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:

Quite a lot of nonsense.

Warning for: length, tangents, national generalisations based on no empirical data, gratuitous Pushkin references, and other howlers. It’s Friday. It’s been a long week.
 
There are several conversations that I love. One of them I have each morning, as the Horse Talker and I lean over the fence and observe the mares, and pretend we are discussing herd behaviour and horse husbandry and the human condition, when in fact we are inventively trying to find one hundred and forty-seven ways to express how wonderful our girls are.

There are the obsessive racing conversations. I adore those. I particularly like the ones I have with my mother, because she can remember Sea Bird and Arkle and Mill House and Mill Reef and Nijinsky and the mighty Brigadier. She was there, in her elegant hat, at those storied Derbies and Gold Cups and Legers and Arcs. She saw records being smashed and history being written. Sometimes, to give the thing an added piquancy, she was following the ambulance, as Dad fell at the fifth and had to be carted off to hospital.

And then there are the conversations where you know you can go anywhere, and the person you are talking to will follow. Usually, they will leap over you and arrive at the destination three steps ahead. Oddly, quite often, these are had with strangers. I had one this morning, with a man to whom I had just been introduced. He wears his cleverness modestly and diffidently, in the true British tradition, and it took me a moment to realise I had to bring my A game. Actually, I don’t think I even understood that consciously. It was only afterwards that I had the sense of shifting gear, only looking back on that exhilarating half hour of chat that I saw myself, retrospectively, going into turbo drive.

It was during my daily HorseBack visit. I went in for a perfectly ordinary discussion, about logistics and practical things and the plan for next week. I was introduced to the gentleman, and within two minutes we were off to the races. We talked of the nature of courage, of neuroscience, of evolutionary biology, of gender difference; of hippies, nature, the power and rarity of silence. We talked of the First World War, and societal expectations, and love.

I get so excited when I have these kind of conversations that I say absurd things. At one point, I heard myself saying, ‘Oh yes, authenticity is one of my favourite words.’ At one point, I actually spoke these sentences: ‘It fascinates me that in every society in the world, men are supposed not to cry. Of course, there are certain places in the Middle East where ulultations are acceptable, and there is Russia, with its tradition of melancholy. But even there a man is only allowed to cry if he has drunk half a bottle of vodka and is speaking of Puskin.’

What was I talking about? Do Russian men really sit about and drink vodka and speak of Puskin and weep? Where did I get such an outlandish notion? This is what happens when I get over-stimulated: I make rash extrapolations and wild generalisations. Still, I do stand by the oddities of the current Russian mores of masculinity, if Mr Putin is anything to go by. All that riding shirtless and posing with big guns. Although I suppose one cannot judge an entire people on its rather peculiar president. The fretful, discursive liberals of the Upper West Side would not have liked to be defined by the faux-Texan swagger of George W Bush, any more than the Tea Party Republicans would thank one for putting them in the same bracket as that ghastly commie, Barack Obama. (I love that people really do think Obama is a communist, or a socialist at the very least. ‘No, no,’ I shout at the screen; ‘he really does not want to nationalise the means of production.’)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, talking nonsense. But even when I make perfectly preposterous statements, I still find it entirely delightful to have such a gentleman to talk to. He was very polite and kind about the whole Puskin/vodka thing. He just carried on being quietly clever.

Cleverness is not very fashionable at the moment, in certain circles. I think it’s partly to do with the complicated derision for elites which has sprung up in the last decade. Besides, the British have always been suspicious of too much learning. ‘Too clever by half,’ is an ancient insult here. But the knee-jerk disdain for the ghastly Oxbridge elites who think they can run the country, but, crucially, have no idea how the real world works is a fairly novel political development.

Personally, I love an elite. I adore it when people are really, really good at things. When I watch Andy Murray play tennis, or Ryan Moore or Johnny Murtagh or Ruby Walsh ride a race, or Yo-Yo Ma play a cello, I am dazzled by their brilliance. They are absolutely elite, at the very crest and peak of their powers. I want the people who run things to be exceptionally intelligent and highly educated. I wish for the novelists and poets to be as elite as all get out, as they play with the language of Shakespeare and Milton.

Perhaps the confusion comes between the meaning of elite – best or most skilled – and elitism, which contains the idea that those at the top get special treatment or unfair privilege. It shades into snobbism and us and them; there is the idea of poncy people peering down their superior noses at the rest of us oiks. (I think there is a muddle too about games which have a zero sum. If someone is exceptional, it does not mean that everyone else is pointless, useless and feckless.) Cleverness, which is quite a separate thing, then gets conflated with the dark side of elitism, and before you know it, a good university degree means you are a horrid, out-of-touch posho, with a sneery disdain for the ordinary woman in the street.

I think this is a pity. Cleverness, lightly worn, is one of life’s great joys. I felt so exhilarated and galvanised by talking to the clever gentleman this morning, it was as if I had taken a double dose of iron tonic. I spend an awful lot of time contemplating the dearness of my mare, or what will win the 3.40 at Newcastle (today, I hope a lovely filly called Filia Regina). The book I am writing is a fairly simple story, very much a thing of first principles. I’m not galloping about over any intellectual prairies, which is probably lucky for my readers. So to engage in conversation where I had to stretch my brain to keep up felt like a rocket boost.

And now I’m going to go and drink some vodka and read Puskin and weep.
 
Today’s pictures:

Are not from today. Too dreich for the camera. An entirely random selection from the archive instead: