Fears and resolutions.

Last night, there was a crazy storm. I woke at regular intervals, as the gales battered the house and the rain lashed the windows. I stared into the anxious face of Stanley the Dog, and felt the night demons swarm about me.

F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that in the dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning. That three o’clock is the undefended, paranoid, terrifying time, when the horrid imaginings come. I found myself scolding my inner layabout for not achieving enough. I was almost fifty, and what had I done with my life? I did not work hard enough, I was not rigorous enough, I was a stupid dilettante, who let time slide by with nothing to show for it.

Then I started worrying about what would happen if I went blind. (This is how nuts the bleak night hours can make me.) How would I cook, dress, shop for food, get around, write? I live alone. Who would look after me? I have no spare cash for a care person. What did people do if they suddenly could not see? How do they know what is in the fridge?

I have several familiar fears, which suddenly attack like angry hornets. One is that I shall go mad in the night, and wake up thinking I am Queen Marie of Roumania. One is that I shall suddenly be struck blind. One is that I shall be paralysed. All of them involve loss of agency. Independence is my most cherished possession.

Then I woke up and the rain had gone and I told myself, in my stoical voice, well, if the worst happens, I shall manage. The stoical voice is very British. It does not say I shall conquer, or I shall overcome, or I shall serve as an inspiration. It just says, I shall manage.

Then I made breakfast for my mother, schooled my horse, did my HorseBack UK work, and, as if galvanised by those nasty, sneering night voices, wrote 3775 words of book.

3775 words is really too much. Graham Green used to do a strict 500 a day. Once you get into the thousands, you can guarantee that many of them will be no good. A lot of them will die in the second draft. But I needed a sense of achievement, and my fingers were bash bash bashing over the keyboard, so I let them run.

I don’t know what the answer to any of this is, but my default position is: if in doubt, try harder.

Except, sometimes, when you must give up trying at all. I am dealing at the moment with a couple of people who don’t like me very much. I used to find this almost unbearable. I cravenly craved like and admiration and approval. I would turn myself inside out and do jazz hands in idiotic and futile attempts to make the dislikers change their minds. I would get hurt and bent out of shape. I would plot strategies to be more lovable, more charming, more magnetic.

Now I think that for some people, I shall always be like fingernails on the blackboard. I think: if people want not to like me, I must let them. They are free agents, and I believe in liberty. They absolutely must think what they want. There are some minds which cannot be changed, and that is all right. It is one of the few areas in life where I think that it is correct to be a non-trier.

I find this thought astonishingly liberating. It’s not just a coping mechanism. It’s not just: I can deal with this. It is much more generous and wide and encompassing than that. It is recognising another human’s full agency and complexity. There is no mitigation in it. It is saying: go on, here is the wide prairie, gallop all over it. I will, with respect and civility, watch you go.

 

Today’s pictures:

A very sweet thing happened when I stopped writing this. I was going to say I had no time for pictures today, and here was the usual red mare/Stan the Man shot from the archive. Then I opened my memory card and found these, from the weekend, which I had completely forgotten about.

They are the Sister with the red mare, the whole family going for a walk, and me with the youngest of the great-nephews. Isn’t he heaven? Look how strong his tiny hand is. We could not love him more.

Writing: The Fear

I am running a small writing workshop this week. It is a keen pleasure, and it is amazingly hard work at the same time. I sit here now, in the afternoon sun, all energy wiped from me, hardly able to string a sentence together. This is ironic, because all I have been talking about all morning is the art of stringing sentences.

I suspect it is because I am an introvert, so anything which involves a group takes it out of me. I am also ransacking my brain for every single thing I know, every tiny particle of knowledge and experience which may help, every last notion which may provide inspiration. These people can already write. I don’t really need to tell them the technical stuff. They know about semi-colons and rhythms and playing with language. I have to give them something bigger than that.

Mostly, I think, people come to workshops because they have run into the sand. Their inspiration has dried up, their drive stutters and fails. They know they want to write, they know they love to write, and yet they do not write. Why? That is the profound question, and I must scrabble about for answers.

This is why I always start not with structure or narrative or anything concrete or specific, but with the big abstract idea I call The Fear. The Fear is what stops you writing. It may stop you living. The Fear is all the old voices in your head which tell you that you are not good enough, clever enough, interesting enough. You are useless and pointless and feckless, and you should go into the garden and eat worms.

The Fear is mean and ruthless and transforms itself like a shape-shifter. It takes a myriad of forms. It may be the stern schoolmistress who told you that you could not break the rules of grammar, or the recent friend who kindly informs you of the pitfalls of the writing life. It could be your family, who tease you just a little too much. It is the internalised voice from the culture itself, which says that A Writer must be a certain sort of person, from a certain sort of background, with a certain sort of education and a certain sort of brain. This voice, which is bossy and pernicious, may even suggest that A Writer wears a certain sort of clothing. Oh, yes, there is a dress code. This is the voice of the Members Only; the one with the clip-board and the velvet rope, only lifted if you arrive in the company of Tom Stoppard. It is the one that says you have to be on The List.

The Fear callously informs you that even if you can push past all these horrid obstacles, you will still have to face derision. The Fear says that people will laugh and point, that you are running on idiot hubris, that you do not have what it takes. You? With your puny plan and your paltry adjectives and your pathetically limited life experience? Have you stalked big game on the Serengeti, or run from rifle fire in the dust of the Helmand Valley, or penetrated the Hindu Kush? You have neither enough high life or low life. Your life is too small, too ordinary, of no possible interest to man or beast. The Fear says you will fail, and that people will mock, and that those people will be right.

The dangerous aspect of The Fear is that it has a point. You will fail. All writers fail. The pristine prose that exists in your head never quite makes it to the page. The perfect novel that dances in your mind is sullied and trashed by the time you write the opening chapter. Someone very clever once said: after the first page, it’s just damage limitation.

The secret of this is to keep buggering on anyway. I sometimes think what makes a writer is that cussed determination to keep buggering on. The non-writers are the ones who fold. They might be able to write a perfectly lovely sentence, they might have an ear for prose and a feel for language, but they do not persist. Persistence, perhaps, and cussedness and doggedness and a refusal to be beaten, are the marks of those who go on to write.

And The Fear is right in another aspect. People will laugh and point. Until you are published, they may find your ambitions risible. ‘Ah, your writing,’ they may say, in a special voice. Even after you are published, there will still be pointing and scoffing. No matter how hard you work or how talented you are, some people just won’t like what you have produced, in the same way that some people don’t like artichokes or loathe lentils.

The secret to this is (as you may have guessed by now) to keep buggering on anyway. You can’t stop the laughing and pointing; you cannot convince critics out of their mockery. You can arm yourself, however. There is no magical thick skin which can be grown to resist the slings and arrows, but you can learn how to absorb them, and carry on. You can factor them in. You can learn to roll with the punches, but don’t think for a moment there will be no punches.

So that was today’s theme.

Ah, The Fear, I think, as I sit to write this. My old, old friend. I’ve bashed through a bit of it, after all these years. I have given myself permission to be a writer, which was initially troublesome. I came from a house of horses; the bookshelves were filled with old copies of Timeform, the tables littered with The Sporting Life, not the London Review of Books. There were no poets holding forth in the kitchen, but people discussing what would win the 3.30 at Newton Abbot.

I got over that, after a few years of practice. I still fear the not being good enough. I can carry a tune, make a paragraph dance off the page, if the light is coming from the right direction. Yet I still have to struggle incredibly hard with narrative. Even after all this damn practice, my narrative drive is pathetically weak. I’m good at dialogue but appalling at story structure. I have to work very hard at absorbing failure, which is a mangy hound trotting and snapping at my heels. The discipline and management of time needed to write 90,000 words, and then rewrite them and rewrite them again, is still a daily challenge. I have about six different ideas jostling in my head at any one time, and I can’t get them all organised. Some will never see the light of day. Criticism can send me into a spiral of self-loathing, and hurts like a physical thing. I learnt to talk myself down off the ceiling, but I have never caught the trick of not hitting the ceiling in the first place.

But I am pretty good at buggering on. It’s a learnt skill, and a good one. You can’t wish The Fear away, I have discovered. You cannot make it dissipate through a sheer act of will. You have to stare at the whites of its mean old eyes, and bash on through. With writing, and with life, perhaps.

 

No time for pictures today. Just one shot of the little HorseBack foal, who is now a week old and growing bonnier and sweeter and stronger and more antic by the day:

In which a mysterious event occurs.

Here is the ridiculous story I was promising you.

It took place two nights ago.

At 9.31pm, on a quiet Monday, I hear the four words I dread the most. ‘The horse are out.’

The Horse Talker and I like to lean over the gate and watch our little herd with adoring eyes, and discuss at vast length how calm, how tractable, how happy, how unshockable they are. This is faintly self-indulgent, since it is partly due to the work we have done with them. We had fabulous raw material to work with, but the daily groundwork, desensitising, attention to detail has paid off, and we are not above the occasional naughty clap on the back. We are only human after all.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, they go nuts in the night and completely trash a strong wooden post and rail fence.

The neighbour who lives next to the field hears an almighty crash, and looks out to find the two bigger mares racing at full speed past his window. What is so funny, in retrospect, is that having got out into the wide yonder of the rolling set-aside, they choose to rush back to the top gate and try to get back into the paddock, as if in apology for their errant behaviour.

I tear down and round them up and get them back in. The Horse Talker arrives, and we survey the devastation. One whole bottom rail has come completely off, two discrete top rails have been trashed and smashed and are at crazy, splintered right angles. But the really, really weird thing is that they are facing inwards, as if the force which broke them came from the outside.

The Horse Talker and I turn at once into a pair of equine Miss Marples. We examine the hoof prints, the skid marks on the grass, the trajectories. I actually attempt to reconstruct the incident, but we cannot see how it was done, with the angles of the breaks the way they are, and also the position of the scratches on Red’s body. Autumn the Filly, true to her amazing, laid-back, get away with anything nature, has come away almost entirely unscathed, except for one tiny scrape on her off fore, which has barely even broken the skin.

None of it makes any sense. Miss Marple herself would be baffled and have to eat her cloche hat. Quite apart from the puzzling nature of the broken fence, which appears to defy the laws of physics, horses would have to get into a terrible state to crash through a sturdy post and rails.

Tractors, trailers rattling with blocks of granite, and a variety of thundering diggers come in and out of that field all the time. There is a random person who lets off loud gunshots in the woods. Strange groups of ramblers appear, rustling their Ordnance Survey Maps. The herd does not bat an eye.

When the shelter was being built, the shattering noise of the nail gun did not even cause them to lift their heads from their hay. Close by, the old Coo Cathedral, a palace built for cows in the 19^th century and now used for weddings, sees firework displays on the occasional Saturday night which sound as if civil war has broken out. When this last happened, two weeks ago, I tore down to the field in the pitch dark, expecting to find the girls going nuts. Instead, Red had gathered her little band in the farthest corner, under the soothing shelter of the wooded hill, and was standing between her two charges and the devastating noise. She was alert and scanning the horizon for possible threats, but there was no sense of terror. She was just on watch, that was all.

Who knows what will frighten a flight animal? Red will walk calmly up to a huge, clattering scarlet digger and stick her nose in the cab to say hello to the Young Gentleman, whom she loves, but the other day decided she was really quite shocked by a pair of blackbirds.

Even so, one of the things that I have taught her is not to go into a rising escalation of fear. That’s what the desensitising is for. Slightly paradoxically, it is to teach horses that fear is all right; it is just a thing, it will not kill them. So you crinkle a plastic bag, for instance, and they start and tremble and shoot their heads in the air, and then you indicate by your own body language that the thing is not, in fact a mountain lion, and after a moment, they believe you. There’s also a dance of bringing the terrifying object in, and then removing it; more of the pressure release principle. At the end, we always say to our girls: ‘See? It did not eat you.’ They learn to feel a moment of alarm, but this does not then soar into a rising arc of panic. They come back to us. It does not mean they will never spook, but it means that a three act drama is then much less likely.

And yet, something, something, happened in that field, which must have terrified them out of their wits, a mystery which we may never unravel.

For two nights, it disturbs me so much I cannot sleep. I hate it when anything happens to upset the herd, and I hate to see my beloved Red with Wound Cream all over her beautiful body. Wound Cream, which really is its name, is the most miraculous thing I’ve ever found. It’s by Royal Appointment, and quite right too; I imagine the Queen loves it. You put it on that nastiest cuts and scratches, and the next day, they are healed. Red has one determined cut which is still on the mend, but almost all of her scars are already fading.

I suddenly realise this morning that because I am unsettled by her being unsettled, and because I cannot work out what the hell went on, and because I have not slept for two nights, she is picking up on all that – what the Beloved Cousin calls, descriptively, being jangly. The Horse Talker and I look anxiously at our girls and say to them: ‘Oh, if only you could speak.’ We long for them to tell us the story.

But now, I see this is not the point. I’ve being babying and gentling Red for two days, but this in fact is not what she needs. So I do some proper work with her. Out in the wide three acre field, I work with her at liberty, and she hooks on at once, and drops her head, and follows my feet exactly – a move to the right, a circle to the left, four paces backwards, stop, start, quick slow. There it is, the harmony again. Everything in her big red body relaxes; she has her Good Leader back. That’s all she wanted.

She loves love, and will present herself for it. She will make a sweet face and offer her head for scratching. She will stand for long minutes by my side, leaning on my shoulder as I rub her dear cheek. But this is secondary, for her. Horses experience love in a very different way than humans, and their version of what we call love is mostly based on feeling safe.

She doesn’t want me jangly and fretful. She wants me leading her round a field, confident and certain. Then she can relax. I’d forgotten this for a bit, and this morning I remembered, and my lovely girl let go her nightmares and followed me willingly and with gratitude.

The Bizarre Event starts to fade. I hate mystery. I love explanations. But we have to chalk this one down in the category of May Never Be Solved.

Still, we were lucky. The kind neighbour mended the fence; the other kind neighbour is on full night patrol in his monster truck, just in case any random human agency was involved. Our little herd is protected by the kindness of the compound, their scratched bodies are mending, and they revert to their usual, happy, dozy state.

I have to put away the ghastly imaginings of what might have been, of the potentially catastrophic injuries they might have suffered, and feel grateful that the ending was really a happy one. The best horseman I know, my cousin’s Old Fella, lost a horse not long ago when it crashed through the gate from its field for no known reason, and broke its shoulder. The fates were kind to us; we got off miraculously lightly. I must remember that, and not dwell on the horrors which might have been.

 

Today’s pictures:

This is an absurd picture of some clouds I took by mistake. But I rather love it. It’s a bit like a painting of the sky:

The herd, grazing calmly, as if Great Escapes never crossed their dear minds:

My poor girl, getting back to normal:

Although she would like to show me all her battle scars, masked by the wonder Wound Cream:

M the P, unfazed by the entire event:

And Mr Stanley the Dog is most concerned with catching bluebottles:

The hill, which stays unchanged through it all:

A little Sunday parable; or, the woods are dark and deep.

Now, this one most certainly is a parable. Or at least, it is in the mazy halls of my own mind.

This morning, I walked the mare up into the Terrifying Wood.

At this point, you have to imagine timpani drums and flights of trumpets.

You see, the Terrifying Wood had become a bogey. I am ashamed of having bogeys, so I did not speak of it. I do not get stopped in my tracks by a bit of sloping timber, oh no. I cannot possibly admit to such craven weakness.

In fact, the last time we went there, many weeks ago, Red had a proper, cinematic wig-out. Up in the air with hooves pawing the vacancy; all we needed was John Wayne and Champion the Wonder Horse and we would have had a party.

She has done this three times since I’ve had her. I put it down to the fact that she had never done anything in life on her own. Racehorses and polo ponies work in great strings, and she found strange places without the comfort of companions properly frightening.

I put it down to all sorts of things. At one point, I convinced myself that she was having acid flashbacks to the starting stalls of her hectic youth.

But really, the dark voice in my head was saying it was my fault. I was not up to it; I was not a good enough horsewoman. How the real experts would laugh and mock.

Lately, all the time and patience has paid off. All that groundwork, all those cold mornings, all those hours of concentration. The bond of trust is forged. It goes to my new theory which is: it takes a year. Maybe there are people who can get a new horse and do anything with it after three weeks. I am not of that cohort.

Anyway, today it was lovely and sunny and I had decided to do no work, so I had all the time in the world. Red’s bruised foot is still faintly tender, so we were going for another amble on the lead rope. A kind man has cut us a lovely grassy track through the wilderness, all the way round the set-aside and past the far paddock rail and over the old granite bridge, and into the Terrifying Wood. I was just following it, admiring the delightful new facility, where we would be able to canter, when I reached the bridge, and thought: oh, well, why not?

The wood has alarmed me for a long time. The trees are so dense that hardly any light can penetrate. It has all the spookiness of the old-time fairy tales, and is exactly the kind of place one might find goblins and sociopaths. (All this runs through my head, despite my daily battle against magical thinking.) Even before the mare, I never went there. But it is the way out to the great riding places; once over the hill, you find miles of forestry tracks, snaking north. Despite the fact that Red had freaked out last time we went there and I am not so keen on it myself, we would have to master it eventually.

Because we just came, without plan, to the threshold, following the new track, it was not a thing. I did not wake up this morning and decide to conquer all my fears. It was just there, and I looked at my dozy girl and said: come on, then. And up we went, into the dim cool, where the shadows moved and played and the world was silent, as if someone had thrown a switch.

And the wonderful thing was that it was not frightening at all. Red moved easily by my side, not even lifting her head when Autumn the Filly, missing her lead mare, started yelling from the field below. Stanley the Dog waltzed about, picking up scents. Even when he buggered off on the the hot trail of some deer or pheasant or rabbit, callously leaving me to the mercy of the forest psychos, there was nothing to fear. The mare and I inhabited the wood, so that it was no longer a place of dark imaginings, but a benign, delightful Eden. There were carpets of pine needles on the good earth and blue wildflowers bending their elegant heads. Shafts of sunlight lit the close trees and the quiet spread out like a benediction.

All this time, I thought, watching my happy horse pick at the thick green grass, I was looking up at this crowded slope and thinking of it as a great and daunting obstacle. And now it was an enchanted glade.

Well, it feels like a parable to me.

 

Today’s pictures:

I’m always banging on about love and trees, but I don’t take that many pictures of the trees. Trees drive me nuts, because they look so majestic and filled with awe in life, but on camera, they lose all their beauty. If I take a photograph of a great beech or a mighty oak, it comes out flat and dull, for some reason. But since today is all about trees, I thought that some photographic tribute was called for.

These are rather bark and lichen heavy, because the best way I can capture the loveliness is to go in close:

The Terrifying Wood:

And the happy herd:

I love this face. This is the look she gives me when I am leaving. As if to say: you’re not really going? Not when I look this adorable?:

Mr Stanley the Dog, who had a high old time:

The hill:

In which I say Pah to the Fear

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Well, my best beloveds, I finally got a grip.  I looked the terror in the eye and said B for Be Off.  (B for Bugger off, actually, but this is a family show, and my mother tunes in.) That sounds frantically proactive and admirable, but of course it was much less tremendous than that.  I think I just got bored of being such a wuss.  I have an old theory, which you will find in Backwards, that the thing the comes along and rescues you most often from heartbreak is boredom.  It is so deadly dull to go on yearning for someone after a while that you just wake up one morning and think sod it.  The same thing happened in this case of paralysing self-doubt. I don't think that I summoned any great moral fibre to combat the Fear. I was simply dying of dullness.  Also, I did sign a contract and I don't want my agent to get cross.

So now, miraculously, there are two thousand words of the new book.  Once I started, it turned out I had several things to say, you will be astonished to hear.  I even made up an entirely new theory about the evolutionary nature of beauty, which took me quite by surprise. (I now have to go and look up the science, to see if I have any peer-reviewed evidence to back it up.) One of the things I like about writing is that I quite often find myself transcribing ideas I did not know I actually had.  I think this is why some writers can grow a little mystical about their work, because every so often they get an unexpected bullet from the subconscious or the subliminal or the collective unconscious (at which point, they all rush off to brush up on their Jung).  I like to be quite stern and ruthless about the act of writing, even though I have some romantic notions about literature and language generally.  I believe that it is not a matter of magic or inspiration, but application and perspiration.  I always loved that line of Nabokov's, when he was asked about the idea of characters in a novel taking on a life of their own: sheer balderdash, he said (not in so many words); 'my characters are like galley slaves'.  That's the spirit. 

After all that I feel: happy, relieved, industrious, galvanised.  I am acutely aware that it is only 2,000 words, and there are 88,000 to go.  But as Caesar said, of building Rome: brick by brick, my citizens, brick by brick.

 

And, as part of the fledgling my year in pictures project, here is what I saw today.

I'm afraid the snow and dog theme persists.

Hedge:

Running dogs:

Woods:

My little garden gate, which for some reason captivated me this morning, with its delicate covering of snow:

Coming to terms with human frailty

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Oh, it was all going to be so perfect.  On Monday morning, I was going to be like a finely tuned racehorse breaking out of the gate. It was a new year, a new start, and, the most creakingly hoary of clichés, a new me.  I was going to start writing the new book, and entirely reinvent the blog. It would be all shining and excellent and novel.  It would blind you with its brilliance. I pictured myself as one of those great prima ballerinas of old, the proper divas, bending gracefully to pick up bouquets as they were thrown to the stage by a roaring crowd.

Instead of which, I got hit by the Fear.  It came roaring down the track like an out of control truck, ran me over, and disappeared ruthlessly over the horizon.  For two days my fingers have been paralysed.  I could not, as my most charming friend Stephen likes to say, write fuck on a dusty blind.  I pretended to do 'research', while all the time feeling as if I were crouching under the desk waiting for the terror to pass.

Sarah called this morning. 'I think I have the Fear,' I said.

'Yes, yes,' she said.  There was a pause. 'Fear of what?'

'Well,' I said, talking quickly so as to cover over my utter idiocy. 'That we shall write a very bad book.'

'Yes,' she said, sounding distracted. 'That's not really very likely is it?'

'Isn't it?' I said.

'We are both professional writers,' she said, calmly. 'We have done this before. We have a good idea. Unless we are both struck by accidental lobotomy at the exact same time, I think we shall be all right.'

'I see,' I said.  'You are saying that statistics are on our side?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Oh well,' I said.  'That's all right then.'

Sarah has occasional fleeting visits to the irrational.  Her default mode is, however, bracingly practical.  I have never done practical in my life.  I get all twisted up inside because in my secret heart I think if I try hard enough, and think hard enough, and work hard enough, I might just, one day, write something that comes close to Mrs Dalloway.  Sarah does not care a whit about Mrs Woolf.  She is an absolute pro. I am, from now on, going to attempt to emulate her.  THAT is my new year's resolution.

PS I read somewhere once that someone did a lovely project where they just took a photograph a day for a whole year, so that they had a visual record of their daily life. The pictures were not an aesthetic festival, just plain snapshots of an ordinary life.  I love that idea.  One of the things I do want to try and do this year is have a picture a day. It might get dull or repetitive, I may get bored and give up on the whole thing.  But, for what it is worth, here is what I saw today -

Snow on the trees:

The sheep, just visible through the starting blizzard:

One of the dogs, running down the beech avenue:

And the other one, hock deep in snow:

That snow, by the way, is not a drift.  There has been no wind for two weeks.  That is just how deep it is. For your reference, here is my flower pot, now entirely submerged, with its ever-growing cap: