In which I hear the hubris angels flap their feathery wings.

I start the blog today with pictures, instead of words. You will see why as the story unfolds. To start with, all you need to know is that I was offered a ride on a most excellent Anglo-Arab, and ended up leading a posse up the hill. A great privilege and a great pride.





















As you can see, by the end I was feeling pretty cocky and pleased with myself. I am not very good at riding Western and have only had three lessons in the discipline. Although I like to think that I use a combination of English and Western as I ride the red mare, really what I am doing is riding English in an English saddle, which is what I grew up with. The two Western techniques I use are keeping my leg off and my seat quiet, which I like very much, and what I think of as inviting steering. This is where, instead of tightening the rein and bending the horse’s body round your inside leg whilst applying the outside leg behind the girth, you simply lift your hand and open the door. The horse then steps through that door. It feels like a Jane Austen gavotte to me.

In full Western, I realised my absolute novice status and tried to adapt and remember what I had been taught. It really is a very different beast from what I am used to. ‘Archie can occasionally be a bit grumpy,’ I was told with a laugh. And certainly, at the beginning, he did look askance at my amateur methods. But going up the hill, we got into a rhythm and he pricked his ears, and I thought Yeah, yeah, Green Grass of Wyoming. I had just ridden the red mare, and she had gone so softly and kindly and beautifully that she had infected me with love and confidence. I can do anything, I thought.
Wait till everyone sees this, I thought. My friend Jay has just got back from a week in the Rockies, rounding up cattle in the high places. He was riding behind, and I thought: I’ll be cutting cows too, before you can say knife.

At which point some young cows in the sloping pasture started rushing about to the right, and to the left a pheasant flew up right under my fella’s feet. He’d been distracted by the cows, getting a little wound up, but I was so punchy I had not paid enough attention. I was, I am ashamed to say, showing off. As the pheasant rose with its warning whirr, Archie jinked in alarm. And, dear readers, I FELL OFF.

One minute I was on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine; the next, I was flat on my arse, in front of a crowd of witnesses. I walked home, chastened, limping like an old crock.

The lady in the chemist was very sympathetic as she sold me a bumper pack of Ibuprofen. ‘I don’t suppose you have a pill for bruised pride?’ I said.

I draw my usual lesson from this. Whenever those wings of hubris start flapping, beware. Don’t get careless, because you think you are all that. Pay attention.

The lovely thing it did make me realise is how well I know that red mare and how safe I feel with her. She can still have a little spook from time to time, and she occasionally remembers her racehorsey past. Her majestic thoroughbred blood rises, and her ancestors call to her. But I know the signs so well, I can take action. I know every twitch of her dear ears, and every tiny tighten of every single sinew. Each morning, as I get on her, I can feel from the energy rising from her mighty body what her state of mind is. I know when she is at home with herself, easy in her skin. This morning, she was so relaxed and comfortable that I could take my hands off the reins, and let her stretch out her sweet neck, and know that all was well in her world. She is my person, and I am hers, and sympathy runs between us like starlight. Her thoughts are my thoughts, and mine are hers. That astonishing telepathic sense which horses have surrounds us with harmony.

Archie is a lovely horse, but he is not my horse. It was only the second time I’d ever sat on him, and I did not know the signs. I like to think that my meditations on herd behaviour make me able to read horses in general, and in a limited, basic way, I can. But really what it means is that I can interpret the mare, from all those hours of work, all those mornings of observation, all those weeks of devotion.
When I get above myself, I secretly think I’m a bit of a horsewoman. The truth is, I’m not. I’m a red mare woman. She gives me the astonishing gift of making me feel much better than I really am.

And finally, as I sit, a bit sore and a bit shivery and put firmly back in my box, I think again of my admiration for the Champ, the man of steel that is AP McCoy. He crashes at thirty-five miles an hour, onto hard racing turf. He’s taking a couple of days off just now, after a kaleidoscopic fall at Worcester in a novice hurdle. ‘He got me good,’ he wrote wryly on Twitter. He lay on the ground for fifteen minutes afterwards, but then, in true AP fashion, walked to the ambulance. That’s all part of his daily job. I fell off at a walk onto soft grass. It bloody hurt. It was a rude shock to the poor body. The thing happens so quickly. One minute you are on top of the world, the next you are flat on your back, staring at the ruthless blue sky. How these jocks do it never ceases to amaze me.

PS. I may have overdone it on the Ibuprofen. Not only should I not operate heavy machinery, but I should not be in charge of the English language. There will be typos. Forgive me.

A very shaggy horse story.

You know when the telegrams have to be sent to the Smugpot address? Yesterday was in danger of being one of those days.

I’d worked out some knotty writing conundrums, done some good HorseBack work, snapped some photographs I was quite proud of, and taken my mare out for a rather dreamy ride. There was hardly any head-shaking and a lot of long, swinging, athletic walking on a lovely loose rein. She then stood perfectly for fifteen minutes when I went down to talk to my mother. Finally, to put the smug cherry on the smug cake, she did not blink as a socking great dustbin lorry shuddered and groaned past her.

There is a very lovely thoroughbred forum to which I belong. It is one of the very few horse places on the internet where people do not shout at each other about rugging decisions. Or about anything, in fact. It is mostly a festival of love, for the ex-racing horses who give so much joy. It is a celebration of others’ triumphs, as someone takes their mare across country for the first time, or sends their kind gelding through an immaculate dressage test. At the same time, it is rather a brave place, as people admit to sudden catastrophic loss of nerve, or riding disasters, or an inability to strike off on the right lead. Then everyone gathers round, with sage advice and generosity of heart. Don’t worry, they all say (I often say) it’s happened to us too; you will get through it.

The smugpot came because of the pincer action of the dustbin lorry, in life, and some lines on the road, on the internet.

One of the thoroughbred forum ladies had posted a very comical picture of her mare, unmounted, looking absolutely horrified. The horror had come because the council had, overnight, painted bright red lines on the road. The mare said: MOUNTAIN LIONS AHEAD. The lady had to get off and lead her shaking girl past. Everyone thought it hysterical, and posted their own road line stories, which were legion. There were the usual jokes about a horse deciding that one daisy was the most frightening thing in the world. (I do find these equine jokes very funny.) I remembered the days when the red mare used to reverse, downhill, at top speed, because she had spotted a shaft of sunlight glinting on water.

But the idiot hubris came because I thought: we don’t do that any more. We can ride past honking dustbin lorries without flicking an ear. It’s because of all the desensitising. Last summer, the Remarkable Trainer, the Horse Talker and I set up a perfect carnival of terrifying objects, from flags to pilates balls to hula hoops to shower curtains to those silvery capes that marathon runners drape themselves in after a race. We threw everything but the kitchen sink at the red mare, and she learnt that mountain lions were not, in fact, hiding behind every tree. The idea of desensitising is not to teach horses never to be frightened, but to teach them that fear does not kill them. In this way, they grow in confidence and sense of self, and the spooking becomes a thing of the past.

Yes, I thought, bullishly, my brave girl can deal with anything now. We still have our rank failures, but leaping four feet in the air at the sight of a whirring pheasant is no longer on the list of shame.

Then, this morning, just as we were doing some dandelion dressage, changing direction with steering so accurate and light that I thought she had been hanging out with the dressage squirrels again, she found something that still terrified her out of her duchessy wits.

It was – old people.

The old people were quite a long way away. They were really very old. I could imagine them in the war. She would have been at Bletchley, and he was surely on some hush-hush military liaison job in the back streets of Cairo. They were smartly dressed, with none of the garish lycra of which the duchess disapproves. They seemed entirely innocuous.

But it turned out that they were more scary than Scary McScary of the Clan Fear.

Up went the red head, the neck braced. She did her thing of growing a hand under me. Her ears were hard forward, locked in on the petrifying geriatrics. The snorting could be heard three counties away. All her good concentration fled, as she focused in profound alarm on the threat.

‘They are just old people,’ I said, out loud.

Oh, no, she said. Are you mad? They are clearly part of a plot, undercover operatives for Al Quaida or Horse and Hound. They may not be people at all. They may have been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by pods.

I turned her in a few circles, to get her mind back on the job.

BUT THE OLD PEOPLE, she shouted.

Let’s do a nice figure of eight, I said. Let’s do some lateral flexion.

Flexion, schmexion, she yelled.

I had almost persuaded her that in fact we were not about to be invaded by ancients bent on destruction, when the old people, who were clearly very cunning, did an abrupt turn and changed direction.

OH MY GOD, hollered the red mare.

By this time I was laughing so much that I practically fell off.

It took me about five minutes to settle her, and then she abruptly forgot the whole thing and walked kindly back on the buckle. I like to think I’m getting pretty good at the whole horse psychology lark, but I still have absolutely no idea what all that was about. If I did not know better, I’d say that she had been up all night reading the internet and had decided to have a little joke with me.

Still, what she did do, which she always does, is send the smugs running for the border. And she made me laugh and laugh. You can’t ask for much more than that.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are not in fact from today, as I forgot to put the memory card in.

 

Highs and lows. Or, lessons from the horse’s mouth. Or, beware those flappy wings of hubris.

I’m always banging on about the life lessons my mare teaches me. I think that horses in general are tremendous professors. On some days, the good old universe joins in, and sends me an excellent corrective too.

Today was such a day.

The mare and I did some wild jumping. Zoom, zoom, she went; whoop, whoop, I went. She has taken to leaping as if it were the thing she has been waiting for. All those years she raced on the flat and played polo offered her no opportunity to express herself in this glorious aerial way. Now there is no stopping her. She’s still learning, still working it all out, but she is willing and eager and she gives me the great gift of trust. If I ask her to do this novel thing, she will damn well do it.

I can’t tell you how thrilling it was. There we were, out in the open green spaces, in only the rope halter, soaring over the homemade course that the Remarkable Trainer had rigged up. The jumps were absolutely tiny, but we didn’t care. We were as excited as if we were galloping around Burghley.

She did not pull; she did not waver; she did not refuse a single request. Quite frankly, I forgot that I was riding an ex-racehorse without so much as a bit in her mouth, I was concentrating so hard on sitting her well, and keeping her straight and confident, and going with her. It was only afterwards that I thought how remarkable it was. She is so clever and I am so proud. I shouted out loud and threw my arms in the air.

An hour later, I was flat on my arse on the sandy floor of an arena.

My dander was so high by this stage that I had rashly agreed to scramble bareback onto a horse I had never ridden before. I was clumsy in my mounting attempt, because my middle-aged body is not agile enough, and this particular mare was not having it. She bronced three times in protest, and off I thumped. (She was right, by the way, and I was wrong. She was perfectly correct to object.)

I hate falling off. It is not the bruise to my coccyx I resent; it is the blow to my pride. That is what hurts. I had been flying so high, not only proud of my glorious Red, but, I am ashamed to admit, rather proud of myself, as we mastered our new, thrilling jumping game. Look at me; I am all that. La di bloody dah.

The screeching bird of hubris flapped its treacherous wings. The universe and a determined horse brought me crashing down to earth. I write this with rueful fingers. Never fly too close to the sun.

I’ll get the feeling back in a while, that spiralling, dancing, delighted joy that Red gave me today. They can’t take that away from me. I’m a bit bumped and bruised and humbled just now, is all. I can’t do the things at forty-six that I could do at sixteen. I must remember not to be an idiot, especially when my competitive spirit is drumming in my ears.

What it does make me realise though is that Red is even more kind and forgiving than I had thought. If such a thing were possible. I do scramble onto her when I ride bareback, and she does not move. As if the scrambling were not enough, I make terrible ancient oofing noises, which she also bears with perfect equanimity. My muscles are still not as strong as they should be, and she does not mind. I point her rashly at jumps when I have not jumped for thirty years, and she generously consents to do something quite new to her.

There are a lot of things about her that impress me, but perhaps her generous nature is the one that I admire the most. She has a high spirit in her; she is a thoroughbred, after all. She does not forget her gracious bloodlines. She could turn her nose up and refuse my requests, if she chose. She is not a push-button old dope, going through the motions. Instead, she offers so much, with an open heart.

After I wrote this, filled with rue, I stumped down to the field to give her her tea. She was still looking pretty pleased with herself. She gave me her customary whicker, that low, throaty, Lauren Bacall whinny which makes my heart dance. She pricked her ears and nodded her head. She stood polite and still as I gentled her neck and chatted to her and told her what a brilliant person she was. She breathed contentedly through her nose and wibbled that beloved lower lip.

She doesn’t care that I just made a fool of myself. I am her person, and that is all. So I left her, as always, feeling better than when I arrived. That is another of her great, great gifts.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are a little hit and miss. Some of them are rather blurry. But I wanted to give you an impression of the flying. And even though the jumps were only about eighteen inches off the ground, it DID feel like flying.

Starting off gently:

I have my concentrating extremely hard face on. I swear that Red is POSING for the camera:

JOY:

Whoop, WHOOP:

You can see her still figuring it all out here, as she lands a bit in a heap, but on she still goes. Nothing will stop her. Nothing will stop us:

I know this is very blurry, but imagine it with the International Velvet soundtrack. (Those of you who were horsey children will know what I mean.):

Love this face. Oh, look, a very small JUMP:

Now she’s starting to look unbelievably professional. She is one of the fastest learners I ever met:

The tiny, tiny fence built of silver birches:

 

And the double:

Back in the quiet of her field, with her most adorable Good Evening face on:

And The Mare Who Objected. You can see there are no hard feelings. How could there be?:

A good old shaggy horse story for the end of the week; or, Red the Mare teaches me yet another life lesson.

I learnt a big lesson this week. Life is always teaching me lessons, sometimes over and over again, because I am a bit of a goofball and I constantly forget things. Also, there is the gap between head and gut, so that one may know something intellectually, but it takes a little time for it to percolate right down into one’s viscera.

Red the Mare is my best teacher of all. On Monday, she had a little wig-out. Two strange horses were coming to work in our field, and I thought we’d go out to greet them. It was idiotic. I took her away from her herd, and Autumn was shouting for her, and in the wide open spaces two unknown equines abruptly appeared and went past her towards her field. Of course she wigged.

I’d made about sixteen different mistakes. I’d got caught in hubris for a start. Look at me, with my immaculate horse, with my whispering skills, with my All That. In my fever to refute all the mean stereotypes about thoroughbreds, I had convinced myself that I had transformed her into a dozy old donkey. Not only that, but I was showing off about it.

On top of that, I’d let things slide. I am so pressed with work, and my time management is so ropey, that I’d rather taken her for granted. She is amazingly relaxed and tractable, almost all the time. She does learn all the new things I teach her wonderfully quickly. But I’d stopped doing so much work with her, just thinking I had made this transformational mare, and I could take the foundations as read.

The wig-out also happened because I was not concentrating, and did not read the warning signs quickly enough. I could have headed it off at the pass, and I did not.

And then, the final sin: I took it personally. I’m always banging on about how silly people do this. They say things like: ‘my horse is taking the piss.’ No, it really isn’t. Horses have no concept of the piss. They are just being horses. Their behaviour is very rarely directed at their human. They are usually reacting in their own equine way, or they are trying to tell you something. (This is uncomfortable, this freaks me out, I do not know what you are asking me to do, etc, etc.)

But I’m ashamed to say, my immediate thought was: after everything I’ve done with you, you reward me with this? From donkey to bronco in under ten seconds: that’s what I get?

I felt the black bird of shame swoop, as if everything that had come before was wiped out, and all was disaster.

It took 24 hours for me to talk myself down off the ceiling. It turned out, she was telling me something. She was telling me that I had to sharpen up and concentrate and stop feeling so damn pleased with myself. So I squared my shoulders and back to the humble basics we went. Good, hard, determined work; confidence and clarity on my part, which is what she likes; and most of all, remembering that it is not all about me.

The hubris fell flaming to earth, and good thing too.

Since that moment, she has been as lovely and good and responsive as a horse can be. I’ve set her new challenges and she has met them. The black bird has flown off to bother someone else. There is a difference between shame, which means everything is disaster, and humility, which means I need to learn from this specific thing.

Shame is negative and insidious and destructive. It is the voice in my head that says: I am useless and feckless and pointless and good for nothing. It is mildly self-indulgent and teaches one nothing. Humility is a bracing, good, instructive thing. It says: come back down to earth and learn well from your mistakes.

It also says: everyone makes mistakes; you are not alone. Humility is rather tender. It tells me: never mind, you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

This morning, in the blazing sun, we did some lovely groundwork. I went back to teaching her to jump, on the end of a long rope, and she suddenly found her leap. Often, when I point her at a little obstacle, she sort of ambles over it. Today, she really jumped, arching her strong back, picking up her dear feet.

She looked first amazed and then delighted. Her head went up with pride. It was enchanting to watch.

Then I got on and we rode through the wild grass, in nothing more than rope halter. Lovely trot, relaxed and long; some beautiful, soft transitions. I’m teaching her to move from trot to walk and back again using only my voice, like they do with Western horses. It’s very restful and she is learning it fast.

And there it was, at the end of a long week. The harmony was back. My good lessons have been learnt.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that I have to let my horse be my horse. I think I was trying to turn her into something she is not. She damn well is a thoroughbred; for all her sweetness and kindness and gentleness, all her ability to let herself down and be as relaxed as an old hound, she does have hot blood in her. Even though she was the slowest racehorse in England, she still did once run in a jostling field of professional equines at about thirty miles an hour.

I think I sometimes do this with humans. I may even do it with myself. I believe through sheer cussed will I may convert someone’s ideas or transform my own self. It never works. Everyone must be who they are; there are no magic wands, not in this lifetime.

So that’s my rather rambly end of the week muse and ponder.

Dear old Red. I don’t think she knew when she arrived in the wilds of Scotland that she was setting up a little University of Life, but it turns out that is exactly what she has done. I smile as I write the words. I feel, as I so often do, passionately grateful to her.

 

Today’s pictures:

The lambs are growing up and look very beautiful in the dancing sun. They always make me think of Jane Austen, for some reason. There is something wonderfully unchanging about sheep:

The little HorseBack foal:

My lovely wise girl:

With Autumn the Filly, who has begun sporting a very chic fly mask, to guard against the horrid horseflies:

Can you see the wisdom of the ages in those eyes? I so can:

Working with The Remarkable Trainer, earlier in the week:

And having a lovely pick at liberty in the wild grass:

Stan the Man:

That is his highly concentrated Where is that Damn FLY face:

The hill, shimmering in the heat haze:

Thank you for all the Stanley love from yesterday. You are very, very dear Dear Readers when you do that. It’s one of the lovelinesses and absurdities and sweetnesses of the internet, when fondness for a canine can come winging through the ether, from thousands of miles away. More touching than you know.

And now I am naughtily taking the rest of the day off to listen to the Ashes and watch the July Meeting at Newmarket. It’s the heavenly Sky Lantern today, another great female thoroughbred, although of a slightly different stamp than my own dear girl. People are talking of a tactical race defeating her, and the Gosden filly gaining the upper hand, but I stick with the glorious flying grey, and hope she will assert her starry class and prove the doubters wrong.

Hubris

Ah, the hubris gods are flexing their muscles. Oddly, I quite like it when they do this. I had been getting a bit swanky with the mare. She had been in such a good mood lately, and we had been doing marvellous things together. I’m afraid I got a bit cocky. I thought that we had entered a whole new miracle realm of communion and understanding. We were as one, horse and person. I may even have congratulated myself, in the privacy of my own head, on my own equine skills. I’m ashamed to admit that I was reading a good Monty Roberts book last night, and thinking, idiotically, yes, yes, Monty, I really know all that.

Buggery bollocks, said the mare this morning, when I went up to her. Ha ha HA, she said. You think you’re all that; well, let’s see. The wind was blowing hard, and the wildness was in her; she rolled her eye at me, kicked up her heels and was off. So much for joining up; so much for our unshakeable bond. As the small Welsh person watched quizzically, Red roared round the field, jumping, twirling, squealing, doing corkscrew bucks and sixpence turns and sudden stops. Ha, she was saying; let’s see what you make of this.

Actually, she was not saying that at all. She was just being a horse. I let her. It is a lovely thing to watch; I can’t quite express the glory of a thoroughbred in full, untrammelled cry. She floats over the ground. She dances and plays, challenging the wind. I swear she hears the ancient voices, calling to her from the plains on which her ancestors roamed.

I do think she is watching me though, to see what I make of all this. She roars back towards me, comes to a streaming, shuddering halt in front of me, and looks right at me. I stand very, very still, as if to say, well that was very amusing but if you think you can freak me out you are wrong about that. We contemplate each other for a while. She shakes her head. I grin at her. Then back to school we go.

It took me an hour to get her where I wanted her. I took her right back to the most basic basics. I write of this so often, and so often I forget it. One of the best horseman I know, who trains the most obedient, beautifully mannered horses, told me not long ago that he does twenty minutes of basic groundwork before he gets in the saddle. It doesn’t matter how long he has had a horse, or how much he has taught them, every day, he goes back to the beginning. Nothing is taken for granted.

This is such a stupidly good lesson for life that sometimes I want to give that mare a prize. It’s also a really, really good rule for writing. Sometimes I get a bit hubristic about that, too. After all these years of practice, I occasionally believe that I really do know how to carry a tune. Look at me, with my rhythmic sentences and my feel for language and my playing with the form. Then I shall wake up, sit at the keyboard, and feel as if my fingers are dipped in glue. I can’t remember how to tell a story, or frame a paragraph, or even what word to type next. My mind is wiped blank; my imagination is mired in mud. I can’t see it.

Just as with the horse, I have to go back to basics. I have to be dogged and persistent and not take anything for granted. I have to remind myself that really, I know nothing. The hubris gods take me out behind the woodshed and give me a good pummelling and so they damn well should.

Now, a little chastened, I give a big sigh, and let my shoulders come down. I’m going up to HorseBack UK now, the brilliant operation I have written of before, which uses horses as part of a rehabilitation programme for wounded veterans. I shall see people who really are going back to the beginning, learning how to live a new life with an arm gone, or their legs missing. The beginning, I think: it’s not such a very bad place to be.

 

Some very quick pictures, because I am running late.

My bronco, in full cry:

And back to her most butter would not melt state:

Her view:

And The Pigeon, who would never dream of doing circus tricks, just as long as I throw that ball for her: