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:

HorseBack, dogs, love, perspective, and a remarkable gentleman

Author’s note: this is stupidly long. And this is the edited version. You might like to sit down with a nice biscuit.

 

Today was a HorseBack UK day. I almost called to cancel, because I’ve now got the clock ticking down, and every minute with the old dog is precious. But it’s important that the Mother and Stepfather get some time with her too, and she adores them, so she would spend the morning there.

It was a good decision. First of all, they are really nice people who know all about animals, and the love. Second of all, it’s a place of profound authenticity. I remember this when I was grieving my dad; I craved authenticity like a drug. I can’t really explain it. There’s a crashing feeling of: there is life, love, death, and, in my case, trees, and everything else is bullshit. I can’t be doing with the bullshit when life gets this real.

Third of all, there are horses; fourth of all, there are hills. We drove up to look at the winter quarters, where the herd shall go in a week or two. The road runs through thick Scottish woods and then breaks out at the top of a rise, and you turn in, and suddenly all the mountains open like a book, rolling in high blue waves, so beautiful and majestic it makes me catch my breath. It was that with which I fell in love when I first came here; it was why I threw everything up in the south and made the whimsical move north.

Back at headquarters, one of the volunteers, whom I had not met before, approached me. The way this operation works is very clever. There are specific courses for wounded servicemen and women, which are important in themselves, but almost more important is the voluntary programme. Those wounded in war, with scars internal or external, come back to this extraordinary place, with its beauty and its peace, and do all kinds of work, with the horses, on the buildings, and find a safe place, where they do not have to explain themselves. It is the most potent therapeutic tool, and brilliantly organic and real.

Anyway, one of these fellows came up to me and said: ‘You’re the blogging lady, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I said.

He looked rather grave, and I had a sudden terror that he was going to say, oh please don’t write that, or don’t use this word, or just: you’ve got it all wrong. Every time I sit down to write about all this, I have a keen sense of responsibility. These are people who have experienced things I can hardly stretch my brain to imagine. I am acutely aware of the spaces of my ignorance. It is a delicate subject, and one to which I must do justice. More than in any other area of my writing life, I feel it is vital not to get it wrong.

In fact, the grave look was because he was filled with seriousness of purpose. He had embarked on a fund-raising exercise, and now was the moment he was to present the cheque. He was giving something back, for all that HorseBack had given him. He wanted me to record it.

I felt stupidly, absurdly humbled. Also: honoured. I damn well was the blogging lady, and I was going to be able to show the lovely virtuous circle that exists in this place.

The gentleman told me, with the ready honesty that I find everywhere here, of his history. He served in the first Gulf War and in Northern Ireland. He had PTSD, which suddenly morphed itself into acute agoraphobia.

‘I did not go outside for six years,’ he said.

I’m getting reasonably good at this now. I do not exclaim, or say oh no poor you, or put on the pity face. I sense, without having to be told, that the pity face is the last thing any of them want. Although pity can come from the good human emotion of sympathy, it can also be patronising and distancing. Now, when people say things like this to me, I nod, seriously, and take it on the chin, and listen, and let them tell me their story.

Six years inside is a long time. Now, this gentleman was lifting his eyes to the distant hills, at home in his surroundings. Now, he was working with horses, which he had no experience of until he came here.

‘I could hardly lift my head up,’ he said. ‘The horses taught me to raise my head.’

I nodded, on easier ground now. I know horses.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because you have to.’

‘Because you have to,’ he said.

You know what I said yesterday about the Perspective Police sending me a note? This was the note. My heart will break, but hearts mend. Perspective does not lessen grief, but it bloody well makes me realise all the good fortune I have, and reminds me not to throw out babies with bathwater. It restores sanity. Everything will not end. 

The cheque presentation was lovely. The amazing fund-raising gentleman said to me, out of the corner of his mouth, as we all went into the office: ‘Sometimes I’m not very good at talking to one person, let alone a whole room.’ But his short speech was gracious and fluent and perfect. ‘The first thing I felt when I left,’ he said, ‘was that I had to give something back.’ And so he did, over eight hundred whole pounds, which means a huge amount to this organisation.

The boss stood up to take the cheque. ‘It’s not often I’m lost for words,’ he said truthfully. There was a pause, whilst he found some good ones. At the end, he looked at the gathered veterans and said: ‘It’s a real privilege to work with you guys.’ Right on the money. Everyone clapped and I quite wanted to whoop and holler, but I restrained myself. I took some pictures instead.

There is a slight hippy dippy idea that the universe sends you the things you need, when you need them. I’m not quite sure about that, but Jung had a similar idea, which he called synchronicity, and the Buddhists go there too. There might just be a grain of rational truth in it. I don’t know who sends what: universe, fate, give it the name you like. But I got sent something really good. If it had not been for the mare, I might never have discovered HorseBack, and it is the absolute definition of a one true thing, and it really is a privilege to work with those guys, just like the man said.

I got home to my Pigeon. She was a bit dopey and wobbly after her anaesthetic yesterday. She gave me the Disney eyes and I fed her treats and stroked her and made encouraging noises and told her she was a very marvellous creature indeed. The Playwright called, with jokes and words of wisdom and the exact right combination of understanding and encouragement. Also, there was a call from one of the very old friends who has known the Pidge since the very day she arrived in our lives, a small bundle of black fur. The old friend is the mother of my goddaughter M. ‘The Pigeon is M’s favourite dog in the whole world,’ said the old friend. ‘Even more of a favourite than our own dog.’ She laughed. She sent love.

And talking of love, the thing that never fails to astonish me is the kindness and love sent by the Dear Readers. You did this after the old Duchess went, and you do it again now. It touches and cheers me more than perhaps you know. If it had not been a HorseBack day, this entire post would have been devoted to the miraculous nature of the Dear Readers. Who knew so much generosity of spirit and cleverness and kindness was out there, on the wilder shores of the world wide web? 

After Frankel won the Lockinge, Tom Queally said: ‘He belongs to racing now.’ In my fanciful mind, I think: the Pigeon belongs to the internet. I did not expect to have a dog who was beloved from the Antipodes to America, but it turns out that is what I do have. That’s a lot of love. Thank you for it.

The old lady is chasing rabbits in her sleep now. I take this as a GOOD SIGN. We’ll bugger on for a few days yet, I think.

 

Today’s pictures:

The happy HorseBack horses:

The view from the top of the hill:

The cheque presentation:

My sweet girls:

The Pigeon, after I brought her home from the vet last night, swaddled in blankets:

The love

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I know I talk rather a lot about the animal love, but it’s on my mind again. (Non-dog and horse people, and flinty unsentimentalists: move slowly to the exit.)

There is an awful, cruel, sneering cliché about spinsters with cats. Oh, the poor old lady who can’t get a gentleman, with her poor pussy. Ha ha. This never takes into account the Occam’s Razor of the matter, which is that some women don’t fancy fellows, but do really like cats. It’s not pitiable or pathetic. It just is.

I live alone. I regard it as an enormous privilege, although some people, even those who know me quite well, think it frankly odd. I used to get cross about this, as if my lack of desire for husband and children was something which had to be defended all the time. I went about with my fists up, ready to fight the slightest slight, to counter the merest raised eyebrow. Now I am older, I think: everyone must think what they will. Everyone must live the life they want to live.

Despite this new sanguinity, there is the occasional batsqueak of the old judgements, the worn platitudes. Am I like the old ladies with the cats? Are Red and Pigeon my sad feline equivalents?

I think that people get this whole women and creature thing the wrong way round. If you choose to live without someone, you do not need to get some missing love from an animal. It is very nice to have the adoring Pigeon gaze; when she jumps up and down with literal joy when she sees me, of course it makes my heart beat faster. When Red lifts her head and canters from the other side of the field when she sees me, when she gives her lovely low whinny of welcome, of course I feel fired with delight. But it’s not the getting of love that is important. I am practical enough to know that a lot of that comes from the fact that I am The Human with the Food. No, what they give me is somewhere to put the love.

The only disadvantage that I can see of living alone, apart from the fact that there is no one to say, oh don’t worry, I’ll call the plumber, is that sometimes my heart is all dressed up with nowhere to go. It gets filled up with affection, and that adoration needs to come out. I assume that if you have a wife or a girlfriend or a husband or a partner for life, you can fling your arms about them at your whim, and express that fullness of heart. That is the gift my two beautiful creatures give me: I can fling the arms. I can express the love.

The Pidge is a very cuddly, affectionate sort of girl. She loves nothing more than the flinging; she can take all the love I have. Red, at the beginning, was not particularly interested. She was much too posh, for starters. Also, she weighs half a ton and hears the call of the ancestral voices much more keenly. I have a theory that dogs have pretty much forgotten their wolfish past, but that horses are alert to the siren call of the wild things from which they descend.

Now, my grand thoroughbred has turned into a teddy bear. Because of the cold, her coat has even fluffed up, so instead of being sleek and hard, she is soft and velvety. She rests, sleepily, on my arm, angles her head up so I can scratch her favourite place below her right ear, stands stock still at my side as I rub her white blaze and chat quietly to her. She has started to appreciate the love. It is why my greatest pleasure now is just hanging out with her. We do work and have wild rides, but the highest joy for me is being with her; sentient human beside instinctive, mysterious animal.

They give me rewards and affection and attention. I get great pride out of them. Today, when the farrier finally arrived, I felt ridiculously proud that Red stood like a rock as he cut and pared and rasped her poor hooves; she was so relaxed that she even dozed off for a bit. She must be the best horse to shoe in Scotland. She was number one top of the class, and I puffed out my chest with admiration.

But really what they do, these animals, the most important thing, the greatest, most generous present, is they act as receptacles for the love. They don’t argue or equivocate; I do not have to read between the lines. They are fine and steady and true. Although they both have their animal mysteries, they are much simpler than humans. At the same time, they have that creature touch of the wild, which puts them on another plane. I think that is their other great gift: they are not of my world, but they consent to live happily in it with me. It is consent, and as a human, you have to earn it. So, along with all the other loveliness, there is the underlying hum of achievement.

As with all my theories, this one is still a bit half-baked. It needs a bit more work. Whatever the truth is, I feel incredibly lucky that I have these precious things in my life, who keep me straight and bring me joy.

And now I am going to see if I can work out who will win the 2.50 at Sandown. (Hoping for a brilliant Richard Hughes ride on the lovely Prince of Sorrento, who loves the mud.)

 

Another gloomy old day, so no I did not take the camera out. Here are a few shots of my lovely creatures:

And of course, there is little Myfanwy. I love her too, but she is a family pony, so it is not the same undilute passion that I have for my very own girls. All the same, I have been working with her lately, and we are making great strides together, and she steals, hoof by hoof, into my heart:

And, specially for the Dear Reader who loves the hens – The Hens:

Hill, under the stormy June sky:

Oh, and I meant to say: The Playwright had his first night last night. It is not the official first night, just the initial preview. But still, he will have seen the play  he wrote, up on the London stage, with one of our very finest actresses in it. I doff my hat in awe and wonder to him. He is so wise and works so hard and makes me laugh so much; no one deserves such a thing more than he.

Of goats and mountains and climbs

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

One of the things I like about the internet is that it is very levelling. There are no ivory towers out there in the prairies of cyberspace. (My only fear about this is that the levelling can go too far, and lead to abandonment of decorum, so instead of saying, ‘I’m not sure I quite agree with you,’ people scream ‘die, bitch, die’.) If ever I should get a bit above myself, I only have to look at the search terms which bring people to my blog.

In my hubristic mind, these might be Universal Verity, or Most Beautiful Canine in Existence. In reality, they include Goat Climbing Mountain.

I should be thinking about serious things like the morality of banking bonuses, and the tottering world economy, and whether poor Andy Murray shall ever stop being shouted at for not winning a grand slam. (I’m not very interested in tennis, but I find the Murray phenomenon fascinating. He works incredibly hard and is very talented; he is at the top of a highly competitive game; the three men who routinely beat him are titans; yet he seems unable to shake off the label of dour Scottish loser.) I should be contemplating big serious questions about government cuts and fiscal austerity and what is going on with Hungary and the IMF.

Instead, I am slightly obsessed by the whole goat climbing mountain thing. I don’t think I have ever actually written about goats. I may have reported on the half-joke plan that The Sister and I hatched in case the entire economy does, finally, implode. We are going to grow vegetables and keep goats. You see how cunning and finely conceived our plan is. Ha. The crazed bankers and know-nothing economists can do their worst; we shall have the goats to keep us warm. However, none of this involves mountains, or, in fact, climbing. How the Google gets to me from the clambering goats is a mystery.

I also love the idea of people sitting down and bashing ‘goat climbing mountain’ into a search engine. It’s either a Dadaist form of poetry, or someone is doing espionage. Goat climbing mountain could be Moscow Rules. Just as I imagine discreet operatives going up to each other in St James’s Park, which as everyone knows is where all the spooks meet in their lunch break, and saying ‘The geese are flying south for winter’, so I could see that ‘goat climbing mountain’ is clearly code for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The other, even more perplexing search is: girl fawn Maddow. This is code so abstruse that even Bletchley Park might be left wondering. I do write about Rachel Maddow quite a lot. I love her. The love might, I suppose, sometimes pitch over into fawning. But I do not think, at 44 years and 362 days old, I could be described as a girl, even by the most unreconstructed patriarch.

I don’t know. Perhaps Rachel Maddow secretly has a thing for fawns. The most brilliant thing about this odd search is that now, every time I watch the coruscating Maddow show, I shall think of baby deer. Which is probably a very good antidote to the latest loon thing Newt Gingrich is saying.

The sun is fading now, and the last of the frost lies still and white on the cold grass. It’s been a long week. I have, as is so often the case, not done quite enough work to satisfy. I bash on and bash on and think: come on, come on, not there yet. More, more, I think.

I have thought a lot about my father. In yesterday’s life post, I wanted to say: remember your dead well. Then I thought: that is a stupid thing to say, of course we all remember our dead. I don’t need to write that down. But then I wondered whether there is a part of mourning where one shies away from thinking of the departed. There is a childish, magical part of the brain that wonders: if I do not think about them, perhaps they will not really be gone.

On my desk, I have a photograph of the first man who ever believed in me as a writer. Since, at the time, I was writing books so bad that I need to invent a new word for execrable to describe them, his belief was a real leap of faith. He was not a relation; he had no skin in the game. He was an artist, who, for some reason, picked me up, and encouraged me. I was twenty. I knew nothing. But he treated me as if I were Virginia Woolf.

He died, much too young, from AIDS, many years ago. Every day, I look at his picture, and feel gratitude, and wonder what he would make of it all. I remember him well.

One day, I think, I shall be able to look at a picture of my dad in the same way, with glad remembrance, rather than a tearing in the heart.

 

I know it may be rather vulgar to keep harping on about this, and it could sound like the worst kind of pandering, but the Dear Readers have really been magnificent this week. And now I know I have the goat mountain Maddow fawn people on my side, I believe I can do anything.

 

Pictures of the day.

It was another afternoon of astonishing light. Most of these pictures are of the hills and trees I can see when I look due south. I hope they are not too same old, same old. But there is something about the Scottish light, seen at that angle, that is so magical I can't quite get over it:

This one is completely out of focus. But these are two of my favourite little birches, and I rather love the blurred effect, as if they are in a painting:

The old iron fence. I can't get enough of that, either:

The beech avenue, from a low angle. (More attractive crouching from me, as The Pigeon looks on in bemusement.):

This happy face is because I bought her a new ball. I know I'm always banging on about how all you need are free sticks, but sometimes I like to get her an actual bought object to have fun with:

Here she is, with the bright orange thing in her mouth, doing what I used to call 'bottom in the air', but which I know now from the Dear Readers is actually a serious yoga pose called 'downward facing dog':

As my friend The Playwright says: do admit.

The hill:

Now I really am ready for the weekend. Happy Friday.