Some absolutely pointless Friday questions.

I stand down by the shed, with the red mare’s head on my shoulder, talking of life and complicated families and the odd twists of human psychology. The sun thinks about coming out, and then changes its mind and goes sullenly away. The mare is covered in mud and growing her teddy bear coat for winter. She is content. I love her very much.

I think about the oddities of the things that make one human happy, and the things that make another human sad. I think particularly about the small things. Poor Matthew Parris just wrote an article about what a furious mass of crowd rage he had uncovered when he dared to write something disobliging about UKIP. He is an old school, one-nation Tory, rather courteous and thoughtful, and the intemperance of the Kippers made him despair. Underneath his article, all the furious people came out and were ruder than ever. It’s all ad hominem with them, although they could not see the irony. This fury on the internet gets a lot of press, and there is an odd herd mind which takes hold on message boards. I don’t know why it astonishes me that the readers of those two old grand ladies, the Speccie and the Telegraph, leave by far the rudest comments. They are much more polite over at the Staggers, and much funnier at the Guardian.

I do mind the rudeness very much, but just at the moment I find myself fixated on the absurdities of the unimportant. I really do mind about the absolute lack of spelling and grammar. It’s not just on news sites, where some of the crosser comments use English which looks as if it were randomly selected by a bot. It’s on every forum I visit. Breaks for brakes, should of for should have, you’re for your. I like playing with the language, and will merrily split an infinitive so it damn well stays split. I will rashly end a sentence with a preposition, and sometimes invent new words. (I do not think that wibbly is found in any dictionary, although it is the only satisfactory adjective for the soft lower lip of the glorious mare.) I make typos and sometimes completely forget how to spell.

I know I’m a writer, and it is my job to use the English language. I know that I am a nerd, and it is my obsession. But it’s so easy to write simple, clear English. Anyone can use a full stop, or put a capital letter at the start of a sentence, or understand the apostrophe. I find the trashing of such a beautiful resource almost physically painful.

Once I’ve got onto this hobby horse, and galloped off in all directions in the manner of a Daisy Ashford hero, I become fixated on tiny expressions which drive me batshit nuts in the head. It used to be jargon which had this effect. For no known reason, I grind my teeth every time someone says they are going to grow a business, rather than a pot of mint. Now, it is growing wider than dead management-speak. Today, a government minister said that the world needed to ‘wake up to’ the problem of Ebola, and instead of fretting about a fatal pandemic, which would have been the correct reaction, I grew furious over that unlovely phrase. In a similar manner, I want to throw things every time a person says ‘it’s down to you’. It used to be ‘up to you’. Where did this awful ‘down’ come from? Even Lord Fellowes has smuggled it into Downton Abbey. Don’t even get me started on ‘end of’, or ‘TB’ for thoroughbred, or ‘hun’ as an abbreviation of ‘honey’. They fly like stinging arrows to my idiot mind.

My old dad always said that once you got the irritation there was nothing you could do about it. Some poor hapless person would annoy you in some way, and, after that, they could say nothing right. They could be the nicest person in the world, but every word out of their kind mouths would be nails on the blackboard from then on.

It’s so irrational. How on earth can it matter, when the world is so oppressed, whether someone chooses to say end of, or TB, or use he as the universal pronoun? (I get particularly livid when people do this with horses, as if they are writing off ALL THE MARES.) Talking of generalisations, I find the universal we even more distressing, particularly when it comes to women. We all want to lose half a stone; we all obsess over shoes; we all crave the latest must-have. What is this we of whom you speak? And while I’m on the subject, ‘must-have’ causes me daily offence. It is wrong on about eight different levels.

On the other hand, there are lazy tropes and worn phrases of which I am fond. I rather like ‘back in the day’, which drives one person I love demented. I use ‘old-school’ far too much. Almost every single one of my metaphors has an equine aspect. (There is a lot of galloping, and many, many prairies.) My skies are almost always the colour of some pigeon or other – doleful, despairing, or desperate. Practically everything is dear and old – Scotland, the weather, Blighty, TS Eliot, the hills. I’m always ransacking the most obvious parts of Shakespeare – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the sorrows not in single spies but in battalions, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. When I was editing the manuscript of the book, I found myself shamingly unable to kill all the darlings that should have died. I have developed awful little tics and twitches, and indulge them far too often.

Taste is so odd. Why do I love green but hate yellow? Why does it drive me mad that everyone has started using the redundant So to start every single sentence? Where did my adoration of Scott Fitzgerald come from, when I cannot wear Nabokov? (This is particularly wrong, since Nabokov is supposed to be the ultimate writer’s writer.) Why do I worship Nina Simone, but find myself left cold by Michael Jackson?

Those are my Friday questions.

Now I’m going to watch the racing. It has not only the great beauty of the thoroughbred, but also a glittering language all its own. I love every single racing expression. Racing has a lingua franca which stretches across nationalities and cultures. It is tribal but not exclusive. It is the sound of my childhood, the voice of my father, and it never ceases to thrill me.

 

Still no time for the camera. Just this dear old face:

As I have made the complaint about bad English, the irony gods will ensure that there shall be at least three howlers in this post. I’ve read it through twice, but my eyes have gone squinty. I rely on the Dear Readers to point them out and save me from myself.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are.

Rage.

Things have changed, in the horse world, since the days when I grew up in a racing stable in the Lambourn Valley. Some of those things have changed for the better. The new rug technology, for instance, is splendid. I have no nostalgia for the flat green canvas of the New Zealand, or the heavy sacking of the Jute.

Some things have changed for the worse.

The language is failing. What I refer to as a thoroughbred is now called, almost universally, a TB. I try not to get angry about it, because what can it really matter and because perfectly nice people use it. They do not think it a slur. But today I am in a hot rage, and all my ancient fury is flying into the yellow air.

TB is the most reductive acronym you can use for a horse. Its proper usage is for a disease which, before modern medicine, ravaged entire populations. Consumption was, most often, death. TB Sheets was the one Van Morrison song to which I could never listen.

Quite apart from that, it is ugly. It is an ugly reference to one of the most beautiful, majestic breeds ever invented. Thoroughbred has a euphony to it, fit for the fleet, proud animals who have illuminated the sport of kings. The word used to be spoken, in my youth, with tones of admiration, affection, even awe. I grew up knowing that these mighty creatures were the empresses and emperors among horses, bred over three hundred years for courage, speed, agility, stamina and strength.

Even worse, people now casually refer to what they call, with varying degrees of resignation and wryness, ‘a typical TB’. What does that even mean? Was Arkle a typical TB? Was Mill Reef? Was Dancing Brave? Was Red Rum?

Was Frankel a typical TB? When he stretched out over the Knavesmire in the Yorkshire sun, leaving Grade One horses flailing like selling platers in his wake, was that typical? When Simon Holt shouted, with joyous disbelief in his voice, ‘they can’t even get him off the bridle’, was that typical?

Funnily enough, I think he was perhaps typical of his breed, although he was the most exceptional example of equine greatness the racing public has seen in many generations. He was proud, intelligent, courageous, strong, brilliant, fast, and, in the end, once his humans had worked their magic with him, biddable. That is not the typical that those other people mean. It is what I mean.

Other ghastly, intellectually lazy, reductive collocations abound. Moody mare, there is another. People even put it on t-shirts. They speak the words as if they are carved in stone. The man in whose yard I have just spent a week, a horseman so blindingly good that he has forgotten more than I shall ever know, only buys mares. He is a professional. He makes his living from horses. He can afford no sentiment. He buys mares because he knows they are the best.

There is nothing finer in the world than a really tough mare. If you handle them right, they are more loyal and more brave than any creature on earth. They will give you everything, when it seems nothing is left. Was Dawn Run a moody mare? Was Oh So Sharp? Is Quevega?

Was Kincsem moody, as she won her fifty-fifth race on the trot, a record that stands unbeaten to this day? (She was born in Hungary, in 1874, and she routed them all over Europe, as dazzling as a queen, and when she died the Hungarian newspapers were edged with black in her honour.)

There are many more horrid, confining expressions doing the rounds. I hate them all. One of those which makes me want to punch someone in the nose is ‘field ornament’. This refers to a horse which can no longer be ridden. Its implications are nasty in about five different ways. Horses are not ornaments. They are not static, decorative items. They are living, breathing, sentient beings. Just because they can no longer ride or compete or race, it does not mean that any of their intrinsic qualities are lost. They may have honourable retirement. Was Desert Orchid a ‘field ornament’, as he drowsed away his final years in a quiet paddock, dreaming of the days when he set the crowds at Cheltenham and Sandown and Kempton on a roar?

The reason I am in such a rage about all this is that today someone suggested that the red mare might be a headshaker.

It was not meant unkindly. It was intended in the spirit of helpfulness. It is just the way that many people now speak about horses. It is the putting in a box, the applying of a label. It is this labelling that sends me into a frenzy. As I heard it, all the subterranean resentments burst into raging, scarlet life, and I was so angry I had to walk away, before I said something unforgivable.

Red and I, as the Dear Readers know, sometimes have our scratchy days. Sometimes, this takes the form of a sort of yawing with the head and neck. Usually, if I concentrate, I can work through it. We always, always, find a good note on which to end.

It does not happen often, but it has been there, on occasion, from the beginning.

On the other hand, the vast majority of our days are composed of harmony and light. This is one of those moody mares, typical TBs, of which the idle speak. Just to put a cherry on the stereotype, she is chestnut, with almost four white socks. (One is so tiny it hardly counts as a sock, but the superstitious would still look askance.)

This mare, most days, will stand still on command, will move one foot when I point at it, will back up her half-ton body when I twitch my little finger. When leading, she will halt when I halt, back when I back, vary her pace when I vary mine. I can free-school her, which is like lunging, except with no halter and no line. She will canter in perfect circles around me, make transitions from voice, come to a dead stop when I simply shift my body. Under the saddle, she will go kindly in a rope halter, make complicated changes of direction from a signal so subtle that it can hardly be seen, give me a sitting trot of such collection and smoothness that it is like riding the air. She will do a breeze-up on a loose rein, in open fields, and come back to a walk when I merely move my seat.

She is damn well not a headshaker. She is a horse who sometimes shakes her head.

Whatever it is, I shall get to the bottom of it. It may be pollen, it may be blood pressure, it may be sunlight. It is one of the mysteries of the horse world. I shall investigate.

But this miraculous, funny, brilliant, idiosyncratic, kind, clever, beautiful creature is not, ever, ever, going to have a label slapped on her. Her loveliness is so extreme that it often leaves me lost for words, and words are my business. Nobody is going to reduce her to three syllables.

As I finish writing this, I feel the tide of rage ebbing away. We shall be all right, me and my girl. It may just be that there will be days when the shaking is on her, and on those days, she will have a little holiday. The thing causes her no distress. She is, at heart, a supremely happy horse.

I hear a line, from my distant past. It makes me smile. It is from a film. It goes: ‘nobody puts Baby in the corner.’

A moment of pedantry

I did a terrible thing the other day.

I was mooching about on Facebook (obviously not looking for horse pictures) when I came across something someone had posted for a friend. It was an advertisement for a Writers’ Retreat, in the lovely Umbrian hills. The virtual flyer was beautifully produced, with a picture of verdant Italy. One could almost smell the pines and imagine the coruscating literary conversation.

The only problem was that the headline said:

WRITERS RETREAT.

I pondered this for a while. I attempted to employ restraint. In the end, I could not help myself.

I left a little comment, with a mitigating smiley face at the end of it to indicate that I was not shaking my finger in a maiden aunt-ish way, but coming in peace. I pointed out, as politely as I could, that WRITERS RETREAT should have an apostrophe in it. Otherwise, I said helpfully, it actually meant a lot of writers going backwards. I had a sudden vision of a cohort of bespectacled scribblers running away from Moscow. Did they learn nothing from Napoleon?

There was, of course, no reply. I could imagine the author and her friend tutting and grumbling about ghastly interfering know-bests on the horrid internet. It was none of my business, after all.

Just this morning, I found a rather brilliant video which had text running over it. I counted at least three grocer’s apostrophes. I shuddered a little, but said nothing. It was a video about horsemanship, not writing, so I felt that the errors were not egregious. They did not take away from the professionalism of the thing, since the profession was not literary. Who cares if they referred to horses in the plural as horse’s?

Even good, professional writers can slip mistakes past the subs. I saw Douglas Murray dangle a modifier in this week’s Speccie. I’m afraid to say that even dear old Auntie is prone to this. I remember a terrible moment on the News At Ten when the newsreader said, of Beryl Bainbridge: ‘Nominated five times, the Booker Prize continued to elude her.’ Which of course means the Booker was nominated five times, not the brilliant Miss Beryl.

Oddly, I mind about modifiers almost more than I mind about misplaced apostrophes. A dangler is so ugly and clumsy; it arrests the eye, and drags the reader to a screaming halt. The worst ones muddy or even entirely obliterate the sense of the thing. Often one must go back and read the sentence again to see what it really means.

The reason that pedants get so grumpy is not, I think, because they are twitchy fusspots, always looking for something over which to chunter. I think it is because they love clarity. That is certainly why I get cross. Whenever sense is lost, a little piece of my writer’s heart dies.

Of course, I sit in the middle of the most shattery of glass houses on this one. I have blind spots over the spelling of certain words. Because I write this blog quite fast, and do not have time for endless editing, there are often typing mistakes. (Sometimes the Dear Readers kindly correct, saving me from shame.) I use far too many semi-colons. I start sentences with conjunctions; sometimes whole paragraphs too. I dare to end a sentence with a preposition, when the to whoms and of whiches sound a little too pompous. I throw words in the air and watch them fall. In this post alone there has been ‘aunt-ish’ which is not a word at all.

Still, even though people may pick up their brickbats and hurl them right at me, I stand by my principle. Clarity is queen, and I shall serve her all my days. Even if that service shall sometimes be a little imperfect.

 

Today’s pictures:

Horrid, dour, shivery sort of day, with angry low skies and sloppy snow. So the only answer was the close-up, for beauty:

Myfanwy is very pleased with her smart blue rug, to keep her cosy as tonight’s blizzards roar in:

Red and Autumn having a quiet girls’ moment:

Before this happens:

It’s a big moment, the first schooling in full Western saddle. Annoyingly, I take Red to the other side of the field to do some sedate standing exercises. HOW long do I have to stay here?:

Because there is something REALLY interesting going on over there:

Like THAT:

Oh, all right:

She stood, stock still, for ten minutes, whilst Autumn had a little bronco moment, and I wandered across the paddock, faffing about with the camera. It’s one of those exercises that a lot of people would think perfectly nuts. I like it. It teaches trust and attention and manners. I like these small building blocks; I like working from the ground up. It’s no fun having an unsettled, barging, pushy horse. Sometimes I think, as we do leading and standing and backing, the simplest, most honest things, that everything I am doing with her is about stillness. She may be an ex-racing thoroughbred mare, but she has a real talent for stillness. It’s one of the things about her that touches my heart the most.

Prettiest, most demure face:

And from Stanley the Dog, most serious Sit and Stay face:

There is a big stick at his feet and he is counting the seconds until he is allowed to chase it again.

Hill:

In which I muse on language and Twitter, on pedantry and insults

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

WARNING FOR UGLY LANGUAGE, TOWARDS THE END.

It’s quite modish to be rude about social networking. First of all, it has a horrid name. I wish someone could think up something better. Social networking has the ghastly whiff of jargon about it; it’s the kind of thing you might find in a leaflet about interfacing over probable outcomes, going forward. Second of all, it is infected with the ugly things called Trolls. Trolls is just another word for rude, shouty people, with no edit button. Third of all, it takes place in the darkened space of the lonely room, rather than out in the park or the restaurant or the kitchen, or other, more benign environments. It is often considered an atomising force, rather than an act of human community.

People are always leaving Twitter in a huff, or ostentatiously shutting down their Facebook page. I rather sympathise with this, because I have absolutely no defence against the negative comment. But even if sometimes I need to take a couple of days off from the hurly burly of the communal sites on the internet, to regroup and butch up, I always come back. The advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.

I am particularly in love with Twitter at the moment. Often, if I wake early and do not need to leap out of bed, I listen to the Today programme for a while and noodle about on Twitter. There is a whole set of clever, ironical people, discussing what this minister said about that, or which apparatchik refused to answer the question. The Lobby is usually up, and so there will be some excellent insider political talk; my racing Tweeters will be rubbing their hands over the 2.30 at Newmarket; often, a lone journalist will be breaking news from a faraway country of which we know little. It is a sort of miracle really. There am I, up in the north of Scotland, lying in bed with the Pigeon watching on, whilst the whole world unfurls on my small screen.

The thing that particularly amuses me is when hares get sent running. I never know what thought or sentiment will strike a chord. Sometimes I think I have written something rather pithy and apposite, and it falls like a lonely stone into the deepest well. Sometimes, I say something mere and whimsical, and suddenly, it’s a thing, and it takes off and assumes a life of its own.

This happened today. Someone put out a tweet saying that 7 in 10 Britons are ‘disinterested’ in the Olympics. This made me very, very sad. My melancholy fell not because of prosaic Britons refusing to get excited about a sporting event. (I guarantee that people will perk up once the thing is up and running; it’s the thought that does not inspire, what with the traffic problems and the logistical disasters, and the G4S epic screw-up. Once Rebecca Adlington wins her first gold medal, everyone will go crazy, and forget the congestion in the Mile End Road.) The sadness was because a smart, professional woman did not know what disinterested meant. It does not mean having a lack of interest, but having no stake in the outcome. It is more nuanced than neutral, more immediate than unbiased. It is a lovely, useful word, and I fear it may now be lost.

Anyway, I tweeted about this, and instead of being sent to pedant’s corner with no breakfast I was greeted by a chorus of other bugbears. Discrete and discreet apparently are now routinely confused, as are principle and principal. One linguistically-minded gentleman even said that he was inspired to a hymn in praise of gerunds. One women informed me that she was in a meeting with a BBC lawyer, who solemnly announced that he wished the application of ‘Charterhouse Rules’. (We suspect he must have meant Chatham House rules, unless there is some kind of obscure minor public school rulebook used by the legal profession.)
So there, on a dull Friday morning, was a perfect festival of etymological delight. Of course, etymology can be as much friend as foe. When I dig back into the origins of disinterested, I find that it did once mean lack of interest, and switched to its current meaning some time in the 1650s. Perhaps there were seventeenth century pedants mourning that shift. Perhaps the fact that it is shifting again should not be cause for tears, but a robust example of the living, sinuous nature of the English language.

I do draw the line at refute and reject, though. But true to the antic form of the language, it turns out that refute did indeed mean reject until the 1540s. Still, all linguistic scholars now agree that it means to disprove by means of argument, and if anyone wants to take me on with sixteenth century precedent, let them.
Just as I was finishing this, and thinking about language, someone on Twitter put up a link to the transcript of the magistrate’s summing up in the John Terry trial. (For my foreign readers, he is a footballer accused of racial aggravation.) I was struck by this paragraph:

‘The defendant does not deny that he used the words, “fuck off, fuck off”, “fucking black cunt” or “fucking knobhead”. His case is that his words were not uttered by way of abuse or insult nor were they intended to be abusive or insulting.’

You know how I always say that language matters? I may have lived a sheltered life, but I don’t really see how calling someone a black cunt is not insulting or abusive. It was not as if Terry said it in a hail fellow well met way: my old china, my dear old black cunt. Even that is really not nice, but I suppose one might argue the intention was not to insult.

Still, through the mysteries of the British legal system, and the maze of meaning and context, John Terry was found not guilty. I could say that I was a disinterested observer, but that would not quite be true. I do have skin in this game. The great aunt in me would very much like not to live in a society where people run around calling each other black cunts. Call me old-fashioned if you like.

Pictures of the day:











Red’s view:





The mare, in sepia, pointing her dear toe:



Having a pick:



Are you amazed by my restraint in not writing of her today? It took heroic self-control, especially as she decided that today was the day that she would excel herself in sweetness. For someone who can be so zoomy, she can also be incredibly soft and dopey. Today was one of those days. So I just did a bit of groundwork with her, and then hung out. I sat on the stile by the henhouse and she rested her head against my shoulder, and I scratched her sweet spot, and she closed her eyes, and we stayed like that for quite a long time, whilst the swallows flew about us, and the little grey pony munched her way through the good grass.

The mother and Stepfather’s small terrier is staying whilst Mum is in the hospital for a procedure:



She really is rather sweet:



The Pigeon tolerates visitors, but is much more concerned with sniffin’ about:



The hill:

Of language and horses and bankers

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Huge breaking news: I found the mare’s sweetest of sweet spots today. In the process, she taught me something, as she does every day.

We had done some excellent, rather gentle work. She was being as good and sweet as I could wish, pushing the adorable dial up to warp ten. Suddenly, she stuck her head right up in the air, jaw skywards. I tried to get it down again, but no. Up, up, up it went. It took me a moment to work out what was going on.
She had an itch. She was desperate for me to scratch the soft skin under her head, the delicate part that runs up between the hard, carving lines of the jaw and cheek.

Once I got it, she was in twenty-seventh heaven. Yes, there, she was saying; there. Once she was sure I knew what I was doing, the head came down, and I went on rubbing and scratching until my arm ached. Her eyes went into their pleasure trance, delicate red eyelashes fluttering with joy, wibbly lower lip wobbling and bobbing with happiness.

I thought about this for a long time afterwards. One of the things all the good horseman say is: watch your horse like a hawk. If you learn to read them, they will tell you more than any book. I might have thought the throwing of the head in the air was being naughty, that she was acting bolshie, or offering some kind of stubborn resistance. In fact, it was a request, and she was asking for something in the only way she knew how.

The more I get back to horses, and remember their rhythms and cadences, the more I think the word naughty is an incorrect one. Language matters. I have a fatal tendency to pedantry. I get very cross when people say refute when they mean reject, or disinterested when they mean uninterested. Accuracy in language matters acutely when it comes to animals and people, because the labels you put on them affects the way you behave towards them. If I decide my horse is naughty, then I risk marching out with a corrective mindset, on the lookout for some example of bad behaviour, set on a hair trigger of crossness. I could find myself getting grumpy over a transgression which is not a transgression at all.

Unless horses have been badly treated by humans, they are unlikely to be naughty. Generally, their desire is to please. Almost all their behaviour comes from fear, or confusion, or hard survival instinct. I remember, when I first got the dogs, reading somewhere that there are no such things as bad dogs, only bad owners. If a dog is left alone all day and it chews up the furniture, it is not necessarily being naughty; it is more likely saying help, help, don’t abandon me or I shall die. I wonder if it might not be the same with children. Often, what is described as naughtiness is a cry for attention, or a signal of exhaustion, or the brain overload that very small people sometimes get.

I have been thinking about accuracy in language lately in quite another sphere. I am very cross about the Barclays scandal, and still livid about the banking crash of 2008, with all the credit default swap bandits bringing entire countries to their knees. In my crossness, I made a sweeping and derogatory statement about The Bankers. I am not alone in this. Even such an intelligent programme as The Daily Politics, my favourite political show, will have everyone from the presenters to the guests to the daily experts talking of The Bankers and their iniquity.

The lovely Stepfather picked me up on this. ‘What do you mean by The Bankers?’ he said. ‘Surely not all the bankers? There are some rogues who have behaved very badly but there are also many people who work hard and make money for their companies and pay taxes.’

He was quite right. The economies of practically every country I can name, apart from possibly Norway, are still in dire straits, struggling for air, gasping for breath. The shattering acts of four years ago, now compounded by the unending Euro crisis, still echo and reverberate. Cuts cut, but deficits do not seem to fall; growth remains elusive. The human longing is for someone to blame. The Bankers will do; the evil plutocrats with their yachts and their houses in the Hamptons and their obscene bonuses are the perfect bogeymen for our time.

But this is dangerous for two reasons. All economies need a robust banking sector; if fury at The Bankers gets too populist and out of hand there is a danger of babies and bathwater. (Occasionally, I can even defend bonuses on purely utilitarian grounds: the tax on them may build a new school or hospital, so from the Treasury’s point of view, the bigger the better. Then I remember about the Cayman Islands, and wonder if that argument holds water.)

On a very human level, I think it is unfair on the individuals who go to their desks every day with the single idea of working hard, making money to support their families, behaving in a perfectly decent manner. Not every banker has a boat. Not every employee of Barclays is bent on testing the capitalist system to destruction. Some of them, perhaps most of them, are perfectly nice humans who are kind to children and animals. If I worked in an industry which was routinely subjected to wholesale demonisation because of the acts of a few selfish idiots, I might become very demoralised indeed. (Very fortunately for me, no one goes around shouting, Oh, the bloody writers.)

I wonder too, if the opprobrium is spread over an entire category, whether individual offenders might be more likely to get away with it. If they are all at it, in the popular imagination, then are the real rogues less likely to go to jail, where they clearly belong? It’s just a theory.

I don’t think that it is possible to be absolutely accurate in every sentence one speaks. If one qualified every statement it would lead to very dull conversation. Sometimes, a sweeping generalisation is fun. But it’s not a bad thing to take care with language, and not hurl it about without thought. I think it can have more consequences than one realises.
 
Pictures of the day:





















I love this picture of Red. It’s very slightly fuzzy, not sure why, so that it looks almost like a painting:



The same effect happens in these two pictures:





The Pigeon is clearly saying – do you really think this posing in the undergrowth is a good idea?:



The return of the hill:



I can’t say it was sunny today, but at least the clouds lifted a bit and I could take the ponies’ rain sheets off. As I write this, the clouds are gathering again.

Brain switch

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It seems there is a moment when the News Mammoth is rampaging so madly that it switches my brain into miniaturist mode. I can no longer ponder the big, important, moral and ethical arguments. I find myself concentrating on the very, very small.

Yvette Cooper, for instance, has just said ‘issues around’ three times on The World At One. As in: there are issues around medical records, there are issues around privacy.

It is rather unfair to pick on her. Issues around is included in the beginners’ pack of boilerplate handed out to all members of parliament, senior police officers, local councillors, and almost anyone who appears on Question Time. Except Hugh Grant, who must have pleased Her Majesty by speaking her English beautifully when he was on the panel last week.

Here is my objection. Surely it is issues about? I can’t work out if ‘around’ is actually incorrect, or just ugly. It manages to sound like a weasel word, even though it is not really an obfuscation. I cannot work out why. It is horrid, anyway, and it must be stopped.

Also, now I am deep in the weeds, I start to think that issues itself is stupid. When someone comes on the wireless and starts talking about issues, what they usually mean is: a problem, a horror, an outrage, a doing of egregious wrong.

Here is what I do not understand. Everyone loves plain speaking. I am trying to train myself out of the Generalised We. I am starting to get cross with writers who say: we all love this, or we all think that. It’s lazy and wrong. But I think that I can be quite confident about this Everyone. Did you ever hear a single person in your whole wide life say: oh, but what I want more of is evasive, vague, knotty, jargon-littered language? Of course you did not. And yet people in positions of power go on speaking it, day after day. They are not stupid. Some of them are very nice. Many of them are kind to children and animals. Why can they not call a spade a spade?

 

Some pretty pictures, to take your mind off it:

The Pigeon had great excitement today: she put up a rabbit. This is her post-chase, on watch face:

And her no little critter shall eat your violas and get away with it face:

The return of the hill:

 

PS. Small howl for help:

My landlord’s dog is staying. The poor little thing is obviously missing his humans, and is whining and pacing, which means I find it hard to get any work done. I have never had a whining dog, and do not know what to do. Do any of you dog behaviourists out there have any idea? I’ve tried comforting strokes and treats to cheer him up, but the minute I turn back to the computer the plaintive noise starts again. I know I should not really use this blog as a dog agony column, but I am slightly at a loss.