The Rat Man.

Today, the rat man came.

Thank goodness for the rat man, or I don’t think I’d ever have written this blog again.

I went away on holiday, to the enchanted island of Colonsay, and the sun shone and I saw old and dear friends and Stanley the Dog charmed everyone and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

Then I came home and various things were a bit fraught, so I thought I’d leave the blog for a bit until life settled down.

This was fatal. I started thinking about the blog. The first rule of the blog is NEVER THINK ABOUT THE BLOG.

The moment you start thinking about it, the internal conversation goes something like this:

I’ve got to come back with a bang, because the Dear Readers have been waiting. At which point, the Critical Voices, who are already on their second martini, laugh with so much derision that their hats fall off. Waiting for what? they scoff, wondering whether they should move on to a Gibson.

But, continues the dialogue, the world is getting madder and madder and sadder and sadder and there are huge tragedies unfolding and what price my absurd, tiny life and my flimsy, flaky thoughts in the face of all that? Can I really talk about love and trees and Stan the Man and the perfect cowgirl canter the red mare did this morning, in the face of outrage?

It should have wisdom, says a determined voice, suddenly. That’s the ticket. Rework the whole concept. Every day, give them one paragraph of wisdom. You’ve lived life, you’ve been round the block, you know a thing or two. Be useful.

But I have no wisdom, wails the hopeless voice, who is feeling a bit beleaguered and does not really know how anything works.

The Critical Voices at this stage have gone into a huddle and are bitching about something called a Kardashian.

Might as well give it all up, says the hopeless voice. Nobody needs to know what you think about the world. You have two jobs and three secret projects and a horse and a dog and family obligations. There is no time. There’s no point doing a daily tap dance, saying look at me, look at me.

Then the rat man came. I’d just finished working the mare and she was dozing outside the feed shed. Stan was sunbathing at her feet. The rat man and I talked about rats, and voles, and working dogs, and pointers, and evolutionary biology, and inter-species communication, and trust, and anthropomorphism. If I did not have work to do, I’d be talking to the rat man still. If I had the choice between talking to a rat man or a philosopher, I’d take the rat man every day and twice on Sundays.

And then, I came home and wrote this. Some odd Occam’s Razor had come and slashed its way through the nonsense.

It’s just a thing. Some people are disdainful of it, and that is their right. It hides in its little, poor, obscure corner of the internet, and nobody is obliged to read it. It does not need a reason, or a justification, or a validation. Any daily writing is good discipline; a free exercise of prose helps my fingers and my brain and my muscle memory. It is exactly what it is, no more and no less.

I bless that rat man, and all who sail in him.

 

Today’s pictures:

A small collection from the last couple of weeks:

Queen’s View, near my house:

Stan the Man:

The Younger Brother and me:

The beat of my heart, who, through all my recent grumps and groans, has remained magnificent. I need new words for magnificent:

Rare photograph of all four brothers and sisters together:

Stanley on holiday:

Colonsay:

An ordinary life.

Quite often I think: I must give them something.

The ‘them’ means you, the Dear Readers. I am sending something out, for you.

We make a grand bargain, you and I: you give me your time, and I give you some prose. I try and make the prose good, because that’s sort of the point of me. Sometimes, as you know, I indulge myself a little, when I am overwhelmed with one of my loves or enthusiasms. I feel an odd combination of guilt and defiance about this. The guilt is that I may be boring you; the defiance says it is my place and it’s free and nobody has to read it. The guilt usually wins. (Be more interesting, damn you, shout the critical voices, who have been drinking Negronis and are getting punchy.)

Today, after my morning mediation in the green field with my red mare, I suddenly thought: sending out is the wrong idea. By which I think I mean: it should not be a presentation. Here, have this, on a nice silver tray. I suddenly thought that the whole wonder of the internet is that it gives snapshots of other voices, other rooms. Not so very long ago, people who lived in the country hardly knew anyone beyond the next village. Even now, I know a gentleman who, until a year ago, had never travelled beyond Stonehaven. (About forty miles south, on the coast.) The internet lifted the curtain on a huge, gaudy play. I think that is its special gift.

I like the news. I like that I can watch Rachel Maddow and understand the intricacies of American politics. I like the pictures from NASA and the reports from my favourite training stables and the rolling updates from the BBC. I adore the photographs of the Household Cavalry and the beautiful landscape shots of Scotland’s hidden islands. But perhaps what I love the most are the small bulletins from the ordinary humans, living ordinary lives. An artist here is teaching old people to draw; a gardener there has spotted the first snowdrops; an amateur photographer here has captured a tiny owl on a stone wall.

I like seeing the world through other eyes. I take my own eyes for granted. The things I think, the things I value, the things I love are grained so deep in me that they feel natural and obvious. I am aware of my goofinesses and oddities; I know that not everyone is obsessed with red mares and lichen. I understand that I plough a fairly lonely furrow with my one-woman battle against the dangling modifier and my adoration of the semi-colon. But generally, I secretly believe my feelings and beliefs are fairly universal. (I think this springs from my great hope that there is more that unites the human heart than divides it.)

In fact, I am a creature of a very specific set of cultural markers. I am British; I grew up in a farm and a stable; I was given books to read from my earliest childhood; my first serious school believed in Shakespeare and poetry; my father was one of nature’s gentlemen and my mother insisted on good manners at all times. All those laid down foundational imperatives that run through me like Brighton through a stick of rock. I think I was born with innate optimism and cussedness, and those produce a confirmation bias of which I am hardly aware, even though I try to avoid confirmation bias like the plague.

The internet reminds me that although there are universal human truths and unities, there are millions of individuals who have very different cultures, very different perspectives, very different priorities. They are not just interesting, these other lives,  they are salutary too. They stop me falling into tribalism or fear of the other or complacency. They open me up, rather than closing me down.

All of which is a very long way of saying that perhaps the point of all this is that it is one of those glimpses. Here is an ordinary woman, living in an ordinary country, making an ordinary life, holding ordinary hopes and fears and dreams. Just like you, and yet completely different, all at the same time.

I realise as I write this that it is mildly absurd. Why does there even need to be a point? But my mind is like the questing vole in the plashy fen; it likes answers. It is not very good at letting things just be. (This is why the mare is so good for me, because when I am with her that questing mind falls still, and I am in my most elemental, physical, present self, feeling the Scottish air on my face and the powerful animal under me, searching only for harmony and communion and softness. I ask why later, when I think about her and how her mind works. But when I am with her there are no questions, only the moment which has the two of us in it. She is like a miracle physicist, who can stop the space time continuum with her bare hooves.) If I can work out the point, then I am happy. Today, I have decided that a snapshot of an ordinary life is enough. Tomorrow, no doubt, I shall have lighted on something quite else.

 

Today’s pictures:

More from the road. There really are rather a lot. I fear I may be posting them until every last cow has come home.

This adorable blinky person not only did the perfect collected trot with the bend in it again today, she did it in both directions. Yeah, yeah, she was saying, whistling a little tune under her breath, I can do it this way, and I can do it that way, and would you like me to do it the other way? BECAUSE I CAN. I did not think that I could love her any more than I already did, because the love is already turned up to eleven, but it turns out that I could. Ha. There is always, always room for more love:

I also love that the sweet Paint filly has her show pony face on, as if to say we can’t all be blinking our eyes and wibbling our lips; some of us have to be ready at all times for our close-up.

Some thoughts; no conclusions.

Some of the Dear Readers will be amazed to hear that I do think quite a lot about this blog. I think about it in a discrete way, often writing a post in my head as I brush my teeth in the morning. (These dazzling creations, so brilliant they hurt, dissipate like breath on glass by the time the actual day starts, leaving only a ghostly memory behind.) Rather as if I am feeding a family, and have to remember that we had chicken on Tuesday and little Wilf does not like mushrooms and dear Myrtle can’t abide aubergines but that still all the food groups must be represented, I think well, I banged on about the red mare on Saturday and I went on a tangent about racing on Friday and the Wednesday before that I was in a really bad mood and had a terrible old moan, so today it must be time for something pithy and uplifting. Or, possibly, a jeremiad against the dangling modifier, just to stiffen the sinews.

If I have been grave of late, I try to put some jokes in. (I am quite funny in life, although I never know whether it is funny peculiar or funny ha ha, but I find it really hard to be funny in print, and stand in awe and wonder of those people who can do it.) If I’ve been a bit mimsy, I try and have a rant. If I’ve been all hello clouds, hello sky, I may attempt to sketch a little acerbity. Texture and variety, my darlings, and changes in tempo. Or some such.

This is complicated by the fact that I am often tired by the time I get around to writing the thing, and I can’t remember what I wanted to say to you and I have no time to edit as I would like, or to polish the prose until it gleams. Since really the only point of this is that, when it comes to sentences, I can carry a tune, this is a slight pity.

I think about blogging in a general way, too. It is such a novel medium, and I find it fascinating to watch it develop and change, to stretch its wings or run into sudden cul-de-sacs. It strikes me that the micro-blog is the one that will conquer the world – little bulletins on Facebook have more heft, I think, than long, windy disquisitions on Blogger or Wordpress. I am terribly prone to windiness, which may be why I am not naturally suited to the medium. Even on my Facebook page, I often post perfect essays, complete with sub-clauses and semi-colon action, instead of the preferred three lines littered with exclamation marks and LOLZ. (That is going to be the first and only time I write that acronym. Even doing it in the spirit of illustrative irony makes me feel sad.)

All of which adds up to my usual conclusion, which is: I know nothing. There is no perfect template, no beau ideal. There is no one person, doing it the finest and the best, in whose trail-blazing footprints the rest of us may follow. I often think the point of it is to scatter a little cheer into a dim world. If people are exhausted after a long day, they might come here and look at pictures of trees and Stan the Man and the dear old duchess, get a shot of aesthetics, a breath of the hills, and feel a frown turn to a smile. That is when I think I should just give you the good stuff – something bright, or hopeful, or diverting. I must do a tap dance. I often think this in life, scolding myself if I feel I have not been on good enough form, as if it were my duty to be the life and soul of the damn party, as if I must always be on. I am terrified by the thought of falling into the mundane or the banal or the crashingly dull.

But sometimes I am in a rotten mood, trudging through the slough of despond, furious with myself for doing something idiotic, and I can’t put those ridiculous tap shoes on. Since I am hopeless at faking, I generally tell you that. The doomy part of me is shouting FAIL, FAIL, but oddly, it is often those messy, grumpy, scratchy posts, filled with human flaws and existential doubts, which really get the Dear Readers going.

It’s almost as if, by admitting my own moments of flakiness and hopelessness and fecklessness, I give you permission to have your own, although we have never met and it is none of my business. Yet, there is a sense of that, and perhaps it works because it is the opposite of the perfect face/perfect house/perfect marriage/perfect clothes nexus of the women’s magazines. I eat carbohydrates and don’t give a bugger about cellulite and sometimes forget to take my face off at night and have entirely given up on my hair and am haunted by the cupboard of doom. I am the very opposite of the shiny cover girls who gaze down at ordinary females from the newsagents’ shelves, mocking their paltry attempts to be fabulous.

All of which is a very long way of saying: I don’t really know what it is for, or why I do it, or why I love it, or how to make it better. I do think about it, and I never really come to any conclusions. Which is absolutely bloody typical.

 

Today’s pictures:

The kindness of strangers.

I was going to write a lovely, wandering blog for you about love, and the true meaning of the word amateur. I wrote it in my head as I was riding my red mare this morning. But it was a HorseBack day, and that ate up the hours, and I have absurd amounts of work still to do, and miles to go before I sleep.

So there is hardly time for words.

My glorious girl was at the height of her magnificence today. We had one of those rides that live in the memory. A beautiful, athletic walk, some dandelion dressage, a delightful collected canter, and then I let her go and she put her sprinting shoes on and I felt her power. For a moment, I thought I’d given her too much rope, and we would end up in Coull. But even as she hit full stretch, the moment I said ‘walk’, she walked. Oh, the cleverness of her. I was so proud I practically fainted.

She also made me laugh helplessly. After yesterday’s old person Rocky Horror Show, she has clearly done some hard thinking. As we wandered down the lime avenue, all dozy and in harmony and on the buckle, I spotted a horde of ramblers. Ramblers!!! With their mysterious poles and their ordnance survey maps and their hidden agenda. (I am convinced there is something the ramblers are not telling.) They were also, shall we say, of a certain age. Not quite old enough to have been in the SOE, like the ones yesterday, but not in the first flaming flush of youth. What would the red mare do with her new terror of the oldsters?

Answer: give them a courteous, faintly dismissive nod of her duchessy head, and walk past without so much as a blink.

This makes her three act opera of yesterday even more mysterious. Perhaps it is part of her mission to keep me from falling into complacency. Perhaps I got it quite wrong, and she was not alarmed at all, but merely acting out the vicissitudes of modern life through the medium of interpretive dance.

Anyway, since I have no time for words, I’m going to hand over to a Dear Reader. The comments that come here make me smile, astonish me with their generosity, and often cause me to laugh out loud. I love them all. Sometimes I get one that flies through the ether like an arrow to my bashed old heart. I get one that makes me feel keenly the kindness of strangers, and makes me realise that all this wandering about on equine tangents does actually have a point. As you know, I often wonder what the point of this whole shooting match is, and why I do it. I have no good answers to those questions. But sometimes, the Dear Readers reassure me that perhaps there is a point.

Yesterday, I got this:

‘Five in the morning here and I am belly laughing so hard one of my baby cats came running to see if I was having a seizure. These wonderful, magical creatures provide the best therapy. I mean the horses, not the baby cats. My trainer and I have worked mostly on desensitising, too, this past year - the mare needed the kitchen sink kind of stuff and I had to learn how to overcome my fear of horses in general and this thoroughbred in particular. We are at a nice place now; I trust her enough to get on her back and she has learned that I will not spook so bad so as to cause her a heart attack! In fact last week, she even decided I was ready to try to hang on while she jumped an exercise pole. Smart mare! I did not leave the saddle. So we are making progress. Plus, those feel- good hormones all the baby books promised would flood my system when presented with my newborn which never materialised, are now making an appearance every time I show up at the barn and she runs toward me. This mare could be the greatest love of my life. She has taught this 47 year old woman with an acute fight or flight response to chill the shizz out, as the kids would say. Heading into open heart surgery in the next week or so to fix a congenital heart condition so my riding will have to be put on hold for a couple of months, but sure would appreciate the link to the decent forum of which you speak. I have noticed during my short time as a horse owner that there are a lot of crazies out there and figure I actually don't need to add to my own particular brand. Thank you, Tania. I found your blog last September and you have been my inspiration in all things equine.’

There are several things I love about this, not least the baby cats. I love that someone else of my exact age, many miles away, is going through the same sort of journey. I love that the story is so sweetly shared. I love that across an ocean, someone else, of whom I would have known nothing if it were not for the miracle of the internet, also has a mare who is the love of her life. I love that suddenly, almost shockingly, there is the shining note of stoicism, as open-heart surgery is glossed over as if it is nothing more than going to the shops.

Thank you Elyse. You made my day.

I assume you are across an ocean, because you use the word barn, and smart to mean clever. I’d love to know more about you and your mare and where you both live, and I hope your operation goes well and you are back in the saddle soon.

And while I’m on the subject: thank you all, Dear Readers, for coming back, for being kind, and for so graciously putting up with all my nonsense.

 

Today’s pictures:

After our perfect ride, quite pleased with herself:

Waiting politely outside the shed, as I made breakfast. Raincoat on, as the mercury has plunged to a paltry eight degrees and it is going to rain all day and all night:

Having a little doze, as I appear to be taking my time:

Is it ready yet?:

Please say it’s ready:

YES!!!! BREAKFAST!!!!!:

The sweet Paint:

In other news, the lilac is out:

And finally, one of my HorseBack pictures. I was quite pleased with them today:

PS. Back with the PEN today. The smart loaned Nikon is smart, and the quality of pictures is probably better and sharper. But the dear, battered old PEN does do something magical with colours, and I’m quite tempted to stay loyal to it.

PPS. Whilst I am on the subject of pictures: Blogger has started doing something peculiar with my photographs. It seems to do a sort of auto-enhance as it publishes, like Google Plus does. I hate this, as I edit my pictures very carefully, and get the exact right mix of light and shade. Also, the enhanced pictures sometimes end up having far too much grain in them, which drives me nuts. I can’t find a relevant settings button, and wondered if there were any fellow bloggers out there who know about this oddity.

Ha. Turns out there were quite a lot of words, after all. Same old, same old.

A little tangent for a Friday afternoon.

A lot of wisdom and kindness from the Dear Readers this week. One of my favourite Twitter gentlemen, a fellow racing fanatic, asked me yesterday how I do a blog every day. (Well, not quite every day, but pretty close.) I replied that I could only thank my weirdly obsessive nature.

I like doing it. It is not for money or fame or the ghastly idea of building the brand, which it seems everyone must do now. It is a marking of the days, a recording of my beloved Small Things, a small existential stamping. Yes, yes; here I was.

And yet, there is an oddness too. I feel a very faint bat’s squeak of obligation. This is nuts, of course, but sometimes I do not fight my nuttier imperatives. This audience has settled into a small and exceptionally select band. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me when I see a comment from some of the old faithfuls, who have been with me since the beginning. I also glean particular joy from the international correspondents. You come here, and give me the gift of your time. I feel that in return, I must give you something, as many days as I can. I sometimes feel bizarrely guilty when I go missing in action, even though there is usually the most excellent excuse of life getting in the way.

That really is quite strange. My finger hovers over the delete button. The truth is that today I am tired from a long week and I was not going to write anything, just give you some nice Stanley the Dog pictures. On some days I have a tale to tell; on others, the brain is filled with mud, and I can feel my synapses snapping off, one by recalcitrant one, and there is no story. I am like that today, but I wanted to thank for the kind comments of the week and before I knew it, I was off on this peculiar tangent. (I am fatally addicted to tangents.)

The finger hovers, and then stops. I’ll let it run. I feel a curious liberation in sometimes giving space to my less explicable thoughts. Why not? I write often that I believe people should have the moxie to follow their own goofy star. Perhaps I should put my money where my mouth is and reveal my own profound goofiness. The entire humming theme of Backwards was that the hunt for perfection is a snare and a curse. So in some ways, offering such imperfection feels like putting down a marker. Sometimes I like to tell you the good parts of my day, but I resist the shiny magazine trend for offering gleaming, seamless lives, with all the contradictions and muddliness and small moments of failure airbrushed out. (I think that was why it seemed important to tell you of my shaming crash onto my arse yesterday, and not just confine myself to the glory jumping.)

Shame thrives in secrecy. It lives and feeds in the dark. The moment one admits the flaws, the failings, the idiot notions, the moments of sheer folly, the crashings down to earth (literal and metaphorical, in my case) they lose their power.

And that, my darlings, is my winding and tangential Thought for the Day.

If you can call it a thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are a selection from the week.

We haven’t had any garden pictures for a while:

The lovely colours of some of the HorseBack herd:

This splendid gentleman arrived in the feed shed this morning:

Stanley the Dog:

Can you hurry up with the tea?:

Thanks, it was delicious:

King of the Absolutely Enormous Stick:

The very dear Myfanwy the Pony:

Excellent yoga stretches:

Can’t resist one more of me and my darling duchess:

The hill: