Stoicism is not enough.

Stoicism, it turns out, can only get you so far.

I think: did I know this, and forget it? Did wish-thinking take over, so that I dreamt up a luring fantasy that I could just stoic my way out of it? Or did I remember very well, but think I’d give it shot anyway?

I’m not giving up on stoicism. I love it. I do not like the things which stand in opposition to it. I do not like the weeping and wailing and look-at-me-ing. I do not admire grandstanding and drama queening and that nasty strain of competitive grief which is played so ruthlessly by the narcissist. I do not like ululation and holding up the bleeding hands and the playing of the victim.

Everybody has sorrow. Everybody’s heart breaks. Everybody loses someone they love.

There are two voices in my head. (Who am I fooling? There are twenty-seven voices in my head. Sometimes it gets very crowded in there.) But these two voices are speaking the loudest, just now, and they are both saying the same thing.

One says: your mum died. This is the voice which understands well that is an ocean of loss, a great, unmapped expanse of water, almost impossible to navigate. That voice knows that the rogue waves will leave me storm-tossed, and hurl me, breathless and hopeless, to the beach, only to suck me out to sea again. This voice says there is no point trying to fight it or neaten it or pretend that it’s only an ordinary thing which happens to everyone. It does happen to everyone, but at the moment it is happening to me. This voice says, kindly, gently, that I must keep sailing on until that great tempest blows itself out.

The other voice says: your mum died. No need to make a fuss, says that voice, a steely note in it. (This is the same voice that says, when I dress up for a party, well, no-one is going to be looking at you.) Get on, says that voice, and for God’s sake don’t be a bore. Sing another song boys, says this voice, who has been listening to Leonard Cohen, this one has grown old and bitter. This voice is quite useful, in a way. It is the voice which gets me to HorseBack to do my work there, and gets me out to the field to check the water trough and put out the hay, and drives me to make breakfast every morning for my dear stepfather and make bright conversation about world events to cheer him up and keep his mind off it. (As if I could keep his mind off it.)

Another wiser, saner voice speaks now. That voice says: they are both right, and you have to find the balance between the two. Find the balance. Stoicism is not enough, although it can be good and useful and keep one existing in the world. The wild stormy griefs must be let out, from time to time. Probably best if one does that in a nice, quiet, private place, so as not to startle the horses, but they must be given their moment.

Let it out, keep it in. It’s like a push-me-pull-you. Wallowing is no good; self-indulgence is no good; but the thing is real and true and must be felt. Find the balance.

I write all this because I burst into tears in front of the poor stepfather this morning. For all that I believe my job is to cheer him up and be my best self for him, I could not help it. Out they came, the streaming tears. Then I put on my ridiculous hat and made a joke about it. ‘No wonder I am crying,’ I said, a bit watery, ‘when I have a hat like this. It is a truly tragic hat. But it does keep the rain off.’

(I feel there is a life lesson in this, although I can’t quite put my finger on it. It really is a tragic hat, but it really does keep the rain off.)

And we laughed, and I went home to do my work, and said that I would see him in the morning.

 

Today’s pictures:

The rain stopped this morning, and the sun shone, and my sweet girls went out into the set-aside to have a little graze. They are so happy and so muddy and so woolly and so absolutely themselves, rooted in this good Scottish earth, shimmering with goodness and authenticity. They are my best consolation, because they are so beautiful and true:

Good parts, bad parts. Or stoicism and loss.

I’m back in the missing stage, today. Yesterday I was in the stripped of my skin stage. The day before I was in the baffled, hit a brick wall stage. Today, all I can think is: I miss you. Oh, I miss you.

It was every day, you see. I saw my mother ever day. That’s part of the problem. It’s the good part and the bad part. The good part is that we saw each other each morning as I went in to make the breakfast. On Saturdays, I collected her Racing Post from the shop and delivered it and stayed to talk about the day’s runners. (‘Oh, Ruby,’ she would say, a wistful, maternal note in her voice, as if these were not tough men at the top of their profession. ‘Oh, AP.’) On Sundays, we all had a lie-in and I would just get a telephone call if Hurricane Fly or Annie Power had done something marvellous at Punchestown.

That’s all good part. The bad part is that this means there is a vast daily rupture; a daily absence; a daily reminder. The lovely Stepfather and I eat our eggs and doggedly talk of the news. We speak of Paris and fundamentalism and tolerance and intolerance and the lessons of history, and we pretend that there is not a great, gaping hole in the house. We do a lot of speaking. The one thing we do not say is: ‘Oh, how we miss her.’

I write about my mother and father as if they were paragons. They were not. They were as complex and flawed as all human beings. They were both dazzlingly brilliant parents and occasionally absolutely useless parents. There were times when they drove me mad, and times when I drove them mad, mostly through my shocking stubbornness.

But the interesting thing about death (at least, it is fascinating to me) is that almost at the very moment of passing from the mortal realm to whatever lies beyond all those flaws and frailties and maddening bits are burnt away, as if in some grand Phoenix-like fire. And from the ashes rise all the glorious parts, the good bits, the moments of glad grace, the idiosyncratic talents, the laughter, the kindness, the sheer otherness. (They were both quite unusual, in their different ways. I only realise this when I tell someone a story which I think perfectly normal, and see the arched eyebrows and look of astonishment.)

I like that part. I like remembering them in their glory days; I carry their very finest selves with me, locked into my heart.

I got used to being without my father. It took about two years. I still think of him every day and sometimes miss him so much that I can’t breathe, but mostly I think of him with a great, spreading fondness and keen pride and a lot of wry laughter. I’ll get used to this too, although I think it’s going to be harder and longer, because of the every day aspect. A huge chunk of the cliff of my life has crumbled into the sea and I have to make a new path.

The Stepfather, who is a gentleman of the old school, as my brother said at the wake ‘the greatest gentleman in Britain’, said a very kind thing yesterday. We were talking about stoicism. Mum had it; he has it; it is one of the virtues that is still stitched into the culture of this dear old island race. I admire it more and more as I get older. ‘I think you are very stoical,’ he said, nodding his wise head.

I felt as if someone had given me a medal. When I was young, I wanted to be charming, brilliant, eccentric, talented. I wanted glittering prizes. Now, I want to be steady and stoical.

It doesn’t mean that emotions are not felt, or honoured, but that one does not make a three act opera of them. One may stare them in the whites of their eyes, but not wallow in them. It’s a very, very fine line to walk. Sometimes I feel that even writing this is a bit of a tap dance. Look at me, with my grieving. On the other hand, sorrow must have words, and this is as good a place to put them as any. I put them here, and people may read them and understand them, or they may pass on, and I don’t have to bore poor real-world humans and frighten the horses in the street.

Also, I want to remember. When the missing stage has faded, shrunk back to its proper place, become gentled with time, I shall take down this book and slowly read. I find it curiously soothing to know that it shall all be there, waiting for me.

 

Today’s pictures:

The remarkable thing is that the one place I don’t have to be at all stoical is down in my enchanted field. The mares are so funny, affectionate, clever and beautiful, so authentic and present and real, so honest and absolutely themselves, that merely standing next to them banishes all sorrow. It is really quite odd. It’s my daily rest, my morning holiday from wearing emotion. I can’t quite work out what it is - their sheer loveliness, the purity of them, their own complete lack of sentimentality, their faintly flinty life must go on aspect. Or perhaps all of those things. Whatever it is, I am more grateful for it than I can say.

It’s gloomy today, so these pictures are from a couple of days ago, when it was sunny:

Cheese puffs.

I have just made some cheese puffs. I have no idea why. I have never made a cheese puff in my life.

I am practising for my mother’s wake, which is on Saturday. I am in charge of the food. I am doing some old favourites which I can cook in my sleep, but I suddenly wanted something a bit different. So I got the puff pastry and played around with it and filled it with cheese and rolled it and rolled it and cut out little disks using an Edwardian sherry glass (exactly the right size for the puff, it turns out) and presto! – a cheese puff.

I have no concept of why I suddenly decided these would be the very thing for my mother. She never made them when we were little. They were not a tea-time favourite or a Saturday treat. We did not sit around in a pleading chorus, our eyes as yearning as those of Dickensian orphans, shouting: please, please, THE CHEESE PUFFS. I don’t think I’ve ever knowing eaten a cheese puff. I’m not sure I could have told you what they looked like. But that is what we are having.

I find the whole thing most surprising.

Riding and cooking, I think; those are the places where I am all right. In the field and in the kitchen. Do some people get very stout when they lose their mothers? Cooking, cooking, cooking, like a demented Italian mamma (do Italian mothers still think that food is the cure for all ills?), making soup and taking it round in pots so that the dear stepfather can keep up his strength, making something, some good offering.

He said this morning: ‘I still have my appetite. Is that wrong?’

I said: ‘It’s marvellous. You must eat, because it’s so bloody tiring. If we did not eat we would fall over.’

My step-aunt, whom I adore, has arrived, and we all have breakfast together, and it’s all hysterically British. We make little stabs at irony and talk about the news and generally carry on. The said is all in the unsaid. Occasionally, our eyes slide towards each other, acknowledging all the things that are tacit. (These are: it’s bloody awful; the house is so empty without her; everywhere you look there are heart-breaking little reminders.)

Then I stomp off to the field and there are my dear mares, as still and centred and peaceful as two little Zen mistresses, and I mix up their feed and give them their hay and do a little work with them and feel the heavy ache lift. They are both very affectionate by nature. Not all horses are. Some are like cats, and don’t care much for human stroking. These ladies are also getting into their furry stage for winter, despite their aristocratic bloodlines, so they are like two beloved teddy bears. I hug them and rub them and talk to them and they blink their liquid eyes at me and whicker down their velvety noses.

I suddenly thought this morning: this is like being in a foreign country. It’s as if I’ve gone abroad, to somewhere not very nice, where I can’t quite remember the idioms and am not certain of the food and can’t read the road signs. I have been to this doleful country before, but the memory is not sharp. So I drove along the river to anchor myself in my own country and look at my favourite hill and watch the water go by.

And then I went and did some more cooking.

 

Today’s pictures:

The river:

The teddy bear:

The crying stage.

I’m in the crying stage. I’ve been through shock, irrational fury, stoicism and looking on the bright side. Now every word, every memory, every small thing makes me cry.

This is good. The tears have to come out or they get stuck inside and turn angry and bitter.

The difficult part is not the tears, it is that this stage makes me feel as if I have been stripped of a layer of skin. I have absolutely no defences against the slings and arrows, and find normal conduct a strain, like walking uphill in a headwind. A well-meant suggestion feels like a shattering criticism of my entire self. The usual rough and tumble of other people living their usual lives makes me feel as if I have been hurled into a rioting crowd. A careless word or a sharp tone of voice are like red-hot brands on my paper-thin skin. An oversight feels like arrant rejection. A mild demand feels like a roaring sergeant-major is sending me up Everest without oxygen.

I don’t like wimpishness. I don’t like the stripped skin part because it reduces me to one of those weedy drama queens whose company is so exhausting. I don’t want to be that person. I want to butch up. But butchness will only return with time and I have to bloody well wait it out. I have to go slowly. This part cannot be rushed. This pisses me off quite a lot.

I suddenly think those clever Edwardians had it right when they went into black for six months after a death, and then lavender for the next six. It was a subtle, tacit sign to say Handle with Care. Many people are afraid of grief, and desperately want one to get back to normal. This is kind and faintly callous at the same time; it is very human and entirely understandable. The singed spirit does not want pity or even sympathy. The yearning heart does not need everyone to walk on eggshells. Solemn faces are not required. Jokes and laughter are essential. But gentleness and kindness and thought are needed and not everyone has those immediately to hand.

Some people are naturals with grief just like some people are natural with horses. I am passionately glad for those people. Oddly enough, today the best and most shimmering of them was the lady in the Co-op. Our Co-op is a small shop, and I know quite a lot of the people behind the till well. There is one I especially like and this morning she spoke the most beautiful and soothing words. They were so fluent, so authentic, so poetic that it was as if she had rehearsed them for this very moment. She had no fear and she had no pity. She had understanding, and a generosity of spirit which shone out of her like starlight.

Not everyone gets it. Why should they? But I cherish the ones who do.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just two today. They are of the person who gets it most of all. She is all gentleness and peace and understanding. She was as tender with me today as if I had been made of glass. Horses are famously telepathic and thoroughbreds especially so, because of their high sensitivity and intelligent. But this has taken it to a whole new level. I think she has been secretly watching Spinal Tap, and has decided to crank up her loveliness to eleven:

The trees.

Last night, I had a dream. I did not dream I went to Manderley again but that I was chatting to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. (I know that people who tell you their dreams are among the biggest crashers on earth, so I’ll keep this brief.) He was talking about crooked vegetables, which is what he is currently talking about in real life, and then he looked at me and said ‘As for the mixed messages which women have to deal with...’ He rolled his eyes as if in actual pain. And I threw my arms round him in amazed delight and said ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ve been living with cognitive dissonance all my life. I didn’t think that men really understood.’

The swanky part of me is quite chuffed that I use expressions like cognitive dissonance even in dreams. The critical part is quite cross that in my sleeping hours I give in to broad generalisation. (I am perfectly certain that there are men who do understand.)

I am not going to bang the lady drum but I did think a bit this morning about the societal expectations of women and how amazingly confused and contradictory they are and how one just gets used to it, as background noise. I am not sure why I dreamed about that, but perhaps it is too that there are societal expectations about death and grief and those hum along in the back of the mind.

One must be stoical, but not too stoical; let it out, but don’t frighten the horses. One must feel it, but not make a drama. One must move on, but not too soon. One must honour the dear departed, but not be morbid. One must share with the group, but not too much. Even as I try to face this damn thing in the whites of its eyes, and as I do that by writing about it, there is a little voice in the back of my head which says: ‘Quick, quick, make a joke.’ One must be solemn, but not serious. Or is it the other way round?

Even as my kindest, most sane voice says there are no rules for grief, that even those famous seven stages or however many there are come packed with caveats, that one must surf it free-style as if it were a wild wave, those humming, chattering voices of the culture cannot be entirely banished. I do not live in a vacuum. I am part of the world. In my more self-regarding moments, I like to think I am a perfect maverick, like my old dad who did not know who made the rules and did not care. But that’s not quite true. I have to work hard to be true to myself. Even at such a time as this, the horrid word ‘should’ sometimes echoes through the mazy corridors of my mind.

Jung said every person that humans dream of represents a part of themselves. I am quite glad that I am in touch with my inner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He is not hidebound by rules or expectations; he is a man of the earth and he believes in real food and he hates waste, just like my mother did. I find odd comfort in this thought.

Today, the sun shone again, and I went and stared at the trees. Stanley the Manly found the biggest stick in the wood and was quite sad when we had to go and I said it would not fit in the car. He gave it one last, tragic look, and left it on the ground. I said, absurdly, out loud: ‘We’ll come back and play with it again tomorrow.’

I salute everyone who can photograph trees well. It’s my second most difficult subject, after horses at the races, which are completely impossible. I thought of all those photographers who have mastered these two subjects and felt profound admiration.

I am so lucky to have these trees. I think every day that I don’t know what I would have done without my mares. I don’t know what I would have done without the trees either. Everyone has their thing. The trees are my thing.

After the trees, I drove up and looked at the hills. They looked back at me, serene and secure in their magnificence. I tried giving Mum to them, but they gave her back. She’s not ready to go out there yet. She’s going to stay with me.

 

Today’s pictures:

When you look at these pictures, you have to imagine the beauty times a hundred. I can’t capture it with my puny eye. But this gives you a little glimpse of the loveliness:

My mission, should I choose to accept it.

Well, the Be Happy For Mum plan didn’t go all that badly, in the end. I thought that it might be the most shaming disaster. I thought that everyone might shout through the ether Oh for goodness’ sake, just be bloody sad and get it over with. (I suspect that was a bit of Freudian projection, and in fact was the voice of my critical self, who is a terrible old vampish harridan and has always had too much gin.) In actual fact, on the Facebook, on the blog, kind people, some known well to me, some complete strangers, all rose up in glory and said generous and funny and wise things, which touched and amazed my bashed heart.

Here is what I learnt, because I must always learn something. All these years on, and I am still a girly swot at heart.

There is one place that the sadness really and truly does go completely away and that is on the back of my thoroughbred mare. I always knew that she did have super-powers. I just did not quite know how powerful they were. Being with her is cheering and soothing, but it’s on her back, when I feel her power under me and the peace that she carries in her flowing from her mighty body into my puny one, that everything falls into a stunning equilibrium. All the bad and sad things just fall away and I am free. I don’t know how this happens, but it does. She is a miracle horse and that’s the end of it.

The joys are there, if you look for them. They don’t banish the sorrow, but they go in tandem with them, like a pair of slightly grumpy and ill-matched carriage horses, the kind that the Queen would not use for state occasions. I’m going to go on driving my wonky carriage, and one day, those two ponies will learn to trot along together.

My stabs at normality are quite funny. I’m a little off kilter. Everything I say is a crotchet off-beat. My laughter is a bit too loud. My walk is a bit ragged. My clothes are frankly peculiar. My hair is a bit bonkers. My attempts to make sense don’t quite make sense.

Laughter still exists though, and it is as healing as tears. I have a new theory that grief is like a trapped energy and has to be let go, in great gusts. It needs to be released from the actual body. Shouty tears can do this, but so can shouty laughter. The Beloved Stepfather made me laugh at breakfast so much that I couldn’t speak for four minutes. It was one of those comical stories so recondite and absurd and almost tragic that only he and I (and my mother had she been here) could get it. That made it even more intense. Once he had told me the absurd thing, and I started laughing helplessly, he started laughing too, the first proper laugh he has done since it happened. It was naughty schoolboy laughter, because it was the kind of thing that was really quite sad in some ways, but we couldn’t help it, it tickled us to death. That laughter opened the door and let some of that captured energy out.

I have to keep reminding myself to let my shoulders go. I have another theory, you will be amazed to hear, that people trap their emotions in different parts of their bodies. Some people get headaches, or stomach cramps. I get the shoulders up around my ears. Every half an hour, I have to say: get those damn shoulders down.

Talking out loud is oddly helpful. I’ve always been prone to this, and it’s getting worse as I get older. Lately, I find myself in the Co-op saying, at shamingly high volume: ‘Now, what have I forgotten?’ Since Saturday, I have been walking round the house saying ‘Oh,’ and ‘Ah,’ and ‘Oof,’ and ‘What next?’ I say: ‘Oh, Mum,’ with a dying fall. I expect soon I shall move on to: ‘Steady the buffs.’

I like having a mission, and I’m going to keep on my mission of hunting for beauty, squinting for the good, searching for the consolations. My old friend The Horseman, who is a man of great matter-of-factness, not a sentimental bone in his body, but a man of oak, the sort of man on whom you can really rely when the chips are down, wrote me a brilliant, pithy message. It said: ‘Live hard in respect for those who can’t.’ That is my mission.

But, and here I think is the important thing, I’m not going to scold myself when I can’t do that. There will be days when it’s not possible. It’s a good goal, and a fine thought. I keep it in the front of my mind, like a shining amulet. The good old Horseman. He was there when my dad died, and when my dog died (he found me in streaming tears on his drive and staunchly faced them without fear) and now he has sent me a line to live by.

Rather to my astonishment, I have achieved quite a lot this week. I have written words, and done good work for HorseBack, and made soup, and worked my new mare, and ridden my old mare in glorious cowgirl canters on a loose rein, and even arranged some flowers. There are roses on my desk. There are never roses on my desk. They were on special offer and I thought, bugger it, I must have roses. They feel sweetly symbolic and I look at them now as I write and think: yes, yes, the small things. I live now in the world of the small things, so that the big thing does not overwhelm me, so that I do not drown.

 

Today’s pictures:

The roses:

I found this wonderful picture of my mother this morning. I remember that fur hat so well. I was very small when she had it, and I used to whip it off her head and hold it and stroke it as if it were a small bear. I can feel it now:

And this picture was in the same book. It is my sister, on her side-saddle champion. This says a lot about my mother. It was she who taught us to ride these ponies, who schooled them and groomed them and taught us sternly to look after them. If we were to have the great fortune to have such glorious animals, we had to be responsible for them. We were never allowed to come in at the end of the day until our ponies were happy and settled with their bran mashes. She would get up at three in the morning to drive us to distant shows – to the Three Counties, and Builth Wells, and Windsor, and Peterborough – and she would make us the best bacon sandwiches in the world to sustain us for the road:

Love and trees.

As the irrational anger stage flickers in and out like a faulty electrical current, there is also a flat stoicism. Get on, do life, don’t make a fuss. Mum left quite strict instructions that she did not want a fuss. (She meant with funeral arrangements and such, but I am taking her words to a wider stage.) So I am goodly not making one.

Quite a lot of people do not know. That’s always the odd thing when someone you love very much dies. The damn world goes on, and ordinary people go on doing ordinary things, and other humans talk to you just as if everything is rational and explicable, just as if there has not been a tear in the space-time continuum. That can cause little spurts of wild rage. Don’t you know what happened? one wants to shout, unfairly. Can’t you tell that there’s a reason my hair is bonkers and I’m wearing my maddest hat and I’m the colour of parchment? At the same time, the stoical, getting on with it self is almost glad, because one can talk of something other than death. The ordinary is soothing, and yet infuriating. It’s all very confusing.

Then there are the unexpected things that tear through the resolute, storm the defences, and break the siege. Today, it was the enchanting gentleman who helped create my mother’s garden. She made such a beautiful garden, and this fine man, who once farmed sheep and knows the land and loves it as I do, put into action all her dreams and ideas. He is a real man of the earth, and a proper human being.

I wanted to thank him.

‘She loved this garden so much, and you worked so hard, and I know how much that meant to her,’ I said, as we looked out through the mist and dreich.

The garden is a little sad at the moment, as it always is at this time of year, but the last of the white roses still lift their brave heads. The garden is in mourning too. As I thanked the kind man, my voice broke and I had to walk away. I did not need to explain. He knew.

The people who know, in every sense of the word, are the finest balm. A very old friend, someone I have known and loved since I was nineteen years old, writes all the way from India. He lost his mother last year, so he knows. Oh, he knows. And he knows me, even though we have gone into very different lives and only lay eyes on each other every year or so. The friendship, dug deep in our formative years, endures time and distance. His words are so perfect, so shimmering with love and truth, so brave and human and funny and dear, that I want to send him flowers.

Another beloved friend, who has also lost both his parents, writes: ‘It is as if a great oak has disappeared from your personal landscape.’ How clever he is, I think. How glorious that he knew the very sentence to write, the one that would make most sense to my addled mind and my battered heart. That is just it. A great oak has gone.

I always mourn fallen trees. We lose some each year in the winter storms. Only yesterday, I saw my neighbour chopping up a chestnut which fell to the first October gale, and felt a sharp melancholy. I always think of downed trees as mighty fallen giants, slain on some mythical battlefield.

Oaks are not common in this part of Scotland, but we have some magnificent ones. There are a few down by the red mare’s field, and a lovely plantation at the end of my mother’s garden. When my brother-in-law’s own mother was very young, she was instructed by stern forestry officials to cut the buggers down. She must be sensible, and plant commercial forestry, like all canny Scots do. She defied the stern men, most of whom were twice her age, and kept her oaks, and they live on, a great memorial to her.

In my world, everything comes back to love and trees.

 

Today’s pictures:

I must find some pictures of trees, I thought, as I finished writing this. But I’ve never been good at taking photographs of trees. I have snapped away at my favourite beauties, only to look at the results with a dying fall. Something about the flat dimensions of a photograph robs them of their majesty; they look oddly bathetic. Then, like a present or a shooting star or a ray of sunshine after the rain, I saw that I had captured the trees. There they were, staunchly in the background, as I had been taking a picture of Stanley the Dog, or my lovely mares, or the dear old sheep whom I adore so much. They were not centre stage, but they were there. These are the trees who people my days and never fail to make me count every damn blessing I have. Not everyone gets to see such beautiful trees. I do not take that good fortune for granted.

That is one of the old oaks, in the background:

A little rowan I planted in my own garden:

The woods I see every day:

The hill that brought me to Scotland (I fell in love with it as you fall in love with a person, and never went south again), with its fine fringe of trees:

The ones that keep the sheep sheltered from the wind:

One of my favourite mixtures of old planting and new planting:

More sheep, because you can never have too many sheep:

The avenue that leads to my mother’s house:

And her roses:

Friday.

The work starts to shift. People sometimes wonder why it takes so long to write a book. I wonder why it takes so long, especially when I can bash out fifty words a minute when I’m really cooking. It’s not the word count. That’s not even a sliver of it. It needs a lot of gestation, after the initial words are down. You carry it with you and think and think and think and think. The 153,000 are there, far too many of them, but you can’t see which ones must die. So you walk and gaze and ponder. Then, one morning, you think: ah, the mother must go. So it’s hasta la vista, Mama.

There’s also a ruthlessness which takes time to arrive. At the beginning, the precious manuscript is like a baby bird, every passage coaxed out with tenderness and gentleness. It must be done in a safe private place, with no cruel editing eyes to see.

Then, you get a bit tougher in the second draft. You are coming out into the light.

Then, you have to get absolutely bloody. It’s because of the Dear Readers. You can’t write a book with a readership in mind, thinking I’ll crack that market. If you do that, all authenticity is lost. You have to write the book you want to read. But as the drafts go on, the actual Readers swim into view. They are busy. They do not have time for your self-indulgent flourishes. They want a good story and some good prose and perhaps a little bit of universal wisdom or human condition. They like a laugh. They are not there to watch you do acrobatics.

I’m reading a book at the moment by a very famous writer whose editor is clearly too afraid to wield the blue pencil. Page after page of showing off prose dance before me. A scene which could have taken ten pages rolls on for three chapters, with some very, very writerly writing. I shout in my head: what’s wrong with a good old declarative sentence? If it goes on like this, I’ll never have time to ride the mare.

That’s when the ruthlessness comes in, and why. It is the least the Readers deserve. Oddly, by this stage, it is really not all about you. But this mental shift too takes time. I’m just reaching it now. I feel my sinews harden and my resolve shine.

In ordinary life, I make breakfast for my mother, and go down to do the horse. My sister arrives and walks round the block with us. The red mare is delighted since this means that she does not have to do schooling or transitions or anything fancy, but can just mosey along without reins, my hands scratching her withers as she drops her dear heads and sighs with pleasure. We are going so slowly that she can stop and say hello to some children on the avenue. She adores children. She loves the sound of human voices too, so the low rhythms of the Sister and I chatting are her deep delight.

I have no interest in Halloween, but the great-nieces and nephew are coming round later and I make them a chocolate fridge cake. I know they would prefer commercial sweets, but I think of them getting loaded up with sugar and additives and decide that, for the sake of the grown-ups who will have to put them to bed afterwards, some nice black chocolate and nuts and honey and raisins, with no terrifying E numbers or artificial colouring, might be better. I swish about, doing my domestic goddess schtick, making some soup at the same time, something I have not had time for in ages.

The radio is on. A Day in the Life comes on. The first part of it was written about my uncle. He died in a car crash and my father got the call very late and had to drive up the M4, through a black, frigid December night, to identify the body. He left my mother, eight months pregnant with me, at home. He never spoke of that midnight drive. I can’t imagine it. Sixty bleak miles, with a dead brother at the end of it. And then the sight of the body on the slab, that beautiful golden boy whom everyone loved, all the life and promise smashed out of him. My grandmother never really recovered. I’m not sure my father did either. The beloved name was rarely spoken throughout my childhood, as if the very sound of it was too much to bear.

I think of what my dad survived. Not just near-fatal falls on horses, back and neck broken twice, shoulders dislocating like clockwork, an ear ripped half off, but a grief so dark that it could not be put into words. And yet, somehow, he managed to be the life and soul of every party, bringing light with him wherever he went, so that people’s faces lit up and they stood a little taller, basking in the glow of his funny, idiosyncratic charm. It was only at the very end that the demons got him, when he was too battered and tired and defeated to defend himself.

I think of the slow, gentle, private life I live, in these Scottish hills. It is what I can manage. I don’t want to ride in the Grand National or be a shining star. I just want to write some sentences and think some thoughts. I want to watch Stanley the Dog with his stick. I want to walk round the block with my sweet red mare. Lucky for me, that is what she wants too. She was bred to be a champion, but it turned out she did not have the character for it. She is a tender soul. She loves the slow quiet as much as I do. It’s a sort of miracle that we found each other.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from the week. They are not the best in terms of photographic quality. But they show the sweetness and that is what I want today.

So muddy and scruffy and happy:

Sorrow.

Too sad to blog today. The sweet little filly has died.

I was quite cheerful this morning, keeping my chin up in proper British fashion. The Horse Talker made me laugh; the horses themselves were at their funniest and sweetest. Then I had to write a farewell for HorseBack UK, and now my heart is too bashed for any more words.

This is what I wrote:

Today, we have only the saddest news. Our little Spirit has gone. For all her fighting heart, she could not beat off the brutal infection, and in the end, it mastered her.

Our own hearts are broken.

Nobody understands why these things happen. As anyone who keeps and loves animals knows, fate can sometimes be random and brutal. Awesome Spirit was so bonny, so bright, always a picture of health. She was such a vital and vivid presence, so actual in the world, that it seems almost impossible to believe that she is no longer in it.

It is an especially cruel blow because of the great man in whose memory she was named. Paul Burns was one of the most remarkable people who ever walked through the HorseBack gates, and every time we looked at Spirit, we thought of him. It was a lovely thing to have a living reminder of his own mighty battling heart. And now there is just a space left behind, where these two beloveds should be.

A shadow has fallen over us, but we shall rally. If the men and women who come here have taught us anything, it is the value of dauntlessness, doggedness, a refusal to give in. They show, over and over, the shining virtue of grace under pressure, which was Hemingway’s definition of courage. There is work to do. The HorseBack ship shall sail on.

But today is a day of sorrow. We say goodbye to a beautiful, fleet, dancing girl, who was taken too soon.

Farewell, Awesome Spirit. You brought us joy, and we loved you well.

Run free now.

 

Bashing on

It was sad going up to HorseBack this morning and thinking of the good man who has gone. Everyone is hard hit, particularly the younger members of the team. At the same time, it was soothing, because there were the horses, and there was the new course coming in, and there was everyone lifting their chins and squaring their shoulders and getting on with it.

I think crossly about grief that it is not useful. It has no evolutionary utility. Humans tend to explain it to themselves as meaningful: it marks the passing of the beloveds as that great matter should be marked. And yet, the person who has gone would not be delighted that mourning and melancholy is left behind. Still, there it is: the hollowness in the throat, the feeling of unreality, the stupid sense of waste. It must have some deep biological root, since even animals mourn; elephants most famously, but horses too have been observed displaying signs of grief. The Pigeon pined for six weeks after the Duchess died.

My theory is: honour the dead by bashing on. This is not necessarily straightforward, but I think it must be true. So I do my HorseBack work and come back and write 1546 words of book and then take Mr Stanley up to see the herd. The Horse Talker and I brush our ladies in the blinding sun, so that their coats shine in the light.

The Remarkable Trainer brings her year-old boy to visit. He is ravished by the equines and very keen on Stanley the Dog. He has no fear of animals but only delight. They all respond to him with astonishingly touching gentleness, as if realising that this is a very small person, still a little unsteady on his feet, who comes in peace and must be treated with care. He laughs at them and feeds them delicate strands of grass and waves his arms in unfettered joy. He is the totem of life going on.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack morning:

Mr Stanley says: please, please, please may I play with my absurd squeaky toy?:

Answer: Yes. At which point, joy is unconfined:

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, and there are dear relations staying, so we had a very lovely little party. I made what I can only call Luxury Snacks, and arranged some special birthday flowers:

No hill today. The camera battery died. Just imagine something very serene, and very blue.

Battery died before I could capture the horses with the small boy, or their special shining coats, so here is one of Red from a few days ago, because a blog is not a blog without her dear face in it:

(Slightly wistful look means: is tea ready YET?)