Age cannot wither her. Or, bugger the menopause.

I am, for no known reason, re-reading Middlemarch. I picked it up because I was thinking about my father and the racing world I grew up in. It was a marvellous world, and I remember it with flinging fondness, but it had absolutely no thought in it that was not about horses. When I first plunged into the wide prairies of Middlemarch, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I could not stop talking about it. (What a dead bore I must have been.) After a while, my father patted my hand gently and murmured, very kindly: ‘And this George Eliot, has he written any other good books?’

He was a horseman, what can I tell you? He read Timeform and The Sporting Life.

I was fourteen. Now, thirty-four years later, I come back to it and it is just as dazzling as I remember. But the perspective of age has changed it all. I had quite forgotten Eliot’s sly jokes, so naughty that they make me laugh out loud. (I don’t recall laughing at the time, I was far too earnest.) I now understand, after only a moment, exactly why Dorothea marries Mr Casaubon. At the time, stupidly romantic, I could not understand one word of that. Those moles. Now, I see why her ardent soul could not bear all those well-meaning relations and friends and neighbours, why poor Sir James with his ridiculous puppy and his good-hearted cottage schemes would not do for her.

I think: how funny it is that schools gave me these books to read when I could not comprehend half of them. The summer after Middlemarch, I was reading The Knight’s Tale, L’Étranger and George Herbert. After that: Huis Clos, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Keats and Robert Lowell. I must admit I never got on with pious Mr Herbert for a solitary second, but I was all over the existentialists and convinced that I had the measure of Lowell’s knotty Nantucket poems. I was living proof of the correctness of Donald Rumsfeld (not a phrase I ever thought I would write): a perfect festival of unknown unknowns. I had no idea how little I knew.

When I am not wigging out about mortality, or getting cross with myself for making schoolgirl errors when I really do know better, I like age. As I motor towards fifty, I think that there are lots of lovely things I have now which I did not then. My vanity has almost entirely disappeared. I have a ten-second moment of despair when I see pictures of myself looking bonkers, with terrible hair and no chin. (I never had much of a jawline, and it is running away now, gravity taking its toll.) But most of the time, I don’t really care what I look like. I have a uniform, suitable for doing horses and writing books, and I stay at a reasonable weight so that I do not burden the red mare’s delicate back. I brush up for the races, because it’s the least those fine thoroughbreds deserve, but that’s it.

I know that, apart from actual life and actual death, things really are not a matter of life or death. I was thinking this morning, as I happily walked my horse out into the long meadow, the view reminiscent of the green grass of Wyoming, of the broken hearts of my twenties, when I really believed that not being loved by a certain gentleman meant my life was over. I don’t do that any more. I keep emotions saved up, until I see the whites of their eyes. At this age, there is death and loss and sickness, a great generation going, brilliant minds fading. I save my sorrows for those.

I can work out now which is Object A and which is Object B. I know that when some people seem scratchy or distant or cross, it is not always because I have done something wrong. It’s usually their stuff. (This is the technical term.) I understand that the humane thing is to leave them alone to work it out, and not make it my drama. I know too that turning everything into a drama is dull and selfish, and drains away the life force from those around you. I think I was a bit of a drama queen in my youth. I’m glad I grew out of that.

I know now, which I did not then, that not everyone sees the world in the way I do, and that is all right.

There’s so much about growing older which is a relief. There are so many circuses which are not my circuses, and so many monkeys which are not my monkeys. The ability to step away does not sound like much, but I think it’s a life-changer.

I can still twist myself into a pretzel of angst, and I don’t expect I’ll ever learn about how to deal with the Cupboard of Doom, and I still get stupidly easily hurt and take things to heart which should not be taken to heart. I’m a bit of a muddler and a bit of an obsessive and my geekiness has never left me. I can fly to vertiginous heights of enthusiasm, which means there is usually a crash afterwards. I can get out the twisty little firestarter of self-sabotage, when things are going too well, as if it’s too scary to sit with good fortune or calm seas.

But there really are a lot of things which have changed for the better since I first picked up that mighty novel. I’m writing them now because I like the idea of them, and I think they should be marked. Women are told so often that age is a disaster, that they become invisible, that the mean old menopause and the hideous wrinkles and the sagging skin tone will render them sad and sexless and altogether negligible. I think this is a big fat lie. I say: bugger the menopause. I say: be as visible as you want to be. I say: those wrinkles, which society says you must despise and regret, are the story of every smile and every frown. Think of the brain. Think of all the things it now has in it which it did not have, when the skin was smooth and unlined. Think of the human heart, which has been beaten and battered and bruised, but which somehow survives, expanding against all the odds, which now has the love of many, many years in it, which can tell the difference between the lasting adoration and the fleeting fancy, which beats steadily on, as the years roll by.

Who needs a Grace Kelly jawline, when they have all that?

 

Today’s pictures:

Actually weren’t very good, apart from the HorseBack ones, so here is a small selection from the last few days:

Not caring about a really bad hair day:

The mare’s hair is a bit scruffy too, but she cares even less than I do:

The Younger Brother took those two last ones. Always credit the photographer. That’s another of the important things I have learnt.

Rain, errands, class and coffee. With absolutely no swearing.

Cold hard rain belts down out of a sullen sky. It dirties the snow, which has been thawing and freezing and now lies in horrid dirty clumps.

I have to go and do incredibly annoying errands. I am so annoyed about the errands (I have WORK to do) that I shout at my mother over the breakfast table. She takes it amazingly well.

In order to sugar the pill, I bribe myself with shopping. It is my birthday on Wednesday, so I think that in order to mitigate the gruesomeness of the errands, I’ll buy myself a little present. Just a small one. (I’m not going to tell you what it is. It is a surprise.)

There was an excellent piece on the Today programme this morning about the shifting of the British class system. A clever writer has come up with a new theory that it is no longer about where your money comes from – land vs trade, most obviously, in the old days – but where your money goes. So even when you are buying a cup of coffee you are making a class statement.

This is the kind of thing that interests me very much. I thought of it when I was in the country shop, and I saw a smart and useful coat. My own coat is practically dead, after being out in all weathers all winter doing the horses, and it is in the back of my mind that a replacement may have to come. The problem with the smart and useful coat is that it was a Barbour.

Barbour have booted themselves into the 21^st century now. It’s not all shapeless green wax jackets, smelling oily and faintly rancid. But still, the image of Barbour as the province of the hoorah is so ingrained in my consciousness that even though this particular coat had both utility and beauty, enough to make William Morris proud, I recoiled in horror. I could not be that person. Visions of honking great yahoos rushed into my mind.

The class consumption fellow must have a good point, I thought. I went straight to the tiny local bookshop, where an elegant and intelligent-looking woman sat at her neat desk.

‘This is a maddening question,’ I said. ‘But there was a man on Today this morning, who wrote a book about class and coffee. I can’t remember his name. I don’t suppose you...’

But she was already out of her chair. She picked up a lovely hardback and smiled.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘That is truly the wonder of the independent bookshop.’

I was so happy and impressed that I bought three other books, all at full price. I’m a bit thrifty about books now; I mostly support my local library. When I do buy, I often go and find huge discounts on Amazon. But this small exchange reminded me why the independents, the locals, are worth supporting. Sometimes, if you can afford it, it’s worth paying a little bit over the odds. It’s a quality of life thing.

We spoke for a while about small shops, and the death of the high street, and the rapacious online retailers. We smiled at each other in perfect harmony and parted on the best of terms. I shall be back.

Then I had to go to the bank and get out terrifying amounts of cash to pay for the palatial horse shelter. The tiny local branch was empty, so I had a happy chat with the two operatives. The charming gentleman who counted out the bundles of fifties, for all the world as if I were a gangster or a professional gambler, finally looked up and said: ‘Are you buying something nice?’

‘It’s a shelter,’ I said. ‘For my horse. I have to pay the joiner.’

His colleague laughed and looked assessingly at me. ‘I thought it was something horsey,’ she said.

I looked down at my muddy coat and my scuffed old gumboots. Did I have hay in my hair, or binder twine coming out of my pockets, or dung on my jeans? I could see no tell-tale signs. I’ve obviously just got the crazed horsewoman look now. Even the bank teller can see it. It doesn’t matter what kind of coffee I buy, that is my class. It’s the lunatic equine class.

Ah, well. It could be an awful lot worse.

 

Today’s pictures:

Too gruesome for the camera today. Here is a quick selection from prettier days:

The three lovely girls:

Autumn the Filly:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare, with her goofy face on:

And my one lovely boy, Stanley the Dog:

Hill:

Oh, and the author of the book turns out to be called Harry Wallop. Don’t know how I could have forgotten that name. There is a good review here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/18/consumed-harry-wallop-review

Of books and burning

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

After much thought, deliberation, soul-searching, and intellectual contemplation I have reached an opinion on the Koran burning issue. (You knew I would have to have one.) I have taken into consideration morality, geo-politics, theology, freedom of expression, and a wide reading of rights and responsibilities. And my conclusion is:

Everyone is being very silly.

No, but really. This crazy pastor is clearly nuts. He was so peculiar that his last congregation actually chucked him out. He is not an excellent and shining representative of the Christian faith. On the other hand, the students who gathered in Karachi on Wednesday yelling Death to America in response to the planned burning are equally silly. The intemperate comment of an Afghan cleric is oddest of all: 'It is the duty of Muslims to react. When their holy book gets burned in public, then there is nothing left. If this happens, the first and most important reaction will be that wherever Americans are seen, they will be killed. No matter where they will be in the world, they will be killed.' This ignores that most Americans, including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defence, the head of the military in Afghanistan, the Attorney General, and the President's closest advisor are saying no, pastor, no. Even the muddle-headed Mrs Palin, who now inexplicably refers to herself as a 'momma grizzly', thinks it is not a good idea. I can't help thinking everyone should have a nice cup of tea and calm down. All this shouting and hullabaloo has a tinge of absurdity to it.

I do think though that people should get their book-burning positions straight. The current consensus seems to be that it is a Bad Thing. Even books that are not sacred are, in a sense, sacred. Goebbels knew very well what he was doing in 1933 when he ordered 25,000 'un-German' books to be burnt. Crowds gathered to watch Einstein and Freud and Heine go up in flames. There was a rash of book-burning in the fevered paranoia of the McCarthy era, when even Mark Twain was considered suspect. Never again, everyone said. Then, amazingly, in 2001, another nutty pastor organised a conflagration of Harry Potter in New Mexico, because, as any fule no, 'Harry Potter is the devil'. (The devil gets about a lot. According to Pastor Jones, Islam is 'of the devil'. Does this mean that Harry Potter owns Islam? Very hard to tell.) When The Satanic Verses were publicly burnt in the late eighties, there were a surprising number of people who did not think that was such a bad thing. The ayatollahs, obviously, were keenly in favour, but there were some unusual suspects who stood against Rushdie. They did not explicitly condone the burning of books, but both John Le Carre and Roald Dahl insisted that Rushdie had brought his troubles on himself. Sir Iqbal Socranie, knighted by the Queen, famously said that death would be 'a bit too easy' for the novelist. The inference could be drawn that the Rushdie knockers thought the book burners had a point.

I say: put the matches down. It is never a good thing to be keeping company with Mr Goebbels. I like the Milton quote: 'he who destroys a good book kills reason itself'.

But I do worry that the showboating of one strange fellow from Gainesville can produce such an excessive reaction, from a global media storm to Death to all Americans. Here is what I think should be leading the news this week, but was instead buried away in the dear old Indy: the thousands of women in Pakistan, Jordan, Palestine, Somalia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Britain, Canada and too many other countries to list who are being stabbed, stoned to death, buried alive, mutilated, attacked with acid and otherwise horribly killed and maimed in the name of honour. Why is that not producing global outrage? Why?

I do not wish you to spend your Friday sad and furious, but if you can bear it, read Robert Fisk's extraordinary article about the honour murders here. The brilliant Andrew Sullivan has an excellent take on the whole Pastor Jones controversy and its political implications here. There is a fascinating article in The Guardian about the history of book burning here.

Some of my favourite bloggers do lovely things on a Friday, finding particularly beautiful pictures and uplifting thoughts to send you dancing off into your weekend. I really was going to do something like that. Then I got cross, and gave you fire and mutilation instead. So sorry about that. Tomorrow shall be all enchantment.

Here are some soothing photographs for your tired Friday eyes:

More ducks and ducklings, because just now I can't get enough. I wish I had taken pictures of them when they first arrived; they were tiny little yellow balls of fluff. Now they are really quite grown up:

More animal beauty:

The posh old girl, sunbathing:

I know I take a hundred shots of my lavender, and it might start to feel like same old, same old, but I seem powerless to stop:

Heavenly autumn dew on my new smoke bush:

Special Scottish heather:

The amazing loveliness of tree bark:

 

Sometimes I wonder: how does nature make these colours? And why? She could just have stopped at muddy brown and been done with it. Why the mad variety of greens and blues and purples and reds? I love the theory of evolution with every beat of my old enlightenment heart, and I bless Charles Darwin each day, but while natural selection answers the what and the how, it leaves the why. I know that Rayleigh scattering tells me why the sky is blue, but it also does not. It tells me how that happens on a physical level; it explains how wavelengths of light hit the human eye; it reveals the mysteries of colour spectrum. But it does not really address the fundamental why. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps things just are. I am going away to ponder this.

In the meantime, I shall consider the hebes:

(There is the sound of bagpipes outside. I must go and have a look. Can never resist a piper.)

I would like to thank the Academy...

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Thrilling, slightly unbelievable news comes from the blogosphere. Despite being very new to all this, and, I sometimes fear, faintly amateurish (although never forget that the word amateur is derived from the Latin for love), Sarah and I have been given a special AWARD. The lovely Mrs Trefusis has named Backwards in High Heels as one of her top five blogs. Since Mrs Trefusis is a woman of exceptional grace and poise, and writes like an angel, this is a high honour. I accept it in a spirit of true humility and actually slightly outlandish excitement.

The prize comes with a set of rules (as there are rights so there are responsibilities) as follows:

THE RULES

1. You have to pass it on to 5 other fabulous blogs in a post.

2. You have to list 5 of your fabulous addictions in the post.

3. You must copy and paste the rules and the instructions below in the post.

Instructions: On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them. When you post your five winners, make sure you link them as well. To add the award to your post, simply right-click, save image, then “add image” it in your post as a picture so your winners can save it as well. To add it to your sidebar, add the “picture” widget. Also, don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by emailing them or leaving a comment on their blog.

So, here are my five fabulous blogs:

The majestic LibertyLondonGirl, Queen of bloggers, who knows about everything from fashion to books to architecture, and is currently delighting us with despatches from her intrepid travels through the wilds of California.

The enchanting So Lovely, who sends out charming and sometimes faintly whimsical posts from sunny Los Angeles, and can actually make her own hot cross buns.

The outrageously funny Belgian Waffle, who makes me laugh so hard it startles my dogs. I don't know how she does it, day after day, with the funniness. She should get a government grant, in these Troubled Times.

Also exceptionally funny - the clever and eclectic Lucy Fishwife, who knows that literature and strong cocktails go together like carriages and horses (although how many people do you see riding around in a carriage, nowadays, apart from the Queen?).

And the incomparable Cassandra Castle, who never fails to make me smile and does lovely and often surprising things with words. It was because of her that I started this blog, and she was the first to welcome me to the blogosphere and make me realise that it was not the terrifying place I had feared.

I know it's only supposed to be five, but I can't go without also bigging up the fabulous La Beet, whose enquiring mind never fails to stimulate.

These are not the only blogs I adore - go to the blog roll of honour for the others that I love and follow - but they were the first ones I discovered when I started all this. The writers are not only startlingly good, but they were unbelievably kind and supportive to a new girl, and they hold a special place in my heart.

Now for my five addictions:

My dogs. Can't help it. I'm not going to go into it now, because I think very soon it will be time to give the glorious creatures an entire post of their very own. With pictures. I'm warning you.

Books, obviously. When I was a little girl I would read so hard that I did not used to notice the light was failing. 'You'll ruin your eyes,' everyone said. I am the only one of my brothers and sisters who has to wear strong corrective spectacles, so this was clearly true. But it was worth it. Highest obsessive rating: Mrs Woolf, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mrs Parker, TS Eliot, Jane Austen, and Nancy Mitford. I also love Helen Simpson, Lorrie Moore, Terence Blacker, Cynthia Heimel, Brian Greene, Justin Cartwright and Martin Amis. I think Midnight's Children deserved every inch of its Booker of Bookers and get very grumpy when people get cheap laughs on Radio Four by saying that Salman Rushdie is unreadable (politicians especially do this, as if it is a badge of honour when it's just stupid and wrong).

American politics and MSNBC. My absolute secret vice is an excessively geekish fascination with the American politicial system. Whenever I have a free moment I race to my computer and watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. I even know arcane House and Senate rules; I can explain the intricacies of the filibuster or the reconciliation process, should you ask, which I recommend you do not. During the Obama campaign, I stayed up all night every Tuesday that there was a primary on, to get the results. When he won, I cried actual tears of joy, and I love him still. This addiction also gets fed by medicinal doses of The West Wing.

The Big Life Questions. There is absolutely no excuse for this. Most people would think it pretentious and pointless. But I really want to know why we are here, what we all think we are doing, and what is the answer to the Universal Why. I want to understand the brain, unravel the nature nurture debate, map the development of language, and know where all the taxis go the moment it starts to rain. I want someone to tell me exactly what it is about women that is so scary that for thousands of years we were not allowed to vote or have opinions or enjoy sex.

Radio Four. I adore and worship it, even when it is going through a slightly dull patch, which it is at the moment. Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time is worth the licence fee alone. It makes me feel both interested and safe, which is a charming combination.

'

And since I allowed myself six favourite blogs, I am going to permit one more addiction, which is writing, naturally. I love everything about it, even when I find it so hard that it makes my eyes ache. I love the nature of words and what they can do. I love punctuation, especially the semi-colon, my favourite punctuation mark. I love the rules of grammar, and sometimes breaking them. I even love the tap tap tap of my fingers on my computer keyboard. I love the fact I can touch type, and still feel bizarrely proud of it after twenty five years. I love being able to say, when asked what I do: I'm a writer.