Facing the void.

At 7.26am, the telephone goes. I struggle to consciousness. ‘Are the horses out?’ I mutter.

It is either that or someone has died.

My brother’s voice comes down the line, thin and high, from Bali, where he lives.

‘Hold on,’ I say. ‘I’m on the scratchy phone. I’ll pick up the good one.’

I go downstairs and settle myself on the sofa and watch the morning sun rise.

The brother is having a bit of a crisis. We are all having a crisis, because we are all going to die, and only two monks and the dogs in the street know what to do about that.

‘But you have your horse,’ he cries.

‘I do admit she is my perfect Zen mistress,’ I say, watching the yellow sun muddle in through the slats of the blinds. ‘Without her, I should probably run mad.’

‘All those hippies,’ he said (he is a bit of a hippy himself) ‘I see them, sticking their left toe in their right ear, trying to quiet the fear.’

‘They should get a horse,’ I say staunchly.

‘I’m not sure that everyone does with a horse what you do,’ he says, very dry.

We laugh for quite a long time.

He reads me Clive James’ poem about his daughter’s maple tree, and the gently falling rain. It is about those things. It has a faint air of ee cummings about it. (Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.) It is really about death.

‘Facing the void,’ says my brother. ‘That’s what it is all about. If only everyone could face the void, then they’d stop being so cross.’

I think about the poem. I shout, suddenly, down the long transcontinental line: ‘LOVE AND TREES.’

‘Yes,’ says my brother, slightly less doleful.

‘That’s what Clive James has come to. Love and trees,’ I say. I laugh and laugh and laugh, from sheer pleasure. Me and Clive and the beloved brother in Bali; we shall face the void with love and trees.

‘I do find the void frightening,’ I say.

‘And yet,’ says the brother, ‘we are just going back to where we came from. We were nothing and we go back to nothing.’

‘I thought of Dad last night,’ I say. ‘I wondered where he went. I mean: where has he gone?’

‘He came here,’ says the brother. ‘I got drunk on gin and told all his old jokes. I haven’t told those jokes for twenty years.’

‘Ah,’ I say, oddly relieved. ‘That’s where he went.’

We talk a bit more about death and love and the void. By this time, we are slightly hilarious, and the thing no longer seems so frightening. We are ironical about the void, and make jokes at its expense.

‘I love you,’ says the brother.

‘I love you,’ I say. ‘This is one of the best conversations I ever had.’

‘I did want you to know,’ says the brother. ‘In case I am run over tomorrow.’

‘Mind those buses,’ I say. ‘I’d rather you weren’t run over just yet.’

One of our grandmother’s oldest friends was actually run over by a bus. He had spent his entire life looking into the void, with an exhausted, comical melancholy. He was the saddest and funniest man I ever knew. He wrote one perfect book, under an assumed name, and then gave up.

‘Love you,’ the brother and I yell at each other.

Love won, today. Love beat the void. And now I’m going to ride my mare.

 

Today’s pictures:

Love and trees. Or, hoof by hoof.

I speak, in turn, at length, to the Beloved Cousin and the Younger Brother. I have not spoken to either since last year, and we roar into an orgy of catching up and jokes and ontological questions.

This is the interesting thing to me of middle age. No matter how they start off, the conversations always circle back to: what’s it all about, Alfie?

‘Love and trees,’ I yell, in delirium. ‘That’s all that matters.’

‘And laughter,’ says the Beloved Cousin. ‘You’ve got to be able to laugh.’

We then laugh for about five minutes straight. We do not do polite lady-like merriment; we rock and roll and shout and shriek with laughter. I have a terrible habit of barking with laughter, like a wild dog. It’s not very pretty, but it gets the endorphin level off the scale.

The Brother and I also discuss the danger of labels, and the pernicious trap of assumptions, two of my favourite subjects.

It’s such a funny thing, life; funny peculiar as well as funny ha ha. Sometimes I feel like I have to work it out from scratch each day. But as I get older, despite the overwhelming sense that the only thing I know is that I know nothing, there are some things of which I am increasingly certain.

These do mostly come under the umbrella of love and trees. But it’s not just the obvious operatic loves. It’s not hearts and flowers love that counts the most; it’s not Paris and a good string section. Romantic love is lovely, and to be desired, but the loves I really cherish are the little, mundane, workaday loves. These are the ones about which no one would ever write a book. It is the love of the small things that I think is the engine which keeps us all chugging along. It is the love of what may be considered unremarkable.

Connected with this is learning to find a sense of achievement in the very small. Worldly success is a marvellous thing, and devoutly to be wished, but shooting at the moon always involves the possibility of going smash. Just as I think that the love does not need to be the high, romantic version, I believe that achievement does not need to be the name in the papers kind.

I was thinking about this today as I worked my little pony. The equines teach me horse lessons each day, and quite often life lessons too. This was one such lesson.

I was asking her to go through what she considers perfectly monstrous yellow barrels. No, no, no, she said, planting her feet, and throwing her head in the air, rolling her eyes at me as if I were mad. I considered for a moment, working out how to deal with the impasse. (You cannot make even a very small pony do what it does not want to do.)

Right, I thought. Let’s forget the big goal, which is to walk through the barrels. Let’s just do one step at a time. So, very gently, and with slow patience, I literally asked her to move one hoof at a time. Every step forward was rewarded.

Hoof by hoof, we worked. With each one, her head went down, her trust went up, my delight soared. And suddenly, hardly even knowing it, we were through the frightening obstacles, and after ten minutes were doing little figures of eight around the yellow horrors as if we were in a demonstration. It was all jubilee with us.

I know that I tell you versions of this kind of story quite a lot, at the moment. It is not really because you need to know it, but because I need to remind myself. I need to put down markers. My heart is still bruised from the loss of my dear old dog; I am still haunted by my Great Setback; the memory of my father may still make me weep in the still watches of the night. I am going to be forty-six quite soon, and I am prey to all those intimations of mortality of which this age is made. Yet, if I can do it hoof by hoof, I think I shall be all right.

Love and trees, my darlings. Love and trees.

 

Today’s pictures are from the week, since I was too busy to take the camera out today.

The delightful herd:

This is what Myfanwy looks like when she is uncertain whether she wants to do the thing I am asking her to do:

NO NO NO NOT SCARY BARRELS.

And this is what she looks like afterwards, when she has been gently persuaded that here be no dragons:

Well, maybe not such scary barrels after all.

And this is a long view of the field, looking north, so you can see the full height of the hill behind:

Stanley the Dog was very, very good on his walk today. His recall is improving wonderfully. For this, he gets love and biscuits:

THE EARS:

And two views of the hill:

I hope you are all having a lovely Friday. I have been working the last few weekends, on account of deadline, but tomorrow I am taking the whole two days off and am going to watch the racing and mooch about with the equines and do absolutely bugger all. So I have a very keen Friday feeling indeed.

Mostly pictures

1024 hard-written words today. Sometimes, when I am really motoring, I can do five hundred in an hour. Some days, I have to pull each phrase out of my head with tweezers.

The Younger Brother calls from Bali, where he lives. ‘We must pat each other on the back,’ he cries, for no special reason. ‘We must cheer everyone on.’ (This is the kind of thing he suddenly says, overcome with his own exuberance.)

He is so filled with optimistic certainty that I can practically see the pom-poms. I was feeling a bit grouchy; the weather had turned dour again, I have a dull head cold, the words were hard. Now, thanks to the unfeasibly happy voice of the Balinese Brother, I feel my spirits lift. I contemplate the miracles of the Skype.

Through my work storm, news from the outside world filters in. The economy seems to be recovering. Dear old Blighty is growing again. Ordinary Decent Britons know better to throw their hats in the air over one set of figures, but I can’t help but feel a small green shoot of hope. It’s so long since we had any good economic news.

A Republican politician has said something unspeakable about rape. This appears to be a pathological daily occurrence, so I’m not sure it counts as news. It never ceases to amaze me, though.

Donald Trump has done something idiotic and self-promoting, which is also too usual to be worthy of print. What should be news but is lost below the fold, because the papers are still obsessed with the Jimmy Savile scandal and bashing the BBC, is that two soldiers were shot to death in Afghanistan.

That’s the one that always stops me in my tracks. I don’t know what to say about that. It’s where words fail; even the language of Shakespeare and Milton is not good enough.

Here, in the far north, the trees are turning and the weather is coming in over the hills. There will be snow tomorrow. I feel the faintest flutter of apprehension at the arrival of the serious winter chill. It is time, I think, for stew.

 

Today’s pictures:

Autumn colours on the hills:

And in the garden:

The herd:

The impossible dignity of Miss Pidge:

The hill:

Inexplicable levels of grumpiness

I hate moods. I like good, clean emotions. I don’t even mind painful ones – sorrow, fury – as long as they come from somewhere explicable. I like things to have an explanation. Moods descend, without reason or rhyme, and flatten the spirit.

Without any discernible cause, I am heroically grumpy. My throat is tight with grumpiness. I stump about like a furious old woman, muttering under my breath. I crossly tidy the house. It is our highland games this weekend and people will be coming, and some of them may knock on the door, and I do not want them to go away thinking me a slattern.

Usually, tidying the house gives me a tremendous lift. I feel saintly and relieved. I may glimpse, just for a moment, the Mount Olympus that The Organised People know. I even went and got flowers. (The garden is too confused with this weather to have much for cutting; besides, I went mad with the box last year and so there aren’t that many flowers anyway.)

Instead of improving my mood, the tidying induced an orgy of self-recrimination. Stupid idiot bloody piles, went the Mutley mutter; why can’t I learn to throw pieces of paper away?

The Younger Brother arrived to pick some of my honeysuckle for our sister. He was also after sage for the supper he is cooking tonight. ‘I am bloody grumpy,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There is a terrible alignment of the planets.’

This is the kind of thing he says. My empirical mind takes a step backwards like a spooked horse. But quite frankly, who bloody knows?

The brilliant Johnny Murtagh lifts my mood momentarily by riding a perfectly brilliant race on the lovely, tough Saddler’s Rock, on whom I appear to have had rather a lot of money. ‘Go on, JOHNNY,’ I yell. The Pigeon does her cartoon dog jumping up and down on all fours, barking her head off.

Then I lapse back into non-specific fury.

Ah well. I shall take some iron tonic and count my blessings and smell the flowers and everything will be better tomorrow. It always mysteriously is.

 

PS. I do apologise for the tenses, which are all over the damn place. I am far too cross to go back and correct them. I hope that the Dear Readers will allow my flaws for today. Better better better tomorrow. Really.

 

Pictures:

Tidy house:

You see I have a great fondness for decorative bottles.

Loveliest decoration of all:

Look at that Pigeon, with the paws and the posing. She does not give a stuff about the misaligned planets:

Red the Mare, who is actually quite grumpy too:

The hill: