Not not not the screw top.

Cremation people: I am sure you are good and thoughtful and kind to children and animals, but who had the meeting where it was decided that the default urn would have a screw top? No human should end up with a screw top.

And logistics people: who invented the form which asks Did the Deceased die from violence?

What the buggery bollocks were you all thinking?

I’m in the irrational anger stage. You may be able to tell.

I loathe the horrid questions and decisions and things to be done. My mother has gone. Her mortal remains mean nothing to me. She is locked now in my heart, and, in time, I shall commit her to the mountains, to Glen Muick, which is my cathedral. I’ll give her back to the earth and the land and the hills and the sky. That is my own private memorial. We shall also have a little family ceremony. But the forms, the questions, the decisions and indecisions mean nothing to me.

The poor undertaker came today, and had to try and understand when I said something of this to him. He had no language in which to reply. I could see his ordered brain searching around for an answer and coming up with: No Correct Response. He is trained in the ways of formality. There can be no you or me, only yourself and myself. I had stumped in from the horses in filthy muddy gumboots and taken them off at the door. He was immaculately dressed. I sat in front of him in odd socks, with my most battered hat on because I was having a rotten hair day.

Even my sister was slightly surprised by this. ‘What is with the hat?’ she said, before she could help herself.

‘I’m having a bad hair day,’ I said. ‘Even a bad hat is better than bad hair.’

The poor, poor undertaker. I don’t think they trained him, at undertaker school, to deal with a crazy woman in no shoes and a bonkers hat who does not care what it says on the nameplate of the coffin.

Then I went and watched a Marine work a thoroughbred, and sanity returned. The Marines really, really know about death. Especially when they have been blown up twice in Afghan. He had all the language I needed, the directness, the authenticity, the keen emotional intelligence, the absolute lack of fear in the face of mortality. For half an hour, I was soothed. I could speak words that made sense, and know I was not frightening anyone. It takes more than a distracted woman in a lunatic hat to strike fear into the heart of a hoofing Royal.

I made my sister Irish stew and we spoke of life and death and love and pain.

More kind words flew in, from all corners of the internet – email messages from old friends, lovely comments on the blog, sweet flutters of generosity on the Facebook.

On my Twitter feed, there is a young boy who recently did a charity walk for the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. I’d found him on my timeline and sent him many messages of congratulation and encouragement because I found what he was doing so inspiring. It was one of those rather touching, fleeting meetings of strangers, in the ether. This young man took the time to send words of kindness and condolence. I think he is ten. He may be eleven. Imagine doing that, at such an age.

The irrational anger will come. It’s a bit of a bastard, but death makes me cross. I have to let that one roll through me, until it is out the other side. To counter it, and balance it, I must pay attention to all the good things, however small. The stalwart friend who held my horse for the farrier this morning because I was late and had to dash off; that fine Marine; that dear young stranger on Twitter; the good companions, the ones who have been with me for over thirty years, who write to make sure I know they are thinking of me. The people who say: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do that.’ (Almost the sweetest words in the English language at times like this.)

Put in the plus column the cooking gene, so that my kitchen is now filled with soup – beetroot soup, and cauliflower soup, and my own mysterious green soup. All the people who really get it. The people who are not scared of death and strong emotion, and can be easy with those hard masters. The good Scottish weather, forecast to be dour and cloudy, which changed its mind and sent me some gentle sun. The lovely mares, in their secret field. The thoughtful neighbour, who took the time to drop in a card. All the good things. There are so many good things.

I can’t quite forgive the screw top. I expect I shall learn to let it go. I don’t care about the name plate on the coffin, but I shall do some ravishing flowers, because I do funeral flowers like nobody’s business. The flowers should not really matter either, but they do. I’ll send the old lady off with the best damn arrangement. She shall not be insulted with maidenhair fern. I find a furious consolation in that thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are of the simple, beautiful things to which I cling:

Rage against the machine

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My computer starts braying at me, like a maddened donkey. Then everything flashes. Then everything freezes. If I were not such an anti-cliché vamp, I should say my blood ran cold. (Actually, one does feel a sort of physical chilling effect in moments of panic; and anyway, there are clichés and clichés.)

A furious sign appears. Disc full alert, it says, or something equally terrifying. Apparently, I have only 113mb of space left. For those who do not speak computer, i.e. My Mother, this is absolutely nothing. If my computer were an acre, I would have one square foot of room left in which to move.

I do not understand. There are many things about machines I do not understand. Specifically, I did a big clear-out only last week. I was so proud of myself. I threw out a whole forty gigs of junk. Suddenly, my poor old contraption had a bit of room to breathe. In under eight days, all that had been mysteriously filled up.

The thing has gone rogue, I think. I have downloaded nothing in that time. I have taken a few pictures, that is all. Slightly shaky, I go to the pictures file, to have a rummage. It turns out that I have 7,345 photographs. How does that even happen?

Even more alarming, they appear to exist in three locations, which means in effect I have over 22,000 pictures files. There are things I knew I deleted, but the computer has said no, and squirreled them away in secret cellars and dungeons, scattered about my hard disc. I find endless duplicates. Each one has to be individually removed, with an infuriating ARE YOU SURE notice after each. Yes, yes, bugger off, of course I am sure. I start to grow crazed with the machine. Is it questioning whether I know my own mind?

I waste at least two hours of valuable work time doing what is euphemistically called ‘housekeeping’. None of it makes any sense. There are files where there should not be files. At one moment, there is no disc space left at all; after a reboot, there are, bizarrely, sixty gigs, which is much, much more than the amount of nonsense I have just deleted. I think: are there gremlins in the thing, secretly reproducing in the night? Have I lost control of my own implement? This is supposed to be my slave, not my mistress.

Eventually, things rock back to some kind of normality. Disaster seems to be averted, although I have deep technological questions to which I can find no answers. (Why are there suddenly 179 photographs in a Temp file, which was not there five minutes ago?) I wish, mournfully, that The Man in the Hat were here, because this is ABC to him. For me, it is like trying to have a conversation about sovereign debt in Italian, when all I can actually say in Italian is please and thank you and goodness the Campo de Fiori is beautiful.

It makes me think about impotence. I’ve been having sudden moments of cresting fury, small random rages, in the last few days. I am not good with anger. I do not know where to put it. (I asked The Brother this, yesterday. Take it outside and shout it into the wind, was his advice.) My crossness is a delayed reaction to one specific thing, in which a person has done me egregious wrong, and there is little chance for redress. It is one of those things where you have to let it go, and you persuade yourself you have let it go, because otherwise it will eat you up from the inside, and then you find yourself yelling at an inanimate object. At which point, it becomes clear that the letting go is not working so very well.

I realised that this specific rage, about this one event (too dull to tell you all about), had been steadily leaking out into unrelated areas of life. It could be big things: my bloody father bloody dying. It could be tiny things: the fact that I can never find my mobile telephone, and, if I do find it, it turns out I have always forgotten to charge it.

I can get violently cross about intractable political matters, and pointless tribalisms, and the stupid bankers with their stupid salaries. Mr Hester, I think, enraged, suddenly taking it very personally: do you really need your £35 million in three years? Thirty-five million quid. That is how much we, the taxpayers, have paid the fellow in order to sack people and watch the share price of RBS go down, down, down.

Then, back to the very small again, and I find myself hideously affronted that a complete stranger will ring me up, in the evening, and ask if I want some double glazing. How dare you encroach on my privacy, I think, in stupid rage.

The computer crossness runs over all this like a palimpsest. It’s a combination of not quite knowing what I am doing, the machine refusing to do what I am certain I have told it to do, and the denial of agency. I damn well pressed that button; I got rid of that file; I made space. And now there the bloody thing still is, in some inexplicable other location, as if the computer is defying me, and spends its free time hiding stuff from me, for a joke. I think the fatal thing about machines is they make us dependent on them, so that when they suddenly do not work we know not what to do. It's like when there is a power cut, and I realise I can do nothing, not boil an egg, have a cup of coffee, keep warm, turn on a light.

There is a sense of wider grumpiness, in the population at large. The Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women have their very own television franchise, where they get to grumble about everything from school to Christmas. It takes hardly anything to send the Twitterati into incandescence. Columnists traffic in rage, against any perceived slight, politically correct idiocy, ministerial initiative.

I wonder if the computer feeling is not a tiny, telling exemplar of a broader malaise. There are many areas of life which seem beyond our human control: the climate, racing technology, the tectonic plates of geo-politics, the secretive workings of the masters of the universe (very few mistresses, even now) as they rig the financial world for their own enrichment, intractable political problems, the mysterious bureaucracies of Brussels.

Only this morning, people were shouting about the NHS. No one can agree. The government bill is brilliant, and the only thing to save the health service; the government bill is disastrous, and the NHS shall die. Doctors want it, doctors don’t want it; the nurses are furious; the commentators are split. The citizen can only sit back and watch, and hope that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. The future of the dear old NHS, the thing of which we are so proud, despite the national sport of grumbling about it, hangs in a balance about which I can do nothing.

All of which is rather a long way of saying that perhaps it is not surprising that sometimes I get cross. I wonder if I am living in world rigged for crossness. I am inclined to think of anger as something bad, something which must be fixed. Perhaps it’s just a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

I am not certain. It’s a fledgling theory and I am still working on it.

The main thing is the computer and I are friends again. I bless it each day; its miraculous chips and wiring and widgets allow me to do my work and read the internet and go on Twitter for fun. It is a thing I do not take for granted. I do not enjoy staring at the flashing screen bellowing What the fuck??? (You know when I start using three question marks things are very dire.) Let us hope the whirling disc gremlins do not come again in the night, and all shall stay calm, and I can think serene thoughts and make green soup and breathe.

Pictures are not quite of the day. As I went through the ancient, clogged photograph files, ruthlessly pruning and chucking, I found there were some old ones I could not quite throw out. (The excess if not just due to computer malfunction and defiance, but also because I find it almost impossible to delete anything of The Pigeon, even if it is slightly out of focus.) Here are a few darlings from the last six months that I could not quite kill. I am afraid they are rather dog-heavy, surprise surprise. Although there is also a pig, a robin, a Younger Niece, and some random grass:

And here is a quick snapshot of what today looked like. Afternoon light:

FIRST SNOWDROPS:

Yearny face:

Hill:

Blah

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Actually, it's more like BLAAAARRRRGGGHHH.

I must admit that I am very slightly prone to theatricality (as some of you may have noticed). I like a bit of hyperbole. I am down with excess. So, I can deal fairly well with big emotions. I like great big, clean, painful emotions that are about one thing, that come roaring and screaming out of you, that mean something.

When I say well, I don't mean necessarily with marvellous grace and cleverness. I mean that I sort of know what to do with them, and I always know that they will not finish me.

What I really hate are the messy, muddled, bunched up, neither flesh fowl nor good red herring emotions. The ones with a bit of resentment and a flash of envy and a dose of grumpiness and a pinch of recrimination. And it all gets stewed up in a box and sits low in your stomach, heavy as a lurking alien life form, and you've got to get your bloody work done, and stupid people are just asking you stupid questions, and making demands on your time, and can't everyone just bugger off and leave you alone?

I think that's how it goes. (You can see that metaphors get mixed too, and figures of speech strained to breaking point.)

Then, because I am not dealing with the mid-level emotions very well at all, I get cross. I tried walking it off; did not work; then I tried eating a lot of popcorn; utter failure. I tried Pigeon love and mushroom soup. Nope. Nothing. Still crazy.

The crossness escalates into something all its own, as if it is being fuelled by a Martian energy source which will last TO THE END OF TIME.

Luckily, the Beloved Cousin emails. Apparently she is furious too, and shouting at everyone, and then madly apologising. 'Everyone slightly confused,' she writes.

'Don't worry,' I write back. 'It's good for them. Will butch them up.'

Then I write 777 words, and think about chapter fourteen, which is a screaming mess. If I were brave and decisive, I would just scrap it altogether. It's not really awfully good. It's not dazzling and dancing with original thought. Also, this would save a lot of time: it's just one, slashing delete.

But oh no. I am determined that there are some dull emeralds in all the dung, so I have to go over and over it again to try and find them.

Also, I forget that cutting is never as straightforward as you think. You triumphantly carve away a section, feeling like a fifth musketeer, all flashing blade and insouciance, and then you realise that, without it, the next sentence makes no sense at all. Worse, there will be something three chapters later which refers back to it, which relies entirely on that section to make any sense, and now the anchoring section is gone, and the other thing is just hanging out there.

I think I had better stop now. I am suddenly aware that none of this has made any sense at all. I should cut it, but as always, some bizarre prompting nudges me into showing you the mazy wanderings of my furious mind. Why? Why? But I suppose all the advice on blogging always says you must give the punters what they want, and you do seem to like honesty. I really hope that you are not going to come to regret mentioning that.

 

Photographs now:

Autumn trees:

Promised lichen:

Moss on wall:

Young horse chestnut:

Even though it is October, the hydrangea is optimistically putting out new growth:

These are very naughty. I scavenged them from the wild. They seem happy, though:

The last three salvias:

And my three old lady chairs, to do with. From here, I can sit and stare down the beech avenue:

Geranium:

LOOK LOOK, The Pigeon is UP ON THE WALL:

She has her special I'm up on the wall face on:

Then I make her lie down on some leaves. She gets bored, and starts sticking her bottom in the air as an indication that she is finished. I think she looks exactly like Jennifer Lopez and start laughing:

Then we throw quite a lot of sticks. A dear reader sent me a link to a heart-rending piece in Slate about giving your old dog one perfect day, so now of course I am determined that every day shall be her perfect day. So I threw and threw the stick. And then I threw it again:

Not terribly good picture of the hill:

Better tomorrow. Promise.