A mighty ride. Or, time and love.

I run down to the field. The sun is shining, but in my head, the woods are dark and deep and I have miles to go before I sleep. Or: there is still work to be done. Time is still racing past me. The precious hours tick away. My desk howls to me, in the harried spaces of my frontal cortex.

The Remarkable Trainer says: ‘Come on, let’s go out for a ride.’

I wiffle and waffle and scratch my foot on the ground. My time management, I think, hopelessly, helplessly.

I say, not altogether graciously, ‘Well, as long as I am back at work by four.’

At a quarter to five, I return to the field, on the back of my red mare. I don’t know if I have ever, ever been so proud of a horse in my life. I get off slowly and fall on her neck, wishing she could speak English so that I can express to her the depth and reach of my admiration and congratulations.

Out we had gone, in the sparkly October sunshine, the colours as vivid as if the whole world had just been washed and cleaned.

In that clean, bright world, the little American paint filly is by my side, her ears pricked, taking it all in, with the Remarkable Trainer up. We go over bridges, along the burn, into the woods, out into the wide south meadow, with its tempting new grass, which has not been shorn by sheep since the early summer.

Red has been off for two weeks, with a bit of a pulled muscle. This is our first time back together. The received wisdom about thoroughbreds is that the moment they feel a wide expanse of pasture under their feet everything in them goes zoom, zoom. The received wisdom says you can’t just pull an ex-racehorse out of the paddock after time off and take them out into the wild spaces.

Red looks at the hills, which open up in front of us like a book, so that we can almost see to Coull. She walks kindly in her rope halter, her friend by her side.

We pass the sheep, and random cyclists, and a group of unknown humans, who have a very small human with them, which is making a noise. Neither of the girls turns a hair; they merely observe the tiny human with benign interest.

We circle the wide pasture and come back to a rise. We break into a canter, going easy on a loose rein, as if we are in the great spaces of Wyoming. At the top, the mare comes back to me, dropping easily into a low walk without drama or fuss. Just one little excited shake of the head, as if to remind me that she does have the blood of champions in her, and she feels it, at a moment like that.

We amble back on the buckle. Sometimes I just drop the reins and let her mooch along, steering her with my legs.

She is so clever.

She looks, as I leave her eating her tea, very, very pleased with herself indeed. The love I feel rises up in my chest and spills out into the very air, as if it were a living thing, too big to be contained in one mortal body.

I wish, I wish she could speak English, so she could know all this.

I think: perhaps she has an inkling.

I think: the received wisdom can put that in its pipe and smoke it.

 

Today’s pictures:

Before the ride, I went for a quick drive around the autumn hills. These ones were the ones we saw from the ride, only from a different angle:

Rewind to this morning. Red leading her girls in for breakfast:

She takes her job as lead mare very, very seriously indeed:

Then the Horse Talker and I took our girls out for a morning walk in hand. And we walked past this:

And then I made everyone stop and pose for photographs. Herself, we have noticed, is always ready for her close-up:

The HT admiring the serious posing skills:

Still showing her best side:

Or perhaps this profile is better:

At which point I clearly decide that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and turn into a bit of a Posy Posington myself. As you can see, Autumn the Filly HAS NO BRIEF FOR SUCH VANITIES:

My best beloved, back in her paddock this afternoon, shaking her head with pride and doing comical Didn’t I Do Well faces:

(Actually, she’s probably just got a fly, but I am projecting madly, such is my joy.)

Meanwhile, Mr Stanley the Dog is tracking bluebottles with his X-ray vision. Because that is what he is really good at:

Sometimes, when I tell these horse stories, I fear it sounds as if I am showing off. Oh, oh, look at me, with my perfect mare and her perfect skills and all our perfect harmony. What I really want to do is to say: if I can do it, anyone can.

It’s not as if I got a problem horse. She came out of a great yard, from one of the finest horseman I’ve ever seen. But she did race, and she did play polo, and she is a thoroughbred, and when she arrived the strangeness of being in a new place did make her reactive and spooky. The dial could shoot up to a Spinal Tap Eleven in a heartbeat. The flight of a young pheasant could make her leap vertically into the air, with all four feet off the ground, like a cartoon horse. I rode her in a martingale and feared I should never be good enough.

We had our moments, and we shall have moments again, because she is a horse, and there is no such thing as bombproof. But this new ease and confidence and happiness and trust, so profound that when I ride her I feel as if there could be no other equine in the world for me, as if she was made for me, bespoke, is from slow, steady, simple work. I have no special skills. I am a creaky forty-six year old female, catastrophically out of practice. But I opened my mind and learnt from brilliant people who have forgotten more than I shall ever know. And so we came to this glorious place, of unity, of sympathy, of absolute togetherness.

I want it to be a tale of hope and possibility and encouragement. So that any time someone says, oh but thoroughbreds are impossible, someone else might say, but no, look at the red mare.

All it takes is time and love. And all humans have those.

A fairly rambling Thought for the Day.

At HorseBack, a man says to me: ‘Tania, come in here. There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s doing things with women.’

We go in. I am introduced. The HorseBack man says: ‘You are a raging feminist after all.’

I smile proudly. I say: ‘I am a raging feminist.’

The other gentleman also smiles, with no trace of fear.

I’ve never understood the thing of not being a feminist. Why would you not want men and women to be treated equally? Why would you privilege one group of humans over another, simple because one set has ovaries and one set has testicles? (It’s a dick thing, shouts the puerile side of my brain. But then, I’ve never really understood that either. Oh, and while we are on the subject: PENIS ENVY IS A MYTH.)

I think the problem is that people get muddled. Category errors canter about like spooked horses. The idea somehow got put about that feminists refuse to acknowledge difference, that they want men and women to be the same, that in order to achieve this evil plan they must emasculate the gentlemen and butch up the ladies. This is the category error. Men and women are not the same, although one has to be a little careful here, since the male/female brain is on a spectrum, as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has so lucidly shown. Not all men have very male brains, and not all women very female ones. But that’s a whole other story. The point is that however different humans may be, they should be afforded the same opportunities. That’s the equal part. Not equality of self, but equality of dignity.

However, that is not the gist of this story. The point of this story is that it turned out that I got to meet another of the fascinating men. Without a second’s pause, we were off to the races. We galloped over courage, motivation, confidence, belonging, the basic human needs, societal fears, war and any other animal we could get our hands on. By the time the HorseBack man came back in and asked about the women, I said: ‘we’re way beyond the women, we’ve done the whole human condition.’ (I’m also ashamed to say that I bellowed, in quite a small room: ‘SO INTERESTING.’ I have a tendency to shout when excited or riveted.)

What I thought, as I drove away, again stimulated by being in the presence of such an active and thoughtful brain, was a comically simple thing. It is: there are an awful lot of good people, doing an awful lot of good things. They don’t make the papers, they are not followed by the paparazzi, they don’t provide rich fodder for the tabloids. Quietly, unheralded, they go into the places where the broken people are, and do their best to repair shattered lives.

This particular interesting gentleman works for an organisation which helps everyone from addicts to young offenders to children in care. His current project is working with female offenders (hence the women). Prison is stuffed full of women who come from shattered backgrounds and grinding poverty; they often take to drugs, which in turn leads to prostitution. They find themselves in the grip of a pimp or an addicted partner, who may push them onto the streets in order to pay for a double habit. These are the difficult people, from whom society turns its eyes. This interesting gentleman helps them pick up the pieces, and find hope in the wreckage. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to take off all my hats.

The interesting gentleman I met last week also works for a charity, doing similarly vital, good, often unsung work. I thought of these two clever people, making a damn difference. I get a little despairing sometimes, when I think of all the sorrow and the pity. The barrage of bad news from Syria, that most knotty of Gordian knots, with no good solution or easy answer, can make one want to give up and hide in a hole until it is all over. Sometimes, if one pays attention to the news, it is tempting to think that the whole of the human condition is poverty and fear and prejudice and injustice. We are all for the dark, and there’s nothing in our puny plan which can counter it. (You see that I am so exercised that I have used my hated Universal We. Forgive me.) But there absolutely are rays of light. These good individuals, fighting their own good fights, are the glimmers in the darkness.

The other trap that I sometimes tumble into is the idea that all these organisations are too small, up against the hugeness of the wars and dictators and terror organisations and blank walls of hatred. But then I think of the thing that was quoted in Schindler’s List, when Oscar Schindler was berating himself for not saving more people. Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. It is a small, difficult truth. But it is a truth, and it is a light, and it is my thought for the day.

 

Today’s pictures:

The Remarkable Trainer came and continued Red’s jumping education:

She actually did a BOUNCE. This is when you put up two fences without a stride in between. The horse must land and then immediately take off. It’s pretty difficult. This is only her fourth serious jumping lesson. She did it perfectly, twice. The RT and I whooped and threw our arms in the air. Red looked at us both as if to say: Yes, well, of course.

Clearly telling her best friend all about her own utter brilliance:

Look at this collection. She is starting to learn to carry herself like a dressage horse. Rather amazingly, it is not done with contact or even any obvious aids, but the power of thought. This sounds bonkers, but, as the RT explains, if you just think upwards, the horse will rise up to meet you. It’s a completely different gait, the most lovely, rolling trot. Red is so, so clever I can’t really get over it:

I love this intelligent face. And the ear, of course:

We haven’t had a beech avenue for a while. Here’s one with a galloping dog in it:

The hill:

No saddle, no bridle, no stereotypes.

Yesterday, I was thinking about position. Position is very important. It’s easy for me to get complacent because I sat on a pony practically before I could stand; of course I know about damn position. But the riding really was thirty years ago, and my poor old body almost certainly has no muscle memory left in it. Let alone much muscle. So, just now, I’m all about re-learning position.

I made the fatal mistake of getting on the interweb and typing in ‘perfect position’. Ha, ha, ha, HA, went the internet gods. We laugh at your puny plan. There were all the Brilliant People, with their perfectly schooled horses, and a position that would make angels weep. It certainly made me weep. I contemplated taking up something to do with sheep.

Then, today, the Remarkable Trainer arrived. She is very young and entirely fearless and throws out challenges like confetti. (She was the one who decided rigging up a makeshift arch with a shower curtain hanging from it was a good desensitising tool, and laughed her head off when I rode my thoroughbred mare straight under it. The curtain, I should tell you, was flapping at the time.)

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Position.’

I thought she was going to get me in the saddle and talk about my seat bones and squint at my back and reposition my knees.

‘I think bareback,’ she said.

So we put a pad on Red the Mare, in order that I did not slip about on her shiny back, and tied the ends of the long line to her rope halter and I scrambled on, with a lot of oofing noises (Red did not move a hair) and suddenly I was riding bareback. A little turn, some figures of eight, a lovely low trot. Bareback, which I have not done since I was about ten years old, is buckets of fun. You can feel the horse under you and you don’t have to furrow your brow and think about that damn position, because your body falls naturally into place.

‘Do a canter,’ the Remarkable Trainer suddenly shouted, filled with merriment.

‘What the fuck?’ I yelled in my head.

Out loud, I said, in a slightly wavery voice, ‘Oh, you think?’

Problem is, my dander is very light-sensitive. All it takes is one joking suggestion, and the dander is up, and who cares if I am forty-six and have no muscle memory?

I took the mare down to the bottom of the field. I breathed deeply, into my diaphragm. ‘We’re going faster, we’re going faster,’ I told her, almost singing. ‘If I bloody fall off,’ I said, ‘everyone will howl with laughter.’ Red twitched her ears at me, as if to say: the old girl is rabbiting on again.

Long walk, nice trot. The wide, Scottish field spread open before us. Lots of tempting grass under those thoroughbred feet, to remind her of her racing days, of her polo days, when she was ridden at speed in a double bridle with a martingale complicated enough to please the most dedicated Miss Whiplash. I looked down at the rope halter. I felt her good, wide back under my legs. Bugger it, I thought.

‘Canter on,’ I said.

And there, in the old set-aside, under the dancing northern sun, my ex-flat thoroughbred mare, with her chestnut coat and her three white socks, with every stereotype in the world flung at her beautiful head, rocked into the most enchanting, rolling, collected canter.

I whooped as if I were a fourteen-year-old at a One Direction concert.

Then we did it again, because we could.

I sat down into her and forgot that there was no saddle and there was no bridle and that I am creaky as hell and that the Brilliant People with their Perfect Position would be roaring with derisive merriment if they could see us now. I didn’t care about anything. It felt like we were flying. Bareback, yelled the voices in my head, suddenly delirious with joy; bugger everyone.

(Sorry. I get very sweary in moments of high emotion.)

I slid off and did a little hopping sort of jig, I was so happy. The Remarkable Trainer laughed a lot. ‘I’m so proud of her,’ I said, kissing the mare all over her dear face. She nodded her head, and wibbled her lower lip, and did her donkey ears, and came as close as an equine ever can to a smile.

I do think she was pretty proud of herself. She doesn’t give a hoot about being on the YouTube, or winning gold cups, or learning to do a flying change. But she does know when she’s done something very clever, and she does know when she has made me dance with joy, and she gets this happy, secret look on her face, as if to say: yes, yes, see what I did. If I were only slightly more flaky than I actually am, I would suspect that she likes exploding stereotypes just as much as I do.

 

Today’s pictures:

The brilliant girl, at rest:

Goofy this is bloody good grass face:

Sheer beauty:

(There may be pictures of the Great Bareback Moment later. The Remarkable Trainer took some.)

Meanwhile, Stanley the Dog is also in full fig:

And more Sheer Beauty:

The hill: