My mission, should I choose to accept it.

Well, the Be Happy For Mum plan didn’t go all that badly, in the end. I thought that it might be the most shaming disaster. I thought that everyone might shout through the ether Oh for goodness’ sake, just be bloody sad and get it over with. (I suspect that was a bit of Freudian projection, and in fact was the voice of my critical self, who is a terrible old vampish harridan and has always had too much gin.) In actual fact, on the Facebook, on the blog, kind people, some known well to me, some complete strangers, all rose up in glory and said generous and funny and wise things, which touched and amazed my bashed heart.

Here is what I learnt, because I must always learn something. All these years on, and I am still a girly swot at heart.

There is one place that the sadness really and truly does go completely away and that is on the back of my thoroughbred mare. I always knew that she did have super-powers. I just did not quite know how powerful they were. Being with her is cheering and soothing, but it’s on her back, when I feel her power under me and the peace that she carries in her flowing from her mighty body into my puny one, that everything falls into a stunning equilibrium. All the bad and sad things just fall away and I am free. I don’t know how this happens, but it does. She is a miracle horse and that’s the end of it.

The joys are there, if you look for them. They don’t banish the sorrow, but they go in tandem with them, like a pair of slightly grumpy and ill-matched carriage horses, the kind that the Queen would not use for state occasions. I’m going to go on driving my wonky carriage, and one day, those two ponies will learn to trot along together.

My stabs at normality are quite funny. I’m a little off kilter. Everything I say is a crotchet off-beat. My laughter is a bit too loud. My walk is a bit ragged. My clothes are frankly peculiar. My hair is a bit bonkers. My attempts to make sense don’t quite make sense.

Laughter still exists though, and it is as healing as tears. I have a new theory that grief is like a trapped energy and has to be let go, in great gusts. It needs to be released from the actual body. Shouty tears can do this, but so can shouty laughter. The Beloved Stepfather made me laugh at breakfast so much that I couldn’t speak for four minutes. It was one of those comical stories so recondite and absurd and almost tragic that only he and I (and my mother had she been here) could get it. That made it even more intense. Once he had told me the absurd thing, and I started laughing helplessly, he started laughing too, the first proper laugh he has done since it happened. It was naughty schoolboy laughter, because it was the kind of thing that was really quite sad in some ways, but we couldn’t help it, it tickled us to death. That laughter opened the door and let some of that captured energy out.

I have to keep reminding myself to let my shoulders go. I have another theory, you will be amazed to hear, that people trap their emotions in different parts of their bodies. Some people get headaches, or stomach cramps. I get the shoulders up around my ears. Every half an hour, I have to say: get those damn shoulders down.

Talking out loud is oddly helpful. I’ve always been prone to this, and it’s getting worse as I get older. Lately, I find myself in the Co-op saying, at shamingly high volume: ‘Now, what have I forgotten?’ Since Saturday, I have been walking round the house saying ‘Oh,’ and ‘Ah,’ and ‘Oof,’ and ‘What next?’ I say: ‘Oh, Mum,’ with a dying fall. I expect soon I shall move on to: ‘Steady the buffs.’

I like having a mission, and I’m going to keep on my mission of hunting for beauty, squinting for the good, searching for the consolations. My old friend The Horseman, who is a man of great matter-of-factness, not a sentimental bone in his body, but a man of oak, the sort of man on whom you can really rely when the chips are down, wrote me a brilliant, pithy message. It said: ‘Live hard in respect for those who can’t.’ That is my mission.

But, and here I think is the important thing, I’m not going to scold myself when I can’t do that. There will be days when it’s not possible. It’s a good goal, and a fine thought. I keep it in the front of my mind, like a shining amulet. The good old Horseman. He was there when my dad died, and when my dog died (he found me in streaming tears on his drive and staunchly faced them without fear) and now he has sent me a line to live by.

Rather to my astonishment, I have achieved quite a lot this week. I have written words, and done good work for HorseBack, and made soup, and worked my new mare, and ridden my old mare in glorious cowgirl canters on a loose rein, and even arranged some flowers. There are roses on my desk. There are never roses on my desk. They were on special offer and I thought, bugger it, I must have roses. They feel sweetly symbolic and I look at them now as I write and think: yes, yes, the small things. I live now in the world of the small things, so that the big thing does not overwhelm me, so that I do not drown.

 

Today’s pictures:

The roses:

I found this wonderful picture of my mother this morning. I remember that fur hat so well. I was very small when she had it, and I used to whip it off her head and hold it and stroke it as if it were a small bear. I can feel it now:

And this picture was in the same book. It is my sister, on her side-saddle champion. This says a lot about my mother. It was she who taught us to ride these ponies, who schooled them and groomed them and taught us sternly to look after them. If we were to have the great fortune to have such glorious animals, we had to be responsible for them. We were never allowed to come in at the end of the day until our ponies were happy and settled with their bran mashes. She would get up at three in the morning to drive us to distant shows – to the Three Counties, and Builth Wells, and Windsor, and Peterborough – and she would make us the best bacon sandwiches in the world to sustain us for the road:

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.

 

In which my horse turns out to have a sense of humour

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A really hard work day. At five o’clock, my brain goes pop, as if a gasket or a fuse has blown. Normally I would go on until seven or eight, but that seems to be it for the day. I had all this tremendous horse stuff to tell you and now I hardly know what my name is. (I am certain you are quite devastated; I know that all you need on a rainy Monday is another twenty-seven paragraph horse story.)

Although I will tell you that she put up her sternest challenge today. Oh, she brought out her box of tricks. And there were people watching. ‘Don’t embarrass me in front of the watching people,’ I said in her ear. Ha, ha, ha, ha, went Red the Mare.

The really strange thing was I absolutely loved it. I have not had to concentrate so hard since the old queen died. And, again, we got there in the end. Today, achieving any kind of gentle forward motion involved a lot of circling. I had forgotten how much the circle is your friend. You can use it for everything – for getting her attention back, when she is being silly and not concentrating; for slowing her down, when she is going too fast; for getting her moving, if she plants her feet. A half ton horse will absolutely not move forward if it decides not to, however much you kick on. But it cannot resist a tight turn.

Besides the circling, my friend today was laughter. For some reason, I found it incredibly funny that she was putting me through it a bit. The really strange thing is that I take it as a compliment. I can damn well rise to the challenge, and I wonder if the mare knows that, somewhere in her old horsey mind. One of the things I love most in the Pigeon is that she makes me laugh. Now it turns out I also have a funny horse. I adore her. She is an absolute hoot.

And in other headline news: today is The Sister’s birthday. So it is happy birthday to the dearest, most beloved sibling, and to old Will Shakespeare too, with whom she shares the day. And now I must go and sit quietly whilst my brain shuts itself down.

 

Too shattered even for pictures. Here are a couple of my naughty, funny girls:

 

See that dopey, dozy, butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, blinky face? Don't be fooled for a moment.