My family, and other happinesses.

This is always hectic time of year for us. The clans begin to gather as the day of the highland games approaches. The entire family is here – both nieces, and all four of us brothers and sisters together, which is a very rare occurrence, especially as The Younger Brother lives in Bali. We also have visitors from abroad, which is rather thrilling: one from Australia and one from Thailand. Scotland puts on her pomp for them, as the sun dazzles and dances, and they go off this morning to see the glory that is Glen Muick. I feel happy that they shall see the mighty glen at its finest.

Last night, very tired after a long week, I attempted, as graciously as I could, to refuse a kind dinner invitation. The Brother-in-Law was having none of it. ‘But I’m speechless with exhaustion,’ I said. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘You can just sit there and say nothing.’

Two hours later, I WAS SINGING.

Yes, my darlings, there was singing. Various humans actually played the tambourine. I may have picked up a pair of maracas. The Older Niece has the voice of an angel, a proper voice, which can send shivers up your spine. The rest of us can just about carry a tune. The Brother-in-Law and The Man in the Hat (husband of Older Niece) both whack merry hell out of a guitar. There is even a Gibson in the house.

So, we have a musical evening. I perk up amazingly when it turns out we are having Friday night wine on a Thursday. Nothing like a bit of Margaux, miraculously produced by the kind guest from Thailand, to put a spring back in a tired step.

I sang, I laughed, I shouted. It was one of the best evenings of my life. I used to be a bit cynical about family. Blood was certainly not thicker, in my rather jaded view of things. Now I think that there is nothing like it. There is nothing like being surrounded by the people who have known you since you were born, and whom you have known since they were born. They don’t mind if you sing and shout, because they’ve seen it all before. There are all the old jokes and the collective memories and the stories of childhood. It is a thing of enchantment.

Despite an excess of the good claret, I have no hangover. I run about in the dancing sunshine, doing the horse, going to HorseBack, writing my book, having two astonishingly successful bets at Goodwood, thanks to the mighty combination of Hughes and Hannon, who can do no wrong just now. Stanley the Dog has a ball and is in seventh heaven. I never saw him so happy.

There is a lot of joy in these hours.

Most of the time, I am pretty cheerful. I have a lot of delight in my life and a lot of great good fortune. I have animals I adore and a job I love and some voluntary things to keep my conscience reasonably clear. I live in a place of beauty. I have the trees. But there are the daily worries and stresses which fall into any life, however lucky. This sheer, soaring happiness which comes with the family around me is actually quite rare, I realise. It pushes everything else out. It lifts me up and sends me out into the day thinking that nothing else matters.

I like to record it too, so that when life returns to normal and I am assailed by doubts and frets, I can look back and remember. It’s important, I think. Write it down; write it down. Record the joy.

 

Today’s pictures:

Scotland, this morning:

Garden:

Stanley the Dog, in canine heaven:

Best Beloved, who was of such goodness and sweetness today that I run out of adjectives. She did three amazing pieces of work, two for strangers she had never met before, and was greeted with cries of joy and disbelief. She is making up into a horse that dreams are made on:

The hill, almost lost in the dazzle:

As I write this, the wizard that is Dermot Weld sends out Unaccompanied to win at the Galway Festival he makes his own. It completes a very happy little treble. I shall have some cash to spend at the games tomorrow. And I end the day as I started it, with a smile on my face.

In which I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about

I was going to address something very serious today, but I can’t quite remember what it was. I think it had something to do with bigotry and hypocrisy. What a Monday treat that would have been.

As it was, the day degenerated into a muddle of horse, four different kinds of work (at least one bit of it very serious and not at all about me), paltry attempts at admin, and housekeeping. You can tell that it was a serious day because I only had time to do one tiny treble on my happy post-Frankel William Hill account. I now have no idea what time it is, or what I must do next, or even what my name is. My brain feels like it has been hijacked by experimental scientists. I really must take more iron tonic.

The housekeeping part was very nuts indeed. There is a family wedding going on, and various people are arriving a week in advance to do important logistical things. (I never understand what goes on in making weddings and find the mysteries of them baffling. All I do know is that the whole thing seems to involve small battalions.) As part of the jamboree, I am deputed to have one of the kind logistical people to stay in my house. I find this alarming on about four different levels.

First of all, when work is at full tilt like this, my domestic life goes to pot. (She will think I am a slattern, and she will be right.) Second of all, I am a solitary introvert, and find even the nearest and dearest tiring after three days. The idea of a stranger for a week is therefore disproportionately startling. Third of all, all the sodding lights in the spare bathroom went kaput and I have a fusebox that dates back to 1913 and is therefore incomprehensible to me. The poor woman is going to have to clean her teeth by candlelight unless some electrical deus ex machina descends on the building. Fourth of all, I discover that even though my schedule is frantic, I still cannot help falling into housewife dementia.

So, this morning, I decided the linen sheets must be brought out, the towels newly laundered, biscuits bought for the tin by the bed (I cannot stick the idea of people getting hungry in the night), flowers purchased and Constance Spryly arranged. Then I had to tear back into the village to buy tea. I do not drink tea, but every other Ordinary Decent Briton does. Asking someone to stay in a British house without tea wanders into the mazy realms of Bateman cartoon.

Also, for some reason, I decided that there must be green apples and green grapes, partly for aesthetic effect, and partly in order to ward off those pesky hunger pangs. I also appear to have bought a nice new blanket for the spare bed, because clearly the other twenty-seven blankets I already own are not smart enough.

At least I am supporting the local economy, I thought gloomily, as I performed all this nuttiness. I should get a bloody government grant, or a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Now I have to go and get the poor dog from the vet. After all that, her ear was not right, and she has had to have a POLYP REMOVED. (I take deep breaths and try not to freak out.)

I feel completely crazed and have lost all sense of perspective and hardly know what it is I type. But there must be blog; you must have blog; or the world shall spin off its axis.

I think this is what people call stream of consciousness, if you can describe what I harbour in my cerebellum consciousness.

But the good news is, that of all the work I had to do today, I managed to get the most important done, which was a funding proposal for HorseBack UK. Who knows? It might be turned down. Grants are hard to win. But there is the humming feeling that, if I got them right, words I scratched on a page just may translate into thousands of pounds for a Very Good Thing. So I can deal with dog ears and strange guests and domestic daze, because there was at least one serious matter, that meant something. A day cannot be lost if it has that in it. Even if this poor blog has gone to hell in the process.
 
No time for pictures today, just two darling girls and a blue hill:

Return

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

See? This is what happens. I go away for a couple of days, and all hell breaks loose. A monumental piece of legislation passes in America, against all the odds, to cries of communism, tyranny and the end of days. A huge row over settlements breaks out in Israel. British MPs are caught on camera referring to themselves as taxis for hire (oh, the edification). Lovely Sandra Bullock finds out that her husband has been catting about with a tattooed lady who likes dressing up in Nazi costumes. Meanwhile, my top news is that the oystercatchers have come in from the coast, which is the surefire, copper-bottomed, blue chip sign that spring has arrived at last.

When I say away, what I really mean is that I have not had time to blog for the last few days. My lovely cousin G came to stay and I went into full hostess mode. I take guests very seriously. The good linen sheets must be aired, the flowers arranged, the vodka frozen, the logs brought in for the fire. I even brushed the dogs, so that they would look shiny and smart, like small children on their first day at school. The visit was utter heaven, from start to finish. The sun came out and shone gaudily from the moment she arrived, to the moment she left; there was the taking of cocktails and the discussing of politics and the rehashing of old jokes and all the other intense pleasures of which a friendship of twenty-five years is made. There was laughter and exclamation and long, luxurious breakfasts and walks along the burn, where the ducks are getting ready to build their nests.

We ate delicious Aberdeen Angus steaks, so melting and tender you could have cut them with a spoon, and spicy prawn and noodle soup with coriander and lime, and Thai curry, and pork escalopes cooked in the Milanese style. It was a perfect United Nations in this house. We went up to my mother's house to celebrate my dear stepfather's birthday, and ended up drinking fine cognac at four in the afternoon in a thoroughly decadent manner.

Now I am back to normal. I do apologise for the slight break in transmission. I must sharpen my wits and concentrate; I must write my book and do my work. But it was a perfect four days, and I smile as I think of it.

 

Picture of the day is Barack Obama, watching his healthcare bill pass:

It has become fashionable now to trash Obama. The Left complain because he is not radical enough, he is not doing enough to rein in the banks, he keeps bashing away at the bipartisan thing even though the Republicans will not give him a single vote and treat him with disdain. The Right insist that he is an evil communist (and sometimes a fascist at the very same time) who wants to take their guns, tax them into extinction, kill their grandmothers, pander to terrorists, and generally turn America into France.  Commentators say that he is not tough enough, experienced enough, even engaged enough.

I think he is a sort of Zen miracle. He appears able to absorb the relentless blows rained down on him, without buckling. He sits back as people on national television describe how he is just like Hitler, how he is a racist, how he refuses to keep America safe (a peculiar and persistent meme, as if somehow he is longing for Armageddon). He deals with a rabid 24 hour news cycle, a recalcitrant legislature, the jostling disagreements in his own party, the blatant untruths told by the other side, and then, finally, calmly, he passes a bill that no other president has been able to achieve, although many have tried. I think that shows extraordinary patience, determination and cool.

America may be the most complicated country in the world. It has a kind of rage in it at the moment which makes me think it is almost impossible to govern. It is mired in a bleak recession and fighting a hot war. It faces continuing terrorist threats. Yet Obama manages to retain his belief in it, as a place of innovation and progress and, that hoary old chestnut, hope. He is a study in keeping his head whilst all about him people are losing theirs. I admire him very much for that.

A hostess speaks

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

As you might have noticed, I have had guests all summer long. One of the very few things that makes me sad about my decision to flee London and end up six hundred miles north of Hyde Park Corner is that I miss my old friends. Luckily, the hardier of them will sometimes pack up their entire family, get on plane train or automobile ('is it Charnock Richard services that I should avoid on the M6?), and pitch up at my front door. This of course leads to a girlish ecstasy of excitement, but also, equally of course, a hard dose of hostess anxiety.

The hostess anxiety has several roots. Like those Jewish and Italian mammas who may only exist in our imaginations, I associate good cooking and the taking of pains (flowers in the bedroom, the best sheets) with love, and I want to shower my friends with the love. Also, the poor things have flogged all the way from the south, often with small people in tow, so the least they deserve is as much comfort as I can give them. There might be an echo of childhood memories of my mother, who spent at least a week getting ready for guests, religiously laying out the finest towels, heavy glass bottles of Malvern water by the bed, biscuits in a little tin in case anyone should awake, starving, in the night, and a sheaf of writing paper, should someone be suddenly struck by the urgent need to write a letter. Perhaps there is a batsqueak of defensiveness, a small desire to prove that despite leaving the naked city behind I can still live the good life, so far north. And then there is a massive dose of general overexcitement, because visitors are still a relative rarity, and a delightful excuse to make detailed menu plans, show off my latest culinary invention, get out the loveliest linen.

I am not nearly as anal as I used to be. There were times when the entire house would have to be reorganised for about a month in advance. Now I am older and more blurred around the edges: I understand that my friends accept that I live in a constant state of mild muddle. There is no point trying to hide the piles of paper in my office, or the books that live on the stairs. They are not coming to see Martha Stewart, after all. It seems that they will go on forgiving my foibles, even though I shall never turn into the Organised Person of my dreams.

In being a hostess, as in life, it is the little things that often make the most difference. I think it is reductive and stupid to make rules for these things, just another way to make women feel inadequate about their lives. Ignore firmly any sentence that starts: a good hostess must... Having people to stay does not have to look like something out of a glossy magazine. The best fun can be had with nothing more than some good conversation, a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. But if I were to come over all Martha-ish, these would be my own indispensible elements for a charming weekend:

Flowers by the bed.

This one definitely comes from my old mum. It does not have to be a Constance Spry arrangement; I favour a small Moroccan tea glass filled with pretty things from the garden, usually, in my case, mint and sage as a base, and then whatever is flowering at the time - most recently, a white hydrangea, a deep purple geranium and some marjoram. This is the smallest of the small things, but it is a telling act of care, and also makes you feel tremendously domestically goddesslike as you do it If you do not have a garden, or it is the dead of winter, a little glass of tulips is very fetching, and quite cheap.

A well-stocked bathroom.

I live in a rented house, and my long-suffering guests have to put up with a tiny bathroom with woodchip on the walls and an avocado suite. They all say, sweetly, that it reminds them of the 1970s, when they were small, but still. To divert them from the aesthetic horror, I fill the bathroom with as many luxurious products as I can lay my hands on. They get Floris and Jo Malone and huge bars of scented Portuguese soap. Also: far too many towels. I think you can never have enough towels. Another nice thing is to provide basic items they might have forgotten to pack, so there are always spare toothbrushes, toothpaste, cotton wool, moisturiser, body cream etc etc. I do a little hotelly bowl filled with needles and thread, cotton buds, and what I believe are called 'sundries'. No one ever uses them, but it gives me inordinate pleasure.

The good linen.

Before the credit crunch caught us all in its snapping teeth, I had a rush of blood to the head and bought some actual linen sheets (quite good value from The White Company sale, if you have any money left). These are kept for best and proudly brought out when the visitors come. I am quite hard line when it comes to bedding. I think a spare room should have pristine white pressed sheets, at least four good pillows, and plenty of extra blankets (one house I once stayed in was so cold that I was reduced to getting up in the night and putting on all my clothes, including socks, so that I could get to sleep).

The good linen, seen here in action. That pretty wallcovering is a Chinese-style fabric, designed by my very own talented sister, if I can say that without sounding too swanky.

The good food.

It does not have to be fancy. I used to break out the fillet of beef the moment guests arrived; I do live in Aberdeen Angus country, after all. Now it is more likely to be salmon fishcakes and roast chicken with smashed potatoes with olive oil and basil. In some ways, the simpler the food is, the better, because there is more time for chatting. I think the only rule is that it should be made with love. I have given up doing three elaborate courses. Now, people get a little soup in a tea glass instead of a first course, or some homemade salsa with tortilla chips, then one good main course, followed by watercress salad and cheese in the continental manner, and some Green and Black chocolate to finish. If you kill yourself making a la di dah three course dinner with all the trimmings you will just end up feeling flushed and faintly martyrish, which is not the point at all. Where I do veer into Martha territory is breakfast, where I get quite carried away - berries with natural yoghurt, sausages and bacon and tomatoes, and soda bread hot from the oven with special Deeside jam. After that, I usually have to have a little lie down.

A free period.

Even though I mostly want to spend every waking moment with my lovely guests, compensating for the weeks we spend apart, I have learnt that this does not make for the most successful visit. It can be too much, and everyone, especially me, gets fretful and overstimulated. So my new rule is that after lunch everyone gets a free period. I usually go and lie down on my bed, like an old lady, either reading a book or having a little disco nap. The guests will either mount an expedition of their own - a trip to the bookshop at Ballater, or a beautiful drive along the south Deeside road, where they may see Highland cows and black sheep and even, if they are very lucky, an eagle - or just lounge about in the sun, should there be sun, or, in the winter, sit quietly by the fire with a newspaper. Then we are all doubly delighted to see each other again after tea.

So, my dear readers, there are my thoughts on the art of the hostess. It is not exactly Lady Otteline Morrell, but it seems to work for me. You will have your own theories and strategies. My sister, who can be stricter than I, boils it all down to one, iron-clad principle: guests, like fish, go off after three days.

The house, ready for guests, complete with slumbering dogs on the newly plumped-up sofa. They have NO sense of decorum.

Sarah's lovely children, William and Beatrice, who came to stay this week, watching something very serious on the television, with, of course, dogs in their usual position.