A guy with a boat.

Today, I met a guy with a boat.

This kind of thing sometimes happens at HorseBack. My friend The Marine says, as I’m leaving, ‘Oh, there’s a guy with a boat coming.’

I know better than to ask what guy and what boat.

This morning, I get a message saying: ‘The boat arrives in fifteen minutes.’

I drop everything and drive down the valley.

There is the boat.

She’s not just any old boat. She is a boat. Boat is not a good enough word, and all the other words don’t do her justice. I don’t think she is a vessel, or a craft. Actually, the word that sounds best for her is skiff, because that gives a sense of her sleek, athletic, cutting self, but a skiff is a small rowing boat for one person.

This is the biggest ocean-going rowing boat in the world.

The guy with the boat is a veteran of the Royal Navy. He smashed up his leg so badly that his femur was poking out of his hip. He had two years lying in a room to think, as he put it, about what would really make him happy in his life. Quite soon after he got up, he went down to a harbour near Edinburgh and saw an ocean-going rowing boat, and that was it, for him.

So now he has Avalon, and she’s already broken the Indian Ocean World Record, the fleet, flying darling, and now she’s going from Thurso to the Faroe Islands to raise money for HorseBack.

My goodness, the Interesting People.

The sun shone and I was so happy about the boat, and the guy, that when I went down to do the mare, rather later than usual, I stood with her in the field for about ten minutes, just scratching her ears and thinking about men and boats. She liked this plan very much. Partly because it gave her time to put in some practice for the Standing Still Olympics and partly because she really does like having her ears scratched.

We did some gentle work and then we did some more standing. There are days when she is antic and bright, days when all her thoroughbred blood runs through her, days when she is high and comical, days when she is dedicated and active. Some days she is a dancer, some days an explorer, some days a dressage diva, some days a dowager duchess.

Today, she was all Zen Mistress. The sun was glancing about and a quick, dry wind was blowing in from the east, but she had, at the heart of her, a low, spreading calm. It is a peace that comes up from deep within her, and ripples out in waves, something so actual and visceral that I can feel it flowing from her body to mine. When she is like this, she gives me the gift of time. She anchors me in the moment. Most days, I am thinking always an hour ahead. When I am doing anything, I am thinking about the next thing, and the thing after that. It’s a terrible habit, and I’m going to try to train myself out of it.

When the duchess is in her Zen mode, she stops the world. I actually think: it does not matter if I die now, because everything is here, in this moment. All joy and goodness and peace and love is here. All life is here.

I don’t think they mention that in Horse and Hound.

 

Today’s pictures:

This morning.

In which I am ridiculously interested.

Two of the things I love most in the world are people who are really, really good at their jobs, and people who can talk fascinating talk for sustained amounts of time. Today, I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who combined both.

When I go up to HorseBack for the work I do there, I usually gallop in, have a quick chat, take some photographs, and tear back to my desk. The writing of their Facebook page and the editing and collating of the photographs takes quite a long time, and I do also have a day job, so the whole shooting match is done at a fast clip.

Today, I met a Royal Marine who so was absurdly interesting that I sat in a chair for an hour and a half without blinking. As well as being a Marine, he is a sportsman, a sporting coach, a mathematician, and no mean psychologist. He understands the body, and he understands the mind. He is also a polymath. He was injured, and he was bored with not being able to be an active Marine, so he put himself on a reading programme. I suspect, from what he said, that he was always something of a polymath, but he is now the fully fledged article.

Our conversation did have a point. He wanted to ask me some questions about writing. But it opened out like a flower in springtime, and, before we knew it, we were off to the races. (You can see that I am so excited that I am mixing my metaphors and similes like a crazy horse.)

What I love most about really good talk is that galvanising sense of excitement that comes when you are up against someone who is better than you. You have to raise your game. Every neurone and synapse in my brain was firing on all cylinders. I drew on everything I knew and everything I thought. At the same time, I was concentrating on listening well. This kind of chat can be like a ping-pong match, but if you are too carried away with the balls whistling back and forth over the net, you can miss the good stuff. So for quite long periods, I sat back, opened up my body (I have a theory that body language is important for good listening), rested my zipping mind, and just absorbed all the interesting things the gentleman was saying.

He has a fascinating idea. He thinks everyone has one most telling flaw. Humans are composed of many flaws, but when the spiral comes – some kind of negative behaviour, bad thinking, a cracked plate state of mind – there is usually a definitive trigger which derives from this one most important flaw. If you identify that, he thinks, then you may liberate yourself.

I particularly love this because it goes along with one of the most interesting sentences I ever heard about working with horses. Like so many interesting sentences, it is very simple and very profound at the same time. Ray Hunt, who is the godfather of the horsemanship I follow, would often do clinics with problem horses. He bucks out of nowhere, a horse’s human would say; she bolts out of the blue; he suddenly rears for no reason. Hunt would always ask the same question. ‘What happened before what happened happened?’

It’s so clever because it’s all about listening to your horse, and not blaming externals or superficialities or human projections. Nothing, with a horse, ever comes out of the blue. If you go back and see what happened before the buck or the bolt or the rear, there is your answer, shining with truth. You fix that, not the subsequent behaviour, and all manner of things will be well.

(My mare’s flaw was that she would get in a state, lose confidence in herself, forget her focus, and have no trust in me. So I worked on the trust, and the focus, and made myself into the human she needed, and this built up her own confidence and sense of self, and now we canter round the Scottish fields with me waving my arms in the air. She did not need technical fixes; she needed a profound shift in perception. That is why she can carry herself kindly in a steady gait on a loose rein. Although, having said all that, I see it was not really her flaw, it was mine.)

My interesting gentleman has the same idea about human beings. I love it. When I have finished my work, I am going to look for my defining flaw. I have so many that it shall be like rummaging through the Cupboard of Doom. But I’ll find it. I have my mission, and I choose to accept it.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just time for three today. The Interesting Gentleman, learning to ride Western, and my two raving beauties:

Quite a lot of nonsense.

Warning for: length, tangents, national generalisations based on no empirical data, gratuitous Pushkin references, and other howlers. It’s Friday. It’s been a long week.
 
There are several conversations that I love. One of them I have each morning, as the Horse Talker and I lean over the fence and observe the mares, and pretend we are discussing herd behaviour and horse husbandry and the human condition, when in fact we are inventively trying to find one hundred and forty-seven ways to express how wonderful our girls are.

There are the obsessive racing conversations. I adore those. I particularly like the ones I have with my mother, because she can remember Sea Bird and Arkle and Mill House and Mill Reef and Nijinsky and the mighty Brigadier. She was there, in her elegant hat, at those storied Derbies and Gold Cups and Legers and Arcs. She saw records being smashed and history being written. Sometimes, to give the thing an added piquancy, she was following the ambulance, as Dad fell at the fifth and had to be carted off to hospital.

And then there are the conversations where you know you can go anywhere, and the person you are talking to will follow. Usually, they will leap over you and arrive at the destination three steps ahead. Oddly, quite often, these are had with strangers. I had one this morning, with a man to whom I had just been introduced. He wears his cleverness modestly and diffidently, in the true British tradition, and it took me a moment to realise I had to bring my A game. Actually, I don’t think I even understood that consciously. It was only afterwards that I had the sense of shifting gear, only looking back on that exhilarating half hour of chat that I saw myself, retrospectively, going into turbo drive.

It was during my daily HorseBack visit. I went in for a perfectly ordinary discussion, about logistics and practical things and the plan for next week. I was introduced to the gentleman, and within two minutes we were off to the races. We talked of the nature of courage, of neuroscience, of evolutionary biology, of gender difference; of hippies, nature, the power and rarity of silence. We talked of the First World War, and societal expectations, and love.

I get so excited when I have these kind of conversations that I say absurd things. At one point, I heard myself saying, ‘Oh yes, authenticity is one of my favourite words.’ At one point, I actually spoke these sentences: ‘It fascinates me that in every society in the world, men are supposed not to cry. Of course, there are certain places in the Middle East where ulultations are acceptable, and there is Russia, with its tradition of melancholy. But even there a man is only allowed to cry if he has drunk half a bottle of vodka and is speaking of Puskin.’

What was I talking about? Do Russian men really sit about and drink vodka and speak of Puskin and weep? Where did I get such an outlandish notion? This is what happens when I get over-stimulated: I make rash extrapolations and wild generalisations. Still, I do stand by the oddities of the current Russian mores of masculinity, if Mr Putin is anything to go by. All that riding shirtless and posing with big guns. Although I suppose one cannot judge an entire people on its rather peculiar president. The fretful, discursive liberals of the Upper West Side would not have liked to be defined by the faux-Texan swagger of George W Bush, any more than the Tea Party Republicans would thank one for putting them in the same bracket as that ghastly commie, Barack Obama. (I love that people really do think Obama is a communist, or a socialist at the very least. ‘No, no,’ I shout at the screen; ‘he really does not want to nationalise the means of production.’)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, talking nonsense. But even when I make perfectly preposterous statements, I still find it entirely delightful to have such a gentleman to talk to. He was very polite and kind about the whole Puskin/vodka thing. He just carried on being quietly clever.

Cleverness is not very fashionable at the moment, in certain circles. I think it’s partly to do with the complicated derision for elites which has sprung up in the last decade. Besides, the British have always been suspicious of too much learning. ‘Too clever by half,’ is an ancient insult here. But the knee-jerk disdain for the ghastly Oxbridge elites who think they can run the country, but, crucially, have no idea how the real world works is a fairly novel political development.

Personally, I love an elite. I adore it when people are really, really good at things. When I watch Andy Murray play tennis, or Ryan Moore or Johnny Murtagh or Ruby Walsh ride a race, or Yo-Yo Ma play a cello, I am dazzled by their brilliance. They are absolutely elite, at the very crest and peak of their powers. I want the people who run things to be exceptionally intelligent and highly educated. I wish for the novelists and poets to be as elite as all get out, as they play with the language of Shakespeare and Milton.

Perhaps the confusion comes between the meaning of elite – best or most skilled – and elitism, which contains the idea that those at the top get special treatment or unfair privilege. It shades into snobbism and us and them; there is the idea of poncy people peering down their superior noses at the rest of us oiks. (I think there is a muddle too about games which have a zero sum. If someone is exceptional, it does not mean that everyone else is pointless, useless and feckless.) Cleverness, which is quite a separate thing, then gets conflated with the dark side of elitism, and before you know it, a good university degree means you are a horrid, out-of-touch posho, with a sneery disdain for the ordinary woman in the street.

I think this is a pity. Cleverness, lightly worn, is one of life’s great joys. I felt so exhilarated and galvanised by talking to the clever gentleman this morning, it was as if I had taken a double dose of iron tonic. I spend an awful lot of time contemplating the dearness of my mare, or what will win the 3.40 at Newcastle (today, I hope a lovely filly called Filia Regina). The book I am writing is a fairly simple story, very much a thing of first principles. I’m not galloping about over any intellectual prairies, which is probably lucky for my readers. So to engage in conversation where I had to stretch my brain to keep up felt like a rocket boost.

And now I’m going to go and drink some vodka and read Puskin and weep.
 
Today’s pictures:

Are not from today. Too dreich for the camera. An entirely random selection from the archive instead:

HorseBack day

I got up gingerly, like a curmudgeonly old lady, checking for aches and pains. But the sun was shining and I had things to do and I was bored of being what my father used to call a Minny Moan, so off I went.

It was a HorseBack UK day. My chaise longue joke went down very well so now I really am part of the furniture and I don’t feel I have to be on my best behaviour or try to impress anyone. This is a delightful state to find oneself in, but it is oddly easy there, because the whole point of the place is to make people feel comfortable.

Comfort is a word that can be overused; it can slide into sentiment. It can have a pious ring to it, even something slightly patronising: to comfort the afflicted has the faintest whiff of de haut en bas. But comfort in its sense of ease is a lovely, true thing, and that is what you find there, under the shadow of the blue mountains.

There is no sense of one-upmanship; everyone does what they do very well, and without fuss or fanfare; the people who are visiting learn what they learn, and take what they need. One of the veterans said to me today: ‘No one is competing to see who has the worst wound.’ I thought that was interesting, especially as this group was composed of the ones who wear their scars on the inside. They do not have artificial limbs; they have wounds of the mind. From the outside, you would never know. They are charming and funny and wry and dry and articulate. I wonder if that makes it more complicated, somehow.

The funny thing was that there were some acclaimed sporting gentlemen there today. (I think they might be a secret and so shall not reveal their names or discipline.) I was very excited by this and it was part of the reason that I took my iron tonic. But in the end there was so much there to fascinate, the veterans told me so many interesting and honest things, the horses were so delightful, and every single conversation I had was so riveting, that I barely had time to shake the tall, athletic fellows by the hand, let alone admire their tremendous physique.

Still, it is absolutely brilliant that a great sport is interested in such a good organisation, and from the athletes’ smiling faces I guess that they shall be drawn back to the place as I am. As I left, my stamina feebly shot, one of the sporting gents was levering himself onto a wooden horse, and being instructed in the art of riding Western, to general waves of merriment.

I smiled as I drove home. Up at the horses’ field, Red the Mare was dozy and affectionate and faintly comical, as she sometimes is. I had been fretting, lately, about the logistics of setting up her winter quarters. ‘You know what?’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a few decisions and a bit of fencing and a new water tough. I had the perspective police good and proper today, and I marked them well.’ She nodded her head wisely, as if she could have told me this all along, if only I had had the sense to ask.

Just as I was finishing this post, feeling rather weary and wondering how my tired mind would come up with a galvanic final paragraph, an email with a short link fell into my inbox.

I opened it to discover that two women called Chrissie and Susie are walking 780 kilometres with rucksacks on their backs, over the ancient pilgrims’ route from France to Spain, all to raise money for HorseBack UK. I gazed ruefully at the iron tonic. I don’t think even an industrial vat of it would get me that far. So now I don’t need a good final line. I have two remarkable women instead. Seven hundred and eighty kilometres. ON FOOT. I swear I shall never complain of fatigue again.

 

The link to the Incredible Walking Women is here: http://heslop-allen.vpweb.co.uk/?prefix=www

HorseBack, as always, is here: http://www.horseback.org.uk/

 

Pictures of the day:

The tidiest tack room I have ever seen in my life:

Four wise professors in the University of Everything:

Work in the arenas:

The view to the south:

With Gus the foal looking on:

And inside, there is a sporting gentleman on a very splendid wooden horse:

Finally, my own girls, in sepia today, for no special reason except that it brings a waft of Edwardian elegance that pleases me:

Of interesting people, and pandas

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I met a really interesting woman today. She was wearing a panda suit. She said things like: ‘when I went into Chatham House they thought I was there to bring the tea.’

I said: ‘If I could even say I went into Chatham House I would be happy.’

She told me that she had been a lobbyist for landmines and cluster bombs. She had already said about twenty interesting things by that stage.

I said: ‘Oh, it’s too much, you are a saint too.’

I laughed. Then I paused.

‘Unless of course you were lobbing for landmines. You weren’t working for an arms dealer, were you? You weren’t saying, yes, yes, more cluster bombs?’ Luckily she was not. Imagine the faux pas.

She had been to Eritrea with Bill Deedes. I grew very excited at this stage. I met Bill Deedes a couple of times when I was about eighteen. He was one of the wryest, driest, funniest, coolest old men I ever met in my life. He had the great talent, common to all the best people, of treating you as if you were the Queen of Rumania even when you were a raw teen of no discernable importance.

We were with The Older Niece. ‘Do you know about Bill Deedes?’ I said. She did not. I explained about how he was the inspiration for Scoop, how he was Dear Bill in Private Eye, how he was one of the last of the old school Fleet Street legends. The Interesting Woman said that his copy was so good that none of the subs would change a word. I had not known that. I am so glad I know it now.

Then we had a most excellent conversation about whatever happened to the liberals in Texas. For over a hundred years,  Texas was one of the most dependably Democratic states in the union. Now, it is a solid red state, with Governor Rick Perry at its helm, and a wild libertarian streak. I am always fascinated about how things like that happen. We moved on to the fabulous mystery which is Newt Gingrich. (I really want to write about the bizarre rise of Newt at length, and may do so tomorrow. It’s about time we had a good, meaty, outraged political post.)

It was a real treat. One of my enduring freaks is an intense, almost obsessive interest in politics, and American politics in particular. It’s very, very rare that I meet anyone who is much fascinated by that subject, let alone can talk fluently of it, and knows all the names. I wish we had had time to get on to the crash of Herman Cain and the strange pronouncements of Michele Bachman about Iran. (I discover, to my shame and chagrin, that all these months I have been spelling her name incorrectly. Disconcertingly, she uses the single L. I can’t be fagged to go back and change them all, so if you read a misspelled version in an old post, I can only beg forgiveness.)

Now, you may be wondering about the panda costume. In my book, everyone should have one and wear it at least once a week. (I admit I have gone a little panda-crazy since the arrival of Sweetness and Light, or whatever they are called, at the Edinburgh Zoo, on their special panda-jet from China.) In this case, it was put on a for a special photo call. The Older Niece and The Interesting Woman have produced a wonderful collection of songs for children, and they wanted some shots of them together.

I am shamelessly plugging their work. There are CDs of just the songs, and a special DVD with adorable shots of the human panda, lots of small singing children, old tractors, and dogs. What more could you want?

You can find them all, including downloads for your MP3 player, on Amazon here.

And they have a website here.

And these are a couple of the pictures I took of them today.

In elegant sepia, with added Pigeon:

In full colour, with both dogs, and the hill in the background:

Now, in other news, this is what the day looked like:

The amazing thing is that even despite the arctic temperatures and gales and snow, my little rosemary is still alive:

And the pot table, whilst a little moth-eaten, does have some green things on it:

The very opposite of moth-eaten is her ladyship. See how she is getting all furry for winter?:

And is the very mistress of the unwavering gaze:

Two hills today. One as usual, one in panorama: