Where the heart is; or, the friendly ghosts.

When I was two and a half years old, I fell head over ears in love with a gentleman called Eddie Harty. He had just won the Grand National on a horse called Highland Wedding when I first met him, but I knew nothing of that. I was far too young to be starstruck. I just knew that, of all the people who came to the house, and there were many because the front door was always open, he was the one who made my heart want to burst.

Whenever he arrived, I would run upstairs and put on my best party dress. ‘We sometimes had to wait for you,’ my mother says, drily. Apparently, I would give strict instructions that nobody was to do anything until I was properly dressed. Then I would run back downstairs, cast myself shamelessly onto Eddie Harty’s knee, and gaze up at him in adoration.

Forty-six years later, I still think of that most excellent gentleman. He was not a classical beauty, which apparently gave my mother great heart. She thought that I would not grow up to be led astray by a pretty face. Even at such a young age, I was all about the character. He was brave and dogged and determined and a great horseman, from a dynasty of great horsemen.

I think: it’s funny what one remembers.

When I get on a thoroughbred, I feel as if I have come home. My red mare carries with her the ghosts of all those mighty equine athletes among whom I grew up. I remember many of them too. My favourite was the grey Dolge Orlick. My father had a lot of horses who were named after characters in Dickens, which is quite odd, since he was famous for never reading any book except the form book. Lovely Dolge could not have been worse named, since, far from being oafish and evil, he was bright and bonny and kind.

The mare carries the ghosts too of the great racing men who illuminated my childhood. Quite often when I am riding her I think of Fred Walwyn and Fred Winter and Dave Dick and John Lawrence. She carries the spirit of my old dad, although he would have laughed out loud, in a characteristic mixture of puzzlement and pride, if he could see me riding her in her rope halter with one light hand on the reins as if she were an old cow pony out in the American prairies. My favourite set of books when I was eight was The Green Grass of Wyoming trilogy, and every morning, as we lope around the emerald fields of Scotland, I think of that, too.

She defies the laws of physics, acting as a kind of equine worm-hole, collapsing time and space.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, leaving my childhood home, going through ramshackle, gypsy teen years when we were always packing, having an antic London life in my wild twenties, before finally putting down deep roots in an adopted place which had nothing to do with racing or Ireland or horses or any of the things which were part of my young days. Scotland came about through whim and chance, and yet it is here that I belong. The mare, I suddenly realise, was the last piece in the puzzle.

Some people find thoroughbreds alarming or mysterious or incomprehensible. Some people really don’t like them. Yet every time I sit on that noble back, I am in a place I know and love, a place entirely familiar and easy. No matter how much is going on in my life or in the world, no matter how jagged and jangly I am, the moment I get into the saddle, I am home. It’s a tiny, workaday miracle.

 

Today’s pictures:

The dear Dear Readers gave me such a glorious welcome back to the blog that I feel quite bashful. (I am British, after all.) I can’t thank you all enough. You have put a huge and rather surprised smile on my face. I know you love the pictures of Scotland, so here are some more of Queen’s View, especially for you.

Love.

One of the things that people assume one lacks, if one should take the peculiar decision not to marry and have children, is love. There has been a lot about loneliness lately on the wireless. I heard at least three programmes speak of it, as I drove the five hundred miles to London, and the five hundred miles back to the north. (I think there must have been some terrifying survey, revealing the secret lives of lonely Britons.) I was talking about it to one of the best beloveds, when I arrived to stay for my first night in the south. Without thinking, I blurted out: ‘the only time I’ve ever been lonely was when I was in a relationship.’ He looked mildly surprised. He is a family man to his fingertips, proud and adoring of his four funny, bright children, affectionate with them, like a bear with his cubs.

It is true, though. It takes a top skill set to live with someone and love them well, every day, and I don’t have that set. I always chose absolutely hopeless fellows – charming, even glamorous, but unreliable and often quite fucked up. I instantly committed the grave sin which makes all the poor old shrinks in Hampstead shake their heads and suck their teeth: I gave all my power away. I fell into crazy, hopeless, unrealistic love, and wondered why I always felt so uncertain. Then I gave way to noisy despair as the whole thing fell apart with a rocking clang of inevitability.

But I have the love of thirty years. Those were the ones I saw this trip, the ones I have loved since I was eighteen years old. We have so much history together. We have, as Nanci Griffith sang, seen each other straight and seen each other curly. We’ve been young and hopeful together, wild and immortal. We’ve stayed up all night and driven through Italy and danced and drank and laughed. We’ve seen each other through heartbreak and desolation, through failure and triumph. We know each other so well and love each other so well that we start talking the moment we see each other, after gaps of many months, as if it’s only been five minutes. We smile goofy smiles of fondness and understanding at each other. We exult in each other’s successes and happinesses, wanting them as much as we want our own. We ruefully admit that we are chipped around the edges, a little battered and bruised, but still in there, pitching. We admire each other’s strengths, and do not judge each other’s weaknesses.

They are magnificent, these friends.

I don’t just feel the love when I see them, and then settle down. The love hums in me for the whole time we are together, beaming steadily from my expanding heart. It stays, strong and true, in my chest, on the drive home, as I think of them all, and how lucky I am to have them. It is profound, enduring, tested love.

And then, as I motor through the Lake District, where the snowy hills are so white at first I mistake them for clouds, I get the love of natural beauty. I look at the sheep on the fells, and the old stone walls, and the green, green grass, and I feel that love.

When I pass into Scotland, I cry actual tears of love, because this is my place and I chose it and it took me in, folding its blue mountains and its glacial valleys around me. Sometimes I whoop when I pass the Welcome to Scotland sign. Sometimes I get goosebumps. Sometimes I sing. This time, I had a little weep, because love can sometimes make you cry with joy.

And, of course, at the very end, there was the canine love, as Stanley the Dog capered and leapt about me, in a frenzy of delighted disbelief. You came home, he said, with his dancing eyes. There was my sweet little house love, with the books and the pictures and all the colours. There was the paddock love, as I arrived in sudden sunshine, and found the red mare, sweet and docile and furry, slowly eating her hay under her favourite tree. There was family love, as I saw the Mother and Stepfather and Brother-in-law and Younger Niece.

It really is an awful lot of love, for one person.

I am bloody lucky, and I don’t take it for granted, not for one moment.

 

Today’s pictures:

I took my first ever selfie (terrible word; someone should think of a better one) this trip, just to show that occasionally I can brush up and go out without being covered in mud. Although there was a tremendous moment when I parked in Dean Street, and a little bit of Scottish hay fell out into London’s glittering West End:

PS. Very tired after my lovely but long week, and I know that I’ve buggered up some of the tenses, and there will also be typos, but my eyes are too squinty to proof-read. Forgive me.

Return.

There was so much joy in the south, and so much love and laughter, and that glorious thing of a friendship which goes back almost thirty years, and children I have known since they were born. There is nothing quite like it. After a week with my best beloveds, I feel like a better human being.

But as always, I am delirious to be home. Even in the dreich and the mud and the murk, I sing songs as I mix the morning feeds and stuff the haynets and potter about in the shed. Outside, the red mare is grazing at liberty in the set-aside, where there is still something that might be called grass. This is our morning ritual. I let her out of the field to wander at liberty. She could gallop off to see the cows, but she doesn’t. She just mooches about in the open spaces and then comes and sticks her dear white face through the door of the shed, looking at me enquiringly, as if to say: ‘Are you doing that properly?’

Stan the Man is antic with delight. He has a lovely time always with the dog-sitter, but is gratifyingly pleased to see me. There is the tremendous lurcher thing he does, gathering all his energy into his athletic body and twisting and turning and leaping, so that he looks like an animated apostrophe. He is also very happy to be back to my mother’s house for breakfast, where he can see her and my stepfather and his special friend Edward the Terrier. They are a most unlikely couple and they adore each other. They dance around, Little and Large, playing special games of their own and panting at each other with love.

I whack back into work. I have returned to the second of the secret projects, neither of which are really secret any longer, but both of which started on spec. This is a fiction, and it’s a long time since I told a story. I have to remember the rhythms of it, how to keep the narrative taut, what to tell, what to leave out. I like this story and am pleased to go back to it. We are in serious Dead Darlings territory now, because there are 154,000 words, and that is far too many. Great cadres of them must die. I wield the bloody axe, ruthlessly. There are also additions, and decisions about the characters. This one must be put into the background, this one must be beefed up. Writing a novel takes ages because you have to live with your characters for a while to get to know them. Each morning now, I wake up and think: oh yes, that’s why that person did that. Slow revelations come and make sense of the thing. You can’t hurry it, although it drives me mad that you can’t. I’d love to be able to invent them on a dime, write a nice shopping list of traits, and be done with it. But they reveal themselves like onions, the layers peeling off to reveal the heart within, and the process can’t be rushed.

Dear old Scotland is drenched and melancholy, but I love her so much I don’t care. One day the sun will shine again. In the meantime, there is only sunshine in my heart.

 

Today’s pictures:

Far too gloomy to get the camera out, so here are a few snaps from my week away.

The Beloved Cousin sent these from her telephone – me with my sweet homebred friend Cocky Locky, and the three small cousins by a dam they built:

And a couple of the dear herd. I always stupidly took the camera out late in the day, as the gloaming was coming in, so that the light was gone and the quality of the pictures is not that good. But you can still see the sweetness:

Even though this one is terribly blurred, I rather love it:

Another blurry one, but worth it for the dearness:

Almost in focus:

Well, being pin-sharp is not everything:

Even though I have absolutely no technical knowledge, I do sometimes have a bit of secret pride when I manage to take a decent picture. But I rather love that these ones are not very good. It reminds me that the search for perfection is, along with high expectations, the absolute enemy of happiness. It reminds me that it is all right to be a bit scruffy and goofy and not the best at everything. My horrid competitive streak, which always wanted to be the top of the class, has to be smacked down every so often. So I think of putting these pictures up as a sort of salutary lesson. Good enough, my darlings; good enough.

Sunday pictures

A very long and very lovely games weekend. Far too tired to write anything, but there is just time for a couple of pictures.

This one made me laugh. It sums up entirely the difference between my two animals. Red, despite being in the middle of doing some work, is virtually asleep. Stanley the Dog has his eager, antic, whizz-about face on. It makes me laugh and laugh:

Red also has a sweet new friend. The new friend has had to sell her own horse on account of being away at university, so I offered her Red to ride whenever she is at home in Scotland. They are already having the most lovely time together. It is very touching:

And possibly the other most sweet thing was that today, as the family gathered for lunch on the lawn, the great-nieces did a display of highland dancing for us. They are really, really good:

The other person who possibly had the best time of all of us was the glorious dog of The Older Niece. She is very fond of her life in the south, but there are no burns for her to swim in where she lives. Here she is, about to go in, waiting for an attentive audience:

Which she duly got:

And a very quick taste of the dear old games:

Leaving

My To-Do list expands exponentially. I chase after it like the dog after a stick. I am almost organised, but not quite.

I love going south to see the Beloved Cousin, and I have the great glory of Cheltenham to look forward to. All the same, I shall miss these dear faces:

I think he knows I am going:

But he has the finest dog-sitters in the county, and The Horse Talker will see him every day, and no doubt, at some stage, I shall give in to my most idiotic instincts and ring up on the telephone so he can hear my voice.

The horses are fine. Although I have been told that Red gets a little duchessy and cross when I am gone. But I fret slightly about my lovely Stanley, on account of his chequered past. Still, I cannot be the women who never leaves home again on account of a canine.

Spare room, all spruced up for the sitters:

This is what the daffs look like now. I wonder how far along they shall be when I get back:

And the snowdrops, which might still be going, although I fear I shall miss their pomp:

And the beloved hill: