine mind as I am. You have had to wade through endless adorations of the red mare, long shaggy horse stories, furlong by furlong rehashings of the races which have made me shout and weep. There has been self-indulgence, windiness, and far too much galloping off on tangents. I have teetered on the edge of sentiment, and gazed into the abyss of hyperbole.

And yet, rather like the red mare herself, who sometimes has a look on her face which says Just let the old girl get it out of her system, you have walked kindly and generously beside me. You have left comments of sweetness, funniness and wisdom. You have shown kind hearts, generosity of spirit, and bottomless patience. You have a particularly lovely habit of sharing my triumphs as if they were your own. You also forgive my failings in a quite astonishing way, and bolster me when I feel my frailties.

Perhaps what I love most of all about the dear Dear Readers is that you disprove the easy assumption that the internet is a place of wild intemperance, stupid shouting and general bad manners. I loathe assumptions. I am suspicious of received opinion and I detest intellectual laziness. (I know that sounds very pompous and hard line, but it is true, and this is the place for truth.) As you will know, to your rueful cost, I get furious when people make horrid, ignorant remarks about thoroughbreds in general and ex-racehorses in particular. I love Red the Mare for many reasons – her great beauty, her comedy skills, her intense sweetness, her talent for stillness, her politeness, her cleverness, and her glorious, duchessy sense of self. But one of the things I love the most is that she disproves all those idiot stereotypes with every beat of her heart and every point of her toe.

In the exact same way, I glory in the daily proofs left by the Dear Readers, proofs that the kindness of strangers really is kind, that courtesy may survive in the rush of technology, that the wide spaces of the interwebs may be peopled by the good and true just as much as the bad and meretricious. It is not all narcissism and trolling. It is real and actual and oddly comforting. It may be a place of safety and refuge as much as an unpatrolled wilderness.

Perhaps you do not know quite what it is you do when you type out a quick string of words and leave your comments. It’s just the tap tap tap of fingers on a keyboard, after all. It almost certainly does not take you very long, before you go back to your jobs and your families and your lives. But what you do, in that brief, shining moment, is restore my faith in human nature. Pretty much every damn day. Which is a fairly remarkable thing. And that is why I say thank you.

Looking back on a year is always bittersweet. I know that some of you have had losses and struggles. I know also that you have dealt with them with stoicism and grace. The Dear Departeds stay stitched into battered hearts. I marvel often at the great, gutsy, never-say-die hearts of the thoroughbreds I love so much. I’ve watched many races this year which have been won not on talent or tactics, but raw, cussed, dogged gallantry. The heart takes over from the legs, the head, the everything. But the human heart is a pretty spectacular thing too. It gets bashed and bruised and chipped round the edges. It survives disappointments and alarms and grievous losses. Somehow, against all the odds, it goes on beating. It, like all the things I admire the most, keeps buggering on.

Happy New Year, my darlings. May your champagne be cold and your beloveds be beloved and your hopes be merry and bright.

 

My Lovely Ones:

Obviously, Red the Mare and Stanley the Dog are animals. They have no English. They do not understand the concept of time. But if they did, they would wish you a very Happy New Year too, because you have spent 2013 saying so, so many lovely things about them. So, you know, a woof and a neigh and a shake of a hoof.

*Official GOING TOO FAR klaxon sounds, and I move quietly to the exit*

Readers’ questions, on an equine theme.

Busy day. HorseBack work; 703 words of book; a lot of canine and equine sweetness in the quiet of my lovely field. Also: laughter.

A lot of sweetness too yesterday from the Dear Readers, who were staunch and magnificent, as always.

Oddly, I did write a rather long and serious blog today about events beyond the mazy confines of my own goofy brain. But I rather lost my nerve. The problem with writing about politics and people in the public eye and grave matters under general discussion is that one invites what Mrs Merton called a heated debate. Sometimes I love a heated debate. Sometimes I think: I need to go gently and slowly. So I’ve shelved it and I’ll give it to you when I’m having a butch day.

Actually, although not quite butch, I was productive today, and that is the most important thing. I even did some errands and made a Vital Telephone Call.

Just time now, at the end of a very long day, for a reader question:

A couple of the Dear Readers have asked about methods of horsemanship; one yesterday, one a while ago. I feel I ought to resurrect the old Sunday tradition of answering these questions, but in the meantime, as quickly as I can, since I’m all out of things to write, I’ll answer now –

I grew up in the old school of horsemanship, and have only come to the newer version since I got Red the Mare. In my mind, it is all based on studying herd behaviour, so going with the natural equine instincts rather than against them, and, oddly, manners. I like the idea of asking a horse, rather than telling a horse. I think it is a profound distinction.

The word leadership can be misleading, and has nothing to do with dominance. I think a horse does need a good leader, but that position must be earned, through patience, consistency, attention, gentleness and kindness. I learnt all that I have learnt from a variety of sources, and then extrapolated in my own goofy little mind, and I stick to no one method. I am very suspicious of those new schools which admit only their own ideas and seem to do a lot of marketing.

I’ve read very useful books by Mark Rashid and Monty Roberts. (Roberts is controversial, in certain circles, but I like many of his ideas.) I loved the film about Buck Brannaman, who has a glorious attitude to horses. There is a no-nonsense Australian called Warwick Schiller who has a lot of amazingly useful and practical video clips on YouTube. I’ve also read some delightful articles by Carolyn Resnick. There’s an enchanting page on Facebook called Enlightened Horsemanship, which has rather philosophical musings about the relationship between human and equine which I enjoy very much.

I look for new thoughts and good information wherever I can find it, and think of the two of us as embarking on a long, roaming, learning journey. Really, I suppose my answer is that the Google is your friend. That was how I started. I’m slightly abashed to admit that after Red first arrived, and I suddenly realised I had not actually been responsible for an equine for thirty years, I used to sit up at night, madly typing HOW TO HAVE A HAPPY HORSE into the humming search engine. That was how I found a lot of the things I have found. I took what spoke to me, and left the rest.

This morning, there was a gate incident. I arrived to find the paddock gate wide open, and the three girls merrily grazing out in the set-aside. (It is another equine mystery; we have a horrible suspicion they might have opened it themselves, so padlocks are on order. Although I always do wonder about ROGUE RAMBLERS. No, only joking, I love the good ramblers, roaming up the hill with their ordnance survey maps.) Anyway, the point is that the herd could have galloped off to Logie Coldstone, if they had wanted to. (Although it must be admitted that, unless startled, escaped horses generally do not stray too far.) Instead, they remained near home, calm as you like, and were so happy I let them mooch around as I made breakfast and then gently directed them back into the field for their food. The point was: something that could have been a drama had no drama in it at all.

Red set the example, as the boss mare, and part of the reason she is as gentle and calm and biddable as she is is the work we’ve done with her over the months, thanks to all these good teachers from whose writing I have learnt so much, and the remarkable trainer who comes each week to continue her education. It helps that she is a particularly delightful person, and she came from a brilliant horseman out of a great yard, but she was a racehorse and a polo pony, and this deep calm, this softness, this absolute biddability, is a new way of being which she has learnt.

I like the methods of what is generally referred to as natural horsemanship for many reasons, but one of the most important is that it makes everything I do with the mare easy. I can groom her, feed her, rug her and work her without having to tether her in any way. If she escapes from her field, I can gently guide her back in, and she goes quietly, without complaint. I can ride her in a halter. I trust her. She is happy.

And the lovely thing is that the methods are so wonderfully easy. A child of ten could follow them. I wish I could tell you that all this has come about from my own brilliance, but I can’t. It was just from following the simple steps of other people, who have spent their lives thinking about horses.

Very tired now, so just time for three pictures:

A tree:

A handsome dog:

Me and my girl:

Oh, and did I mention Love? That is of course your best guide. I think: don’t baby them, or coddle them, or wrap them in cotton wool, or turn them into little cute things. They are horses. They have thousands of years of nobility running through their veins. They consent to exist in the human world, and that is their great gift to us. The love can’t just be a vague, smooshy thing. It must be the good heart in action. So, I think: listen to them, attend to them, respect them, and be polite to them. Spend time with them. Learn from them, because always, in the end, they are your greatest professors.

A little tangent for a Friday afternoon.

A lot of wisdom and kindness from the Dear Readers this week. One of my favourite Twitter gentlemen, a fellow racing fanatic, asked me yesterday how I do a blog every day. (Well, not quite every day, but pretty close.) I replied that I could only thank my weirdly obsessive nature.

I like doing it. It is not for money or fame or the ghastly idea of building the brand, which it seems everyone must do now. It is a marking of the days, a recording of my beloved Small Things, a small existential stamping. Yes, yes; here I was.

And yet, there is an oddness too. I feel a very faint bat’s squeak of obligation. This is nuts, of course, but sometimes I do not fight my nuttier imperatives. This audience has settled into a small and exceptionally select band. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me when I see a comment from some of the old faithfuls, who have been with me since the beginning. I also glean particular joy from the international correspondents. You come here, and give me the gift of your time. I feel that in return, I must give you something, as many days as I can. I sometimes feel bizarrely guilty when I go missing in action, even though there is usually the most excellent excuse of life getting in the way.

That really is quite strange. My finger hovers over the delete button. The truth is that today I am tired from a long week and I was not going to write anything, just give you some nice Stanley the Dog pictures. On some days I have a tale to tell; on others, the brain is filled with mud, and I can feel my synapses snapping off, one by recalcitrant one, and there is no story. I am like that today, but I wanted to thank for the kind comments of the week and before I knew it, I was off on this peculiar tangent. (I am fatally addicted to tangents.)

The finger hovers, and then stops. I’ll let it run. I feel a curious liberation in sometimes giving space to my less explicable thoughts. Why not? I write often that I believe people should have the moxie to follow their own goofy star. Perhaps I should put my money where my mouth is and reveal my own profound goofiness. The entire humming theme of Backwards was that the hunt for perfection is a snare and a curse. So in some ways, offering such imperfection feels like putting down a marker. Sometimes I like to tell you the good parts of my day, but I resist the shiny magazine trend for offering gleaming, seamless lives, with all the contradictions and muddliness and small moments of failure airbrushed out. (I think that was why it seemed important to tell you of my shaming crash onto my arse yesterday, and not just confine myself to the glory jumping.)

Shame thrives in secrecy. It lives and feeds in the dark. The moment one admits the flaws, the failings, the idiot notions, the moments of sheer folly, the crashings down to earth (literal and metaphorical, in my case) they lose their power.

And that, my darlings, is my winding and tangential Thought for the Day.

If you can call it a thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are a selection from the week.

We haven’t had any garden pictures for a while:

The lovely colours of some of the HorseBack herd:

This splendid gentleman arrived in the feed shed this morning:

Stanley the Dog:

Can you hurry up with the tea?:

Thanks, it was delicious:

King of the Absolutely Enormous Stick:

The very dear Myfanwy the Pony:

Excellent yoga stretches:

Can’t resist one more of me and my darling duchess:

The hill:

No blog today.

It’s been a long week, and I have hit the wall.

But I did want to say that the Dear Readers have been particularly dear in the last few days. You have left wise and kind comments, sent dancing tweets which made me laugh, written antic Facebook remarks. I don’t want to descend into Hallmark card territory, but this generous virtual back and forth damn well does warm the cockles of my absurd old heart.

So, thank you.

And here is Stanley the Dog, because I know everyone loves Stanley the Dog:

And speaking of dogs, and love, for a convoluted and labyrinthine set of reasons, I really, really missed these old ladies today. The universe, in its funny old wisdom, sent me reminders of them, and I’m not ashamed to say that I shed a bit of a tear. They are in the past, but they live with me still, stitched into my heart:

The Duchess and the Pigeon; really, two of the most beautiful canines that ever graced the good Scottish earth.

Small but mighty.

Ha. It turns out we do not need Miss Marple after all. The Dear Readers are on the case of The Mysterious Incident. One of them, to my delight, turns out to be an ex-copper and has put her considerable forensic and analytical skills to work. She concludes that a possible explanation may be rogue deer.

‘Oh, yes,’ I say out loud, as I read the clever comment. At once, this makes the most sense of all the crackpot theories that are jostling in my brain. My current favourite was that a psycho rambler, who, furious that I have put up a fenced paddock in the middle of the old rambler’s route up into the hills, which is rudely not marked on any Ordnance Survey map, had come in the night to wreak his revenges. You can see why I never applied to the police force.

This makes me think of the shining marvellousness of the Dear Readers. When I started this blog, I wanted to make my book go viral, build a brand, make some commercial hay. It was a hard-nosed business decision. Of course, none of that happened. I built a small readership, but nothing like enough to have any effect on sales.

I did, even so, for a long time become obsessed with numbers. All the graphs did go reassuringly upwards, and I checked them mercilessly and castigated myself if I ever suffered a little dip. I was always racing to the internet to see how many views I had received and comments I had got. If there were fewer than the day before, I felt quite awful.

Then, as HorseBack came into my life, and my working day became chewed up by trying to fit in volunteering and day job and mare and family and dog and exigencies of ordinary existence, I, without even meaning to, just stopped looking at the figures. The last I looked, a few months ago, the graphs had gone down a bit, probably because the blog has become more inward-looking and less polished and, in an odd way, less needy. When I was busking for custom, I did sometimes get it. Now the thing exists easily, in itself, not trying to gain anything or prove anything or score points. The dear old blog does not mind if the numbers are small. It is just what it is, comfortable in its own skin, operating without fear or favour.

But what is so lovely is it seems, in some serendipitous way, to have found its perfect level. The Dear Readers may not be counted in vast marching battalions, but oh, feel the quality. They can solve mysteries; they fall openly in love with Stanley the Dog. They remember, tenderly, the Pigeon, and allow that my heart still aches for her. They put up with long ramblings about racing, which they do not follow themselves. (Some of them, who have never watched a race in their lives, even turned on the television for Ascot.) They come and wave hello from America and New Zealand and Austria and Sri Lanka, and all points in between.

Perhaps it comes back to my middle-aged obsession with the small things. I do not disdain worldly success, but the profound satisfactions of the heart are now all in the minute, the minuscule, the barely visible. The delicate barometers of Red’s mood and the merest wibble of that famous lip; the flight of Stanley the Dog’s left ear; a particular expression on Myfanwy’s face; the sight of the Scottish light on an old oak tree; the leap of a lamb in the field; these are things which mean the most.

The cohort of the Dear Readers is small, but oh, it is mighty.

And that is my happy thought for the day.

 

Hardly time for pictures, as I am, as always, racing the damn clock. Here is just a little something on which you may rest your kind eyes: