One picture.

I have guests coming again, all the way from the south, so obviously this means more domestic reorganisation (I love the hopeful re there, as if anything had been organised in the first place). Obviously this also means no time for a blog. So sorry about that.

As I was rummaging through the second spare room, which is essentially a tiny box room with a single bed in it on which everything gets dumped, sweeping up piles of papers and old laundry bags, I found this picture. It is of my friend The Expatriate. She and I met in our first term at Christ Church and we’ve been best friends ever since. She’s been through it a bit, one way and another, but you can see from her smile that she has a fighting spirit. Even though she now lives in Santa Monica, she is a countrywoman to her bones, and she has the strength of the good earth in her.

I remember that day. We’d gone to Hay on Wye, and a wonderful man called Roger Deakin had come to talk about his book on swimming Britain’s wild waters. Roger was so stitched into the earth that I need a new word for countryman. His house in Suffolk looked as if it had grown naturally out of the land it stood on, and was at one with the trees around it. There was wood everywhere, I remember, and he welcomed in all small woodland creatures with a gentle delight. (No reorganisation for guests for him.) After the talk on his book, he invited everyone to come for a swim in the river. Some brave brawny fellows stripped off and leapt in, with quite a lot of macho display, and then a chorus of ahs at the sudden cold, and that is why my lovely friend is laughing her lovely laugh.

This is photographed from the original, which is why the quality is not that good, but you can see the loveliness.

Roger Deakin died a few years ago, but I think of him often, even though he was not an intimate, but the friend of a great friend. He is one of those remarkable people who stay vivid in the mind. His book on swimming is wonderful, but if you want the full enchantment, his book on trees is his masterpiece.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wildwood-A-Journey-Through-Trees/dp/0141010010

Life Lessons, redux

The expatriate rings. We have known each other for so long that we have no need to spell things out; we barely need to talk in complete sentences. There is no call for long explanations; a lovely, staccato shorthand exists between us. A single word in a certain tone of voice can say more than eighteen paragraphs.

Early in the conversation, one of us says, I forget which, ‘Oh, all the learning we still have to do.’

The other echoes, with a dying fall: ‘All that damn life learning.’

I think what we mean by this is that we have got to the age when, according to the book, we should know an awful lot. We should be certain and capable. Instead, back back back we both trot, to the drawing board, to keep learning the lessons, to remember the ones we already learned but carelessly forgot.

‘Do you think,’ I say, tentative and musing, ‘that there are people who just barrel through life?’

I hear her smiling down the long-distance line.

‘Some people might barrel a bit more than we do,’ she says. ‘But you know, everyone’s got something.’

I think this is a fairly profound truth. Everyone does have something. Even those alphas - the bond traders or thoracic surgeons or university professors, the Nobel laureates and the corporate titans, the ones pronouncing on the wireless or writing with authority in the broadsheets, shining with sureness - even they must have something, when they wake at three in the morning, which is what F Scott Fitzgerald called the dark night of the soul. Otherwise why did they need to get so shiny and successful in the first place?

The Playwright calls, from a London street, sirens wailing in the background.

‘I’m just crossing a police line,’ he says. ‘Thank you, officer.’

He has a slightly different take on the matter.

He says: ‘Look how far we’ve come.’

He does not mean in terms of professional success or worldly accomplishment, which is what that phrase might ordinarily conjure. He means that even though we are both still packed with frailties and foibles and general moments of idiocy, we deal with the thorny patches better and more quickly and – this most crucially – more temperately than we would have done when we were young and callow and thought we knew everything.

It’s easy to forget, as one enters the searching halls of middle age, that for everything one does not know, there is a thing one does know.

Here is what I think, just now. Here is what I tell myself. Be brave, be kind, be funny, be vulnerable, be goofy, be true. There are people in the world who will never, ever get the point of your own idiosyncratic little star. My strong thought is: let them. Let them run free, not getting it. Give them the glorious liberty never to see the point. There are points in life it is worth trying to prove; there are some which can never be proved.

For some reason, as I slow down, trying to finish this new notion, I hear an old Scots voice in my head. It says: save your breath to cool your porridge. I think this is what old nursery nurses used to tell chatty children, in the days when children were seen and not heard. But now, I think, it can mean something slightly else. It can mean: don’t try to persuade the unpersuadable.

As I cast around for the good, final sentence, the little existential bow on the parcel, and come up blank, I suddenly think: but of course, you probably know all this already. I think even I might have known this already. Part of the reason for writing it down is that sometimes I need to be reminded.

As I type this, Stanley the Dog comes into the room and gazes at me with his steady amber eyes. Last night, I had a brief grief storm. I was watching, in my geekish way, a re-run of the Gold Cup, and they were showing Gold Cups past.

There was the mighty Arkle, the bonny Mill House, the doughty Desert Orchid blasting his way through the mud and murk. The beauty and the bravery of the horses, and the old racing history, made me think of my father, and I wept. Stanley came and positioned himself next to my left knee, sitting upright as a sentinel, as if on guard. It was absurdly touching. I suddenly realised he has not seen tears before. He arrived in November, and I have been busy and mostly happy since then. I might have thought that the sorrow could have disturbed him, but not at all. There he was, by my side, staunch as a very staunch thing.

The storm passed, as it always does. I felt clean and renewed. I thought of May Sarton, one of my very favourite writers, another solitary. She once wrote: ‘We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.’

 

Today’s pictures:

Can’t have too many pictures of Gus the Foal, here with his lovely friend Awesome:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Autumn the Filly:

Stanley the Staunch:

This person is pretty staunch too. Sorrow holds no fears for her. She just stands with her head on my shoulder until the thing is finished:

Love that slightly wistful face. It’s actually her Where the bloody hell is my tea face.

Hill:

Glimpses of light; or, one for the Dog People

Rather madly, I decide to sit up all night and watch the election. I have worked out secretly in my mind that it will be an Obama landslide, and I must see if my psephological chops are still sharp.

Actually, this is mostly sheer wish thinking. And partly predicated on my inability to understand how anyone would vote for a man who once strapped his dog on the roof of his car and drove it to Canada.
I slept badly the night before, and am in the blank exhaustion stage of grief, so at first I do not enjoy it as much as I normally would. I start to get a little testy with Chuck Todd and his implements. Brian Williams cheers me up a bit; there is something about his wry intelligence which makes me feel better about almost everything.

Then, something lovely happens. Obama begins to win. He wins because the Americans, whom doughty Britons occasionally think of as rather antic and flighty where we are prosaic, who do not have our obsession with the Blitz spirit or the insane Dunkirk pride, are queuing round the block. Egregious partisans in some states are performing blatant voter suppression, but the voters will not be suppressed.

All the pundits except for Rachel Maddow have been muttering knowingly about the enthusiasm gap. Obama’s base, apparently, has no taste for the fight any more. The feckless young people will not pitch up; the African Americans are demoralised. It is the tea partiers and small staters and the pro-lifers who have the bit between their teeth. Peggy Noonan even writes a hilariously wrong column about how the President seems joyless, how his campaign is ‘small and sad and lost’.

In the end, the African American voters come out in greater numbers than ever before. Somebody says it is because they are so furious at the attempts to deny them. (Voter suppression gets targeted at non-white neighbourhoods, apparently, although my mind has to stretch and twang to comprehend that someone would do something so wicked.) The Latinos come out, and the Asians. The college-educated women, which is another vital demographic, marches out in droves, dreaming of Nellie Bly and the Pankhursts.

Suddenly, there are pictures of happy, smiling crowds. People are still queuing in some states, even though the result is now certain. Some of them waited for eight hours. I love them. Someone on the BBC jokes: if we had to wait ten minutes to vote, we would turn round and go home and have a nice cup of tea.

My Twitterstream explodes with joy. I send incoherent messages to people I have never met, congratulating them on the sweep of the battleground states. Mitt Romney ran an ugly campaign, and I am really pleased ugliness did not have its day. I imagine Paul Ryan consoling himself with a nice comforting copy of Atlas Shrugged.

At half past four, light-headed with tiredness, I go to bed. I cast a glance at the Pigeon’s bed, beside my desk. In 2008, she and her sister sat up with me all night. I say, out loud, to the empty space: ‘You would have been quite bored’. She liked the racing; not so keen on the politics. No barking and cartoon jumping for Cuyahoga County.

This morning, the air is light and mild, and the sun shines, and I spend two hours with the equines. I work the mare; I have a long conversation with the Horse Talker, which soothes me. I think about the election again; I realise that I am really, really delighted.

The World Traveller comes out and I tell her the result. She had missed the news. She smiles all over her face. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I am so glad.’ I too am glad. The very fact that there can be gladness feels like a bit of a sign. It is the first thing I have been properly glad about since Friday. I tried to watch the racing, but even the sight of the imperious Silviniaco Conti putting down his marker for a glittering future could not lift my heavy heart. Now, for the first time, there is a glimmer of lightness.

That’s the thing I have to look out for, the first gleam of light. I find that I have to concentrate very hard on learning loss, all over again. What do I do? Is it chicken soup or small acts of self-kindness or hot baths? Is it writing it down, giving sorrow words so the burdened heart will not break?

It is, I think most of all, looking for the light. I stare, stare, stare until the first watery ray is glimpsed. Then, I know I shall be able to bash on. It’s quite odd that the election of a man in a faraway country should prove to be that first glimmer. But it felt like a triumph of the better angels.

It’s not that everything shall now magically change, and Congress shall do good work, and perfect policies shall fall into place, and everyone shall have jobs. The political situation is much as it was. But there was something profoundly moving about those hopeful queues of voters; I am glad most of all that their stalwart endurance was rewarded.

My friend the Expatriate calls, from Santa Monica. ‘I think that Barack Obama is a proper person,’ she says. ‘I’ve been watching him and his wife, and I think they actually are really good people.’ I think so too. Good people don’t always make perfect politicians, but it is oddly reassuring sometimes to see that virtue is given its due. Obama could have taken his glittering Harvard degree and made millions in the corporate sector. Instead, he went to work with deprived communities on the south side of Chicago. That is a mark of character.

Plus, he is really nice to his dog.

As my sleep-deprived brain grows more whimsical, and I search hopelessly for my final sentence, I think perhaps that is why I am quite so pleased. It was a triumph for the Dog People. It was one for The Pigeon.
 
Today’s pictures:

Morning light:

















The happy herd:







They really were amazingly contented today. They have settled so well, and relaxed into themselves, and that too is a ray of light:



I imagine if the old girl were still here she would be saying – you didn’t really think they would elect a man called Mittens?:



No, no, not they. They remember Seamus the Dog:



The very thought makes me do my Lady Bracknell face:



Forgive me. No sleep really does make for inexcusable whimsy.

The hill, very blue today:

In which I stare self-indulgence in the face and wait until I see the whites of its eyes

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The weather is flat and dreich and vaguely cross. The economic news is as dirty and gloomy as the sky. I suppose I should say something about that, but I do not have the heart for it. I start to think it is rather like the famous line that William Goldman wrote about Hollywood: ‘Nobody knows anything’. (In my memory, he thought that line was so important that he wrote it twice, just in case the readers had not quite taken it in, although I may have made that part up.)

My old friend The Expat called and I was so delighted to hear her dear voice that I was inspired to write a little paean to friendship. I had started it, fingers tapping away, when I suddenly lost my nerve. I’m not sure whether it was because it seemed too inconsequential when everything is about to go smash, or for some other reason. I am slightly haunted by what someone said recently, not knowing that I wrote a blog. ‘Oh, blogging,’ she said, in magisterial disdain; ‘it’s so self-indulgent.’ She looked really cross, as if self-indulgence was the thing she could least bear, and there were all these damn people, indulging all over the shop.

I should have let it go. If I were restrained and polite, I would have said: ‘Oh, really, do tell me why.’ I’m not being passive-aggressive; it would have been interesting to know. And besides, it’s a perfectly valid opinion.

Instead, I barged in. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I write a blog, and I think if you are going to make that argument you would have to say that all writing is self-indulgent.’

I then launched into a full-bore defence. It’s the usual old thing; I’ve written it before. It’s not so much that blogging is not self-indulgent, but it’s no more self-indulgent than writing a column or an article or a book or a pamphlet. In some ways, all writing is self-indulgent because it’s saying: here I am, I believe I am so fascinating and charming and otherwise worthwhile that I am actually going to publish my thoughts, rather than keeping them quietly in my head.

I’m not sure it’s much of an argument, really. It’s just that when people write off a whole medium, it touches a nerve. I feel protective of my fellow bloggers, whose work I love. I feel defensive, perhaps, of this tiny enterprise, whose worth I cannot gauge. Ever since that remark, as I sit down to write I think: oh, oh, perhaps that woman was right. What am I doing with the rants and the rambles and the endless dog pictures?

Although perhaps I can defend the dog pictures, on account of the raging beauty of The Pigeon, which clearly adds to the gaiety of nations, increases the sum total of human happiness, and puts another gaudy stitch in the rich tapestry of life. She, who has never been self-indulgent in her life, brings smiles to the faces of readers from Sri Lanka to Singapore, from Texas to Tottenham, and that is not nothing.

As for the rest, I remain uncertain.

Actually, bugger it. I can do better than that. I am not going to let doubt and rain and rotten economic growth seep into my soul and sap my spirit.

CS Lewis may or may not have said ‘we read to know we are not alone’, but it is a statement of ultimate truth. Oddly enough, he also said a true thing about friendship, which could apply to blogs too: ‘Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

Despite the hopes for the global village, the modern world is atomised; extended families and tight communities grow increasingly rare. It is fashionable to use the word virtual as an insult just now, but a virtual community may still commune. That’s what happens when the Dear Readers come. It is absolutely something. It is an exchange of words and ideas and kindness where before there was nothing. As I think of it like that, it seems rather a miracle. (I must not now go the other way, and fall into whimsy and sentiment.)

I think blogs are exactly like people. There are absolute crashers; there are ranters and dullards and drama queens and statistics geeks. There are funny ones and clever ones and eccentric ones and inexplicable ones.

As every blogger understands, there are good and bad days, just like in life. There are days when, as the Dear Readers know to your cost, it is all buggery bollocks. The mind is flat, the imagination has gone out for lunch, the grasp of basic language has fled for the border. Those are the days when, as my friend The Playwright says, you can’t write fuck on a dusty blind.

Then there are times when the planets align and the literary angels dance on their pins, and a sentence will dazzle off the keyboard. Some days, one will actually have something interesting to say; on others, it’s back to the dog pictures.

I think I may, as the shrinks say, own my self-indulgence. I do write about the things which interest me. Not all of you will be as in love with trees and politics and the mystery of the human condition and the cooking of soup as I am. There will be days when you really cannot face yet another description of yet another bloody horse race. Oh, you will cry, enough with the Kauto Star already. And I should not blame you for that.

In some ways, it’s right to have doubts. I think a lot at the moment about certainty. It can be a lovely thing; rather restful to have, oddly soothing to be around. But in a flicker of its eye, certainty can harden into prejudice and narrow-mindedness and bombast, and then we are all for the dark. Every piece of writing I do contains doubt, and I believe that is how it should be. The spectre of self-indulgence should haunt the blogger, just a little, if only to keep the word count down to a reasonable level.

At the same time, I think there is something wonderful about the world of the blogs. I love that they give me a flashing glimpse into the mind and life and surroundings of humans I shall never meet. I like that they can bring people together. They can stretch the mind, delight the eye, challenge the received wisdom.

Sometimes, they are inconsequential, but there’s nothing wrong with that. They can also be really good at disseminating information and putting the record straight. As a novel medium, blogging is amazingly agile, as nimble on its feet as a ballroom dancer doing the foxtrot. (Oh dear, strained simile alert just went off. Never mind. Occupational hazard.)

And, and, where else would we all go for videos of small children and cats doing comical things, and pictures of baby penguins? Quite frankly, I sometimes think it is worth it for the penguins alone. And the dog pictures, of course.

Pictures of the day are very few, on account of the risible weather.

There is, amazingly, a tiny bit of early blossom:



And the viburnum is doing its hardy winter thing:



Look, look, the first tips of the snowdrops:



And the hopeful crocus shoots:



Even on the greyest day, the old beech leaves and the mossy wall still work their magic:





And speaking of magic:



This is her Please can we go in out of this absurd rain and eat some biscuits face:



So dreich that the hill is lost. You can just see, if you squint and look very, very closely, the faint outline of it in the cloud: