Why not choose the good?

I’ve suddenly had a spate of cold calls. Some bugger has obviously sold my telephone number for ready cash and now they are all piling in.

I do get these occasionally, but I have a patent method of dealing with them. They are usually about double-glazing or kitchens, and the moment the person starts the spiel I say, very politely: ‘May I stop you there? I’m a tenant.’

They can’t get off the telephone quick enough. One gentleman was really nice, roared with laughter, apologised, and said cheerfully: ‘You should not be on this list at all. I’ll make sure you are taken off it.’

‘How kind you are,’ I said, and we had a lovely chat.

Even if you don’t rent, say you do. The callers hate it.

But these new ones are different; they want to maintain my washing machine and do my electricity. They ask all kinds of questions. I fob them off with a variety of vagueness, elaborate courtesy, and apologies. It’s a horrid job, ringing up strangers, and not their fault they work for rotten people.

I think, as I go into the kitchen to make strong coffee: who sits down in a room and says ‘I know. Let’s start up a company where we ring up people who have not given us their number and try to flog them things they don’t need.’ What childhood trauma or lack of love leads to that kind of bleak thinking? It’s fine for me, a minor irritant in a busy day, but if you were someone vulnerable from age or bereavement or illness, living alone, I imagine you could feel beleaguered and besieged. I’ve heard rumours that some of the companies like to target the old, thinking they are a soft mark, and that if you are over seventy you can get as many as five of these calls a day.

There are so many huge horrors in the world: militias and fanatics and dictators. North Korea has been in the news lately and I can hardly read of the misery. But there are a lot of small bads too. This sort of heartless, grasping business model is a daily bad.

It’s no wonder the corporate class is not beloved. I suppose they don’t care, as they come on the radio and spout their empty jargon. Occasionally, you hear a good business person come on and speak like a human and even make a joke and it’s like a flower on a dung heap. What I find so odd is that if you are clever enough to set up a company that works, you are in a position to do good things in the world. You could use your power for good instead of evil.

John Lewis is the shining beacon of this, with happy employees who are invested in the business and go on special John Lewis holidays at their lovely houses in Wales or somewhere. They have the best customer service in the country and sell useful items that people want. (My latest John Lewis delivery was free, and arrived in the north-east of Scotland, an area that makes many carriers purse their lips and suck their teeth, in two days flat.) They are one of the few companies that rode out the recession and they are nearing iconic, national treasure status. If they can do it, why can’t everyone?

Then one reads of Tesco, whose leaders appear to have lied about profits, trashed the company, been famously awful to their suppliers (they make small farmers despair), had a devastating effect on local shops and high streets, and now are walking away from the wreckage with their fat bonuses intact. It’s enough to make screaming lefties of anyone. I’m pretty soft centre-left, but when I read stories like that I want to nationalise the means of production on the spot and start singing the Internationale and break out all my old Billy Bragg albums.

I think a lot about choices. Everyone has choices. I see them in action on the internet. You can be one of those angry people, spreading hate and bile under your assumed screen name, or you can write generous, encouraging comments and share pictures of baby pandas and add to the sum total of human happiness. The old-fashioned grandmothers of a lost generation used to say: it’s nicer to be nice. I know it sounds hopelessly hello sky, hello clouds, and irredeemably weedy wet, but why would you not choose the good?

 

Today’s pictures:

Amazingly, there actually are some from today.

Here is one of the HorseBack course participants, having her first sit on a horse ever. I’m always incredibly impressed by this. My parents put me on a pony before I can remember having conscious thought, which is another reason the red mare feels like home. I try to imagine how it must feel when every single thing is alien and odd. They were very brave and good, these women:

(Mikey was a sweetheart too. He is one of my favourites in the HorseBack herd, the most affectionate and dear fella, but with a strong character and defined ideas of what he does and does not like.)

The view in the gloaming:

The autumn leaves in my field:

And the autumn horse. She does not really like the summer. She gets too hot and the pollen bothers her. This is her dream time of year. She can get all muddy and furry and not give a damn about anything. It is this time of year that she becomes her most horsey self. She was so happy this morning that I did not ride her, but just worked her on the ground and then hung out with her at the feed shed, chatting to her and scratching her sweet spots and laughing like a drain when she managed to liberate the meadow-herb treats from their barrel, with a look of absolute triumph on her face. When she is in this mood, I like to be near her, to catch the waves of content as they spread from her glorious, powerful body, as if she is emanating joy. Here she is, this afternoon, as the light was starting to fade, coming up for her tea:

I’m not sure I ever loved anything in quite the way I love her. It’s not the biggest love, obviously, because she is not a human. It’s not like the family or the old friends. It is an amazingly simple love, profound and enduring as the earth. It has a lot of astonished gratitude in it. It’s a bright, clean, true love, and it makes me laugh and smile.

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:

Saturday in brief

Lovely day. Sun shone; the herd gambolled; all my bets bolted up at the races. Red and I had a pretty wild ride through the stubble, which is where I am convinced she is convinced the mountain lions live. There was one spectacular wig-out. At this point, I always have a choice: take her back to the quiet paddock for schooling, or press on.

I pressed on. Two more laps of the golden fields, and I had convinced her that I was damn well on predator alert and nothing was going to come and get her. In return, she consented to walk calmly on a loose rein. We did one floating half-speed gallop up the hill, and then I mooched her home. It’s vulgar to say so, but I felt incredibly proud of us both. We faced down those mountain lions, even though they only exist in our heads.

Then the darling filly Mince put her brave head in front in the 3.05 and poor William Hill got such a shock from my enormous bet that its website stopped working. Mince has lately been breaking track records for fun. Today, she was on ground softer than she liked and she had to dig deep. It’s always a lovely sight to watch the really classy fillies show they have guts and heart as well as talent. So now my throat is hoarse from shouting and The Pigeon is exhausted from leaping up and down like a cartoon dog, which is what she does in a close finish.

Here are the pictures of the day:

Trees:

Red’s View:

The little herd:

Red doing Minnie the Moocher, just as if she had never freaked out in a stubble field in her life:

Pigeon, doing her dignity on the monument face:

Hill, with added sheep:

11.11.11.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

At breakfast, as we are eating our boiled eggs and sourdough toast, the youngest of my small relations says: ‘Are all the good men dead?’

‘The good men?’ I ask. I frown and concentrate. I always do my best to follow her lightning trains of thought.

‘Yes,’ she says, looking straight at me. She is curious but not upset. ‘The good men died.’

She looks more closely at me, as if wanting me to understand. ‘You know, in the war. So people wear the poppy.’

I am quite astounded. I of course think her the most gifted and remarkable child, but she is my tiny cousin and I am biased in her favour. I don’t always know what children might do at what age, what is advanced, what is only to be expected. I think three is quite remarkably young to know about war and poppies.

So then we talk about the poppies and the fallen and that kind of thing. There is something very restful in talking to a small child about death, because it is not something they yet put much drama around. It seems to be a fact of life to them. They are amazingly philosophical and clear-eyed about the whole business.

‘Is he old? Is he going to heaven?’ she had said, earlier, of one of my dear octogenarians.

‘Probably quite soon,’ I said. ‘But not just yet.’ (I say this more in hope than in the spirit of empiricism.)

Anyway, my little cousin H is very interested in this life and death stuff. So we speak of the soldiers and the wars. I find myself not sanitising for her, but keeping it very clear and simple. I hate patronising children, but I don’t want to baffle and confuse either.

Then she says: ‘Is there still war?’

‘Yes, ‘ I say. ‘In somewhere called Afghanistan. It’s very far away.’

‘It’s very far away,’ she agrees, as if she knew that all along.

She thinks about all this for a while. She writes something in her special notebook. She looks up suddenly at her mother and me. She smiles her blinding smile. She seems to have it all sorted out in her head. She is wonderfully present, and vivid, and in the world.

At quarter to eleven, the Beloved Cousin and I put on our smart coats, with our scarlet poppies on our lapels, and drive to the little Cotswold town up the road, to gather among the ancient pillars of the old cornmarket for the eleven o’clock silence. We did this last year; it has become an important thing for us. I am not sure why. We do not have fighting men in our family; we have no brothers or cousins or even friends in the dust of Helmand Province. It’s age, perhaps; we find it increasingly proper to pay our respects.

I always think of my old, dead grandfathers. My mother’s father flew in the First World War, and called the aeroplanes in from the control tower of RAF Benson in the second. He wanted to fly, but they said he was too old. He was an actor, and the pilots liked his voice, so that was part of the reason why he was chosen to guide the Hurricanes and the Spitfires home. My father’s father fought in the Second World War, mostly in Italy. They were of that generation, almost all gone now, who did not have to be professional fighting men to see active service. They saw things that I cannot quite imagine, even though imagination is my business.

Last year, the gathering was very small, perhaps no more than twenty people. This year, the cornmarket was full. There were the old people, smart in their spruce poppies, but, this time, the young and middle-aged too. A little canon went off; we all stood to attention, silent with our thoughts. Down the high street, shopkeepers came out onto the pavement and stood still; pedestrians stopped, and bowed their heads. A lorry went past; I felt a sudden fury that the driver could not have pulled over, on the stroke of eleven. But then I thought life must go on, deliveries must be made, jobs done.

I thought, suddenly, brutally, viscerally, of my departed father. Must not cry, must not cry, I thought. This is not about me. This two minute silence is about the war dead, and everything they fought for. (In my more sentimental moments I think: it was so that my generation can be free.)

Then the canon sounded again, and that was that. The group shifted and smiled politely at each other and dispersed. The gentleman with his flag from some Veterans’ association lowered his standard. The Cousin and I went across the road and had a restorative espresso.

‘I wish there had been The Last Post or something,’ I said. ‘I could have done with a trumpet.’

Later, in the dank afternoon, we took the dogs to the arboretum at Westonbirt and looked at the acers. Whatever else happens, the magnificent trees remain the same. I always have a profound gratitude for the trees, but today I felt it more keenly than ever. I love their stillness, their history, their beauty. There have been moments, this year, when I have really thought: whatever happens, I have the trees.

 

So, for the pictures. I promised you photographs of acers, and so you shall have them. Sadly, it was a dark day, and we went late, and everything is blurred and out of focus, because of the light. As I snapped, rather fruitlessly, I hoped that the wonky effect might just give an impressionist look, as if they were pictures painted by Monet. Instead, they are just rather substandard pictures. But at least you can see the colours:

Now for some slightly better ones I took earlier, of the garden. It always amazes me to come south and see a euphorbia as green as if it were springtime:

And a perfect autumn rose:

And my favourite astrantias. How can astrantias still be in their pomp? In my neck of the woods, such a sight is quite out of the question:

And a little lavender:

Here are the windfalls in the old orchard:

And wonderful moss on an ancient apple tree:

And the glorious twisted trees themselves. My fruit trees are still so young; they do not have this old, historical aspect:

I made all the dogs pose in a trio. I think they look so splendid together that I took a stupid amount of pictures. The Cousin's dogs are ten full years younger than my Pigeon, but I think she does not suffer by comparison. Here she is, in the middle, putting on her most regal air with the youngsters:

And on the left, lying down, as befits her great age and gravitas:

It still feels strange not to finish with my hill, but I am in the south now, in the flatter lands. By next week, I shall be quite used to it.

Not really about Greece at all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to wade into a whole thing about Greece. I have been telling you an awful lot about my life lately, and it is high time I swished about my soi-disant credentials as a citizen of the world. I have no idea where this citizen of the world idea came about, but it is something I have had stuck in my head since I was about eighteen. In my addled mind, it has two essential elements. One is that despite different cultures and customs and local mores, people have more that unites them than divides them. It’s a bit mushy, I freely admit, but I like to think the human heart knows no borders. And secondly, I feel a perfectly inexplicable duty to look outward, and not get trapped into an insular, island nation state of mind.

So, I get an odd guilt when I just bash on endlessly about the garden and the dog and the hills. I must have serious opinions about world events, especially when the world is so very strange. I have no notion where these internal imperatives come from, but I must obey them.

Greece, I thought. Come on. It’s the only story in town. It’s the most incredible, in its literal sense, story in town. The idea that one small nation could effectively hold the world economy to ransom seems almost too curious for my small brain to take in. Possibly the repercussions might not be felt in Indonesia or Brazil, but if Greece goes smash, the shattered pieces of the Euro dream will shake the mighty behemoth of America, as well as all of Europe. Poor battered old Blighty, with her shaky 0.5% of growth, will almost certainly fall back into deep recession. Banks will totter and fall. Consumer confidence will crash through the floor, lending will dry up, stock exchanges as far away as New York and Hong Kong will shudder and sway.

I was going to be snarly and cynical. What does that Greek Prime Minister think he is doing? I was going to write about the reaction to his decision to call a referendum on the bailout deal in the House; how the Indian Prime Minister curled his lip; how Sarko and Mrs Merkel are tearing out their hair. I was going to write about years of incompetence and corruption.

Then I thought: hold on. I thought of the people living in Greece, and how they must feel. They are in the worst crisis since the war. There are no good options for them. And then some superior British person comes along and starts pontificating about their government. It suddenly seemed like insult on injury.

One of the oddest things about nationality is how it can feel a bit like a family. I can bitch and moan about my relatives, but if someone from the outside were to do the same, I would rise to my family’s defence like a tiger. So it is with Britain. I can complain about the government, or national absurdities, or societal weaknesses. But if I hear a foreign voice on the radio being critical of the British, I get prickly and defensive. This is entirely irrational. In the same irrational way, I get a mad gleam of pride when I hear someone saying something kind about us.

There was an excellent programme on the World Service the other day about The Establishment: what it is, how it has changed, whether it even exists any more. The Britons interviewed were, quite rightly, rather scathing about the remnants of the class system and other anomalies which allow Oxbridge to dominate the corridors of power. I did not mind that at all. It was within the family.

Then a thoughtful German correspondent called Thomas Kielinger came on. I’ve heard him before on Radio Four, and he is always incisive and fascinating. He could have torn into the oddities of The Establishment, but he chose instead to be polite. He said the thing he noticed most about those Britons who rise to the top of politics and journalism and the arts is how broad their intellectual reach is, how antic and interesting their conversation. He said it was what he enjoyed the most about working in London.

This had nothing whatsoever to do with me. And yet, I felt proud and pleased. There is no explaining it.

So, I’m not going to go sneering at the Greek government. There are plenty of economists and international experts and Euro commentators who are going to do that anyway. The Greek people are having a perfectly ghastly time. I am not going to intrude on family grief, with my gimcrack opinions and my cheap shots.

This is why I would never have been any good at being a columnist. In the abstract, I believe absolutely in the right to give offence. It’s a great British tradition; it’s one of the glories of Private Eye; it’s a central tenet of freedom of speech. But in the particular, I think: I’m not sure I want to put words on a page that might fall like a new blow on a fresh bruise. It’s ridiculously mimsy, and I’m not especially proud of it, but there we are. That turns out to be my admission of the day.

 

Pictures of the day:

More autumnal hills:

Almost my favourite of the little beeches:

For all that we are in a riot of ambers and scarlets, there are still amazing patches of green. This is the philadelphus on my dry stone wall:

The very last leaves on the rowan tree:

Carpet of leaves:

The lovely hydrangea just keeps flowering:

As does my tiny sedum cutting, which I hope is going to survive the winter:

Sometimes this dog is so sweet and funny I really don't know what to do. This morning, she decided to amuse me by posing next to the marjoram, so it looks as if she is wearing a flower in her hair, like Carmen Miranda:

And then she did her OHMYGOD OHMYGOD Is That A Rabbit face:

The sky had clouded over by the time I got to the hill, so it sits, rather regal, under the violet murk: