A quick day

Raging sun. The day starts at minus five, and soars dizzyingly to PLUS ELEVEN. Scotland is in her most glorious, giddy pomp.

There was:

Work. HorseBack. Logistics. The making of lists. An unexpected drive through the silver birch woods, with the high mountains in the distance still smothered in snow. Vital errands. Slight dog panic as Stanley spots a chicken, a fowl he has not encountered before. Chicken is rescued in the nick of time. Charity shop; tidying of cupboards; more lists. A perfect half hour with the mare. As always, not enough time. Never enough time.

Oh, and the Sister gave me the red hat, so I may wear it to Cheltenham. (It is from her chic clothes shop.)

So this is what I shall look like when I roar Sprinter Sacre up the hill:

Except without the mare and the gumboots.

And this is the good girl who got a big fat gold star today:

Horses, work, time and slightly surprising hats. Or, the end of a really rather lovely week.

Another packed day. There was so much to do that I did not have time to do any serious work with my mare. Still, we achieved something rather miraculous yesterday, so I decided to give her a complete day off.

This morning, I found her, with her little herd, standing under the great tree in the middle of the paddock, which is her favourite place. I stood with her for twenty minutes, and told her, for the hundredth time, of the great day in 1970 when her grandsire won the Derby.

‘See,’ I said. ‘No one really knew if he would stay. He’d never run over that distance before. But Lester thought he would stay; Mr O’Brien thought he would stay. And he came rolling down that hill with a double handful.’

She nodded and dozed and rested her head against my chest and let me ramble on. She is very forgiving, like that.

I should really be getting her ready for riding now. I should be doing all the proper groundwork that goes into that. Even though today’s hiatus was officially because my time management is in tatters, actually sometimes I think one of the best things you can ever do with a horse is simply be.

That is my story and I am sticking to it.

Then I went up to HorseBack, to see Jim Dukes, their most excellent vet, in action. There is almost nothing I love more than watching really good vet at work, and, when it comes to horses, Jim is the high crest and peak.

But there was also a serious purpose. I’m trying a new thing with HorseBack, which is to show all the work that goes on behind the scenes.

There are the banner days, such as on Tuesday, when a member of the government comes to visit, and there are the busy days which will start again quite soon, when the courses are in full swing.

Yet, even on the quiet, unsung, ordinary days, keeping an organisation such as theirs ticking over takes a whole team, working hard together. I thought it would be interesting to show some of that, so I took a little photo essay of the vet doing his job.

Then there was work; then there was a very quick peek at the 3.25 at Sandown; then there was the making of a soup and the considering of all the logistical things which keep my own tiny organisation going.

There are so many things that happened this week which I would like to tell you, but the brain is frazzling now, and it is time to stop. My eyes squint and my fingers crab and my grasp of the English language grows faint.

Still, it was a good week. I had high excitement, a moment of very private achievement, some new ideas, a lot of animal love, the good feeling of being part of something more important than I, a great deal of laughter, a handy little treble which came in at 14-1, a surprising hat moment, a rather unexpectedly touching communication with a stranger on the internet, and, just this morning, in real life, one damn fine compliment.

It was a short compliment, not more than five words. It contained no curlicues or flourishes, no flowery language such as I would employ. It came from someone who does not hurl the things about like confetti.

It meant a lot.

 

Today’s pictures:

The vet at work at HorseBack UK:

Rodney, the most patient patient:

With my friend The Horse Talker, who is a long-time volunteer there:

In the beautiful granite stables, for a little box rest:

Meanwhile, out in the paddock, there is my special friend Gus the Foal, with his heavenly white face, and his insatiable curiosity:

Some quick garden pictures for you:

Myfanwy has had a lovely time this week, getting very muddy indeed:

Autumn the Filly, on the other hand, is looking very pretty and pleased with herself, after a series of excellent adventures:

Since the inexplicable hat proved such a hit, I can’t resist giving you a couple more of those:

That dozy face never fails to lift my heart. (Red’s face, not mine.)

I’m starting to think this might have to be my Cheltenham outfit. It’s the kind of thing Sprinter Sacre would surely appreciate:

Stanley the Dog has been exceptionally good and sweet this week, and had a lot of fine stick action:

And through it all, sails the calm blue presence of my beloved hill:

And since it is a Friday, and if you can’t be a bit self-indulgent on your own blog I don’t know where you can be, here is one final shot of Red and me. I like it because there is the funny juxtaposition of my most speccy geekish incarnation with the affectionate dreamy sweetness of Herself:

I hope you are all having a lovely Friday afternoon, wherever you are.

In which the unexpected happens. Or, the Dear Readers make me laugh.

Occasionally, I give writing workshops. One of the first things I always tell my students is: never, ever try to guess what your readers want.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that you can never know. I don’t care how many market trends you study, or sales figures you pore over; guessing what the public desires is a fool’s game.

The second is that it bleaches the life right out of your writing. The minute you start thinking about any given audience, a chilling effect descends. It’s the literary equivalent of What Would Your Mother Think? Well, Aunt Edna would not like that, or Uncle Bert hates too many semi-colons, and if I talk about naked women my respectable relations will throw the book on the fire. And so your prose dies on the page, in the face of the wagging fingers in your mind.

It sounds odd, but you have to write for you. If you fascinate yourself, then you have a chance at fascinating someone else.

As always, I fall into the tumbly old elephant trap of not heeding my own excellent advice.

My rule on this blog is not to look at the numbers. It’s not about numbers. I freely admit I started the thing with the cunning plan that it should go viral and then millions of people would buy my book and I could retire and open a racehorse sanctuary.

Viral, schmiral. Luckily, I discovered I liked blogging for its own sake. I came to love the fact that I had a small, very select band of Dear Readers. I know many of your names, and get little slivers of your lives.

I saw a blog yesterday which had over 200 comments on one post, and I thought oh, no, that’s too much. That spreads too thin for the community aspect, which is the thing I love here.

All the same, when I’m feeling a bit grinny and groany, I do occasionally look at the pesky graphs. If the lines fall downwards off a cliff, as they sometimes do, I feel momentarily sad, before giving myself a firm talking to. I am not so free from amour-propre that I do not get a little burst of delight when one post generates a lot of traffic.

So, here is the thing that really made me laugh. Today, after all the work and excitement and effort of this week, I was feeling a bit tired and cross. The weather has gone back to chill filthiness and my time management is still all out of whack and I’ve got a sore eye and that bug which was trying to get me a few days ago is back for another go. It is always in this kind of mood that I look at numbers.

Today, the story was a happy one. Up, up, up, went my beautiful balloon.

I laughed, because it was the picture of me looking nuts in a hat that did it.

There was no good prose at all. I had done nothing lovely with the language of Shakespeare and Milton. There was just a mildly inexplicable photograph.

You see, when I think of all the millions of people writing away on the internet, I realise I must offer something different or extra or valuable, to make it worth your while coming here. The only thing I had which marked me from the madding crowd was an occasional way with a sentence. There’s a lot of shoddy prose out there. I thought that at least I could give you a faint dose of lyricism, or a nicely-turned phrase, or the odd unexpected idiom.

But, my darlings, it turns out that all you want is crazed women in hats. I love you very much for it, and it has made me laugh and laugh.

It feels like a life lesson of the most profound kind, although I can’t quite yet work out what that lesson is. Something about expectations and assumptions, perhaps. Once I have distilled it into pithy, parable form, I shall get back to you.

In the meantime, I may have to buy that damn hat….

 

No time for the camera today. I’ve still got twenty things to do and no time to do them in. So here are four photographs from this week.

One is of HorseBack, one of the beauty of Red the Mare, one of Mr Stanley with his stick, and one of the lovely harbingers of spring:

 

 

Oh, and have been meaning to say: I’ve been hopeless at replying to comments lately. Some of you have asked questions, to which I have rudely not replied. I’ll do a Dear Reader round-up at the end of the week.

For which I have absolutely no explanation

Shattered after yesterday’s monumental day. I did not finish work until ten-thirty, so have no words for you.

Just one picture.

There are people who say, and I am of them, that one of the great things you can teach your horse is to lead quietly on a loose rope. If you can get the head down and relaxed, and the ears in the dopey, donkey position, so much the better.

Clearly, I also believe that if you can do whilst wearing a scarlet hat and waving at someone in the middle distance, so much the better.