Horses and flowers.

Got the horses all rugged up yesterday for Storm Abigail, and then came down this morning to find this enchanting scene – sunshine and happy faces:

(We were very lucky with the storm. It roared in from the west, glanced at us for a moment, and then veered quickly north, to go and do its mischief in Orkney and Shetland. Poor things; they got the brunt of it.)

Then did the flowers for my mother’s wake. We are calling it a gathering, because wake is too gloomy. I’ve also cooked about eighty-seven cheese bloody puffs, along with salmon mousse, yellow pepper soup (to be had in shot glasses), smoked mackerel pâté, a spicy tomato salsa, and some feta cheese thing which will go on little rounds of baguette toast. I’m quite tired. But the flowers came out beautifully, and I’m pleased about that:

I keep meaning to say thank you thank you thank you, to all the Dear Readers who have left such enchanting messages. So many of you have visited this foreign country, and your words of generosity and understanding fly through the ether to lift my battered heart. The heart is very, very bashed. But it’s going to be sunny tomorrow, and we shall remember the old lady well, and on on on I bugger, because the only thing to do is to keep buggering on. It is the greatest catchphrase of this funny old island race, and I cling to it like a drowning woman in a stormy sea.

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:

Love and trees.

As the irrational anger stage flickers in and out like a faulty electrical current, there is also a flat stoicism. Get on, do life, don’t make a fuss. Mum left quite strict instructions that she did not want a fuss. (She meant with funeral arrangements and such, but I am taking her words to a wider stage.) So I am goodly not making one.

Quite a lot of people do not know. That’s always the odd thing when someone you love very much dies. The damn world goes on, and ordinary people go on doing ordinary things, and other humans talk to you just as if everything is rational and explicable, just as if there has not been a tear in the space-time continuum. That can cause little spurts of wild rage. Don’t you know what happened? one wants to shout, unfairly. Can’t you tell that there’s a reason my hair is bonkers and I’m wearing my maddest hat and I’m the colour of parchment? At the same time, the stoical, getting on with it self is almost glad, because one can talk of something other than death. The ordinary is soothing, and yet infuriating. It’s all very confusing.

Then there are the unexpected things that tear through the resolute, storm the defences, and break the siege. Today, it was the enchanting gentleman who helped create my mother’s garden. She made such a beautiful garden, and this fine man, who once farmed sheep and knows the land and loves it as I do, put into action all her dreams and ideas. He is a real man of the earth, and a proper human being.

I wanted to thank him.

‘She loved this garden so much, and you worked so hard, and I know how much that meant to her,’ I said, as we looked out through the mist and dreich.

The garden is a little sad at the moment, as it always is at this time of year, but the last of the white roses still lift their brave heads. The garden is in mourning too. As I thanked the kind man, my voice broke and I had to walk away. I did not need to explain. He knew.

The people who know, in every sense of the word, are the finest balm. A very old friend, someone I have known and loved since I was nineteen years old, writes all the way from India. He lost his mother last year, so he knows. Oh, he knows. And he knows me, even though we have gone into very different lives and only lay eyes on each other every year or so. The friendship, dug deep in our formative years, endures time and distance. His words are so perfect, so shimmering with love and truth, so brave and human and funny and dear, that I want to send him flowers.

Another beloved friend, who has also lost both his parents, writes: ‘It is as if a great oak has disappeared from your personal landscape.’ How clever he is, I think. How glorious that he knew the very sentence to write, the one that would make most sense to my addled mind and my battered heart. That is just it. A great oak has gone.

I always mourn fallen trees. We lose some each year in the winter storms. Only yesterday, I saw my neighbour chopping up a chestnut which fell to the first October gale, and felt a sharp melancholy. I always think of downed trees as mighty fallen giants, slain on some mythical battlefield.

Oaks are not common in this part of Scotland, but we have some magnificent ones. There are a few down by the red mare’s field, and a lovely plantation at the end of my mother’s garden. When my brother-in-law’s own mother was very young, she was instructed by stern forestry officials to cut the buggers down. She must be sensible, and plant commercial forestry, like all canny Scots do. She defied the stern men, most of whom were twice her age, and kept her oaks, and they live on, a great memorial to her.

In my world, everything comes back to love and trees.

 

Today’s pictures:

I must find some pictures of trees, I thought, as I finished writing this. But I’ve never been good at taking photographs of trees. I have snapped away at my favourite beauties, only to look at the results with a dying fall. Something about the flat dimensions of a photograph robs them of their majesty; they look oddly bathetic. Then, like a present or a shooting star or a ray of sunshine after the rain, I saw that I had captured the trees. There they were, staunchly in the background, as I had been taking a picture of Stanley the Dog, or my lovely mares, or the dear old sheep whom I adore so much. They were not centre stage, but they were there. These are the trees who people my days and never fail to make me count every damn blessing I have. Not everyone gets to see such beautiful trees. I do not take that good fortune for granted.

That is one of the old oaks, in the background:

A little rowan I planted in my own garden:

The woods I see every day:

The hill that brought me to Scotland (I fell in love with it as you fall in love with a person, and never went south again), with its fine fringe of trees:

The ones that keep the sheep sheltered from the wind:

One of my favourite mixtures of old planting and new planting:

More sheep, because you can never have too many sheep:

The avenue that leads to my mother’s house:

And her roses:

The rain.

Today, I went out in the rain. I stood in the rain, I walked in the rain, I talked in the rain, I rode in the rain.

A friend cast her eyes up to the dreich. The sky was the colour of lost hope. ‘You are going to ride in this?’

I smiled.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am going to ride in this.’

Normally, when people are surprised by something I do (which is quite often), I offer an explanation. I usually want people to know why I think things and why I do things and what I feel about things. That, perhaps, is why I still write this blog. I don’t really know why I want people to understand; I don’t know whether it is a good or a bad thing. Today, I felt no need for understanding. I was going to ride in this, and that was all she wrote.

If you ride in the rain and walk in the rain and if you have a proper hat for the rain, the rain changes. It no longer becomes a gloomy, paralysing thing. It is a ravishing, soft, reviving thing. It is what makes the grass grow. It is what allowed the trees under which the mare and I pass to survive for hundreds of years. I don’t know who planted the beeches, still bright green in the doleful light, and I don’t know when those glorious seeds went into the ground. Those trees can live for a thousand years. That’s what the rain does.

The mare, who is tougher than she looks, walked through the rain with the gentle aplomb of a duchess. It was a friendly ride. We are friends, I thought. Today, we were of one mind and one body. All was well between us.

Then I went to my work at HorseBack and met some people who have injuries to the body, to the brain, to the spirit. It is a group that had come from Catterick, a new set of people I had not met before. I asked the group leader about his men and women. ‘That one,’ he said, looking at a pale gentleman with a kind face, ‘just saw too many dead bodies.’

I am carrying sorrow at the moment. It is the perfectly respectable, expected, appropriate sorrow that comes to all humans in their middle age. It has a reason. It is not a mood, or a self-indulgence. It is a response.

It lives in me like a low weight. It is a permanent ache. I know it well and, rather to my amazement, I know what to do with it. It has to be wrapped up and stored safely inside. It cannot be fought or dispelled or ignored or driven off. It has to be kept and faced and even spoken to. I speak to my sorrow, as if it is a small, frightened animal. The ache stops twice, on this rainy morning: when I am on my mare, and when I am taking photographs of the people who have seen too many dead bodies.

It has so many paradoxes that I find it interesting. It is a weight, but it has a hollowness too, an unbearable lightness of being. It hurts, but it is also cleansing, as if it has the spirit of fire in it, that comes and burns away all the shabby detritus of life. It makes me think of what is important. It is flaying, yet it makes me strong. It turns out that I am doing sorrow well, to my absurd and secret pride. I speak of it straight, if someone asks. I make jokes. In sadness, I get a gold star in irony. How odd that is.

I’ve had practice, and I believe in practice. This feeling trots beside me like an old hound, known, familiar. Oh, there you are, says the mind, faintly resigned; I remember you.

I expect I won’t always do it well. I’ll have off days and cross days and days when I get tired of the thing and try to run away. Today, I am walking in the rain, in the most ridiculous of my many hats.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack this morning:

The duchess and Stanley the Manly, on Sunday, when it was sunny:

Into every life, a little rain must fall.

It is ten degrees, and the sky is the colour of lost hope. So much water is pouring out of it that I start to suspect that something has gone wrong with nature. It’s the kind of rain that should be a brief storm, it is so intense, but it keeps on rolling, as if it has taken a bet. The hills have disappeared into the smoky cloud, and even the sheep look despairing.

Down in the field, the horses do the stoical, flat thing that they do in the weather. They close in on themselves, and have no use for humans. It is purely atavistic; they are in survival mode. Water lies on the fields, dirty and reproachful, and the two mares stand under their favourite tree, but even its majestic green arms cannot protect them. I bless the new rug technology, but the wet still runs down their dear faces and into their ears. (I laugh a hollow laugh at the vastly expensive shelter I built for the weather. They only use it to get out of the sun and away from the flies.)

I too have rug technology, but despite a laughably ‘waterproof’ coat, a hat and sturdy gumboots, after half an hour the rain has got me. It sneaks down my neck, finds its way down my back, trickles sullenly into those stomping boots. I have to accept the wetness. There is no fighting it.

I gain some small consolation from putting out the sweet-smelling, dry hay and mixing up an extra special breakfast for the poor, drowned girls, rich with meadow chaff and herbs. I stand and talk to them as they eat. They cheer up and come out of their shells and flicker their ears at me, and I leave them a little brighter than when I found them.

All the same, this relentless downpour seeps into my soul and leaves me with a humming spiritual ache. I am generally stoical about the weather, but it’s been so rotten for so long, and everything I own, including my house and my car, has turned into a festival of mud. It knocks over my defences and makes me dwell on the sad things, rather than determinedly looking for the silver linings.

Then, of course, I feel cross with myself, because people have so many burdens to carry, and it’s just a bit of mud and wet. I go to the shop, to get some bread and coffee and ham. I see a mother and daughter. The mother is perhaps fifty, rather elegant and smartly dressed. (I look down ruefully at my filthy jeans.) The daughter is about twenty-five, and has some kind of severe mental impairment. She talks loudly, in the simple language of an infant, and stays very close to her mother.

I look again at the mother, with her bright, put-together surface, and feel a moment of awe. Her child will always be a child. She must have to look after her all the time. I wonder if she ever gets a holiday, or can go away for a day. I think of the enduring and unconditional nature of love, of the battling human heart, which does not quail from difficulty. Perhaps that mother loves that daughter even more, because she was not like the other children in the playground. But all the same, there might have been expectations, hopes, dreams, which had to be adjusted. Humans are very wonderful, I think.

As they leave the shop, the daughter turns around to say something to the lady at the till. The speech is so blurred that I cannot understand it. But the lady at the till, who seems to know the girl well, gets every word and chats back, and laughs. The daughter smiles a smile so dazzling that it lights up the gloomy day.

Never assume, I think.

I think of a woman I know on the internet. One of the things I love about the blog, and about the fine side of social media, is that I make quite profound connections with people I shall probably never meet. When people get sneery about virtual life, as opposed to the vaunted real life, I wonder at how little they know of the internet. The kindness of strangers lives there. Those strangers become known; small redoubts of common interests, thoughts, feelings, sympathies, jokes, generosities are set up.

This woman is dealing, with enormous courage and elegance and grace, with one of the greatest tragedies in life: the slow end of her Best Beloved. She writes about it a little, in brief, potent bulletins of sadness, but she will also write of small pleasures – the beauty of her landscape, the making of a cake, the antics of her chickens. I think of her great grief, and the dauntless bravery with which she faces it.

And all I have to deal with is a wet, gloomy day. I hear the knocking at the door as the Perspective Police demand to be let in. It’s just a little bit of rain.

As I think this, my spirits do not lift straight away. One can know a thing intellectually, and not quite feel it in the gut. I understand that there are people out there, brave men and women, who are fighting battles I can hardly comprehend. I understand that I have very little of which to complain. Yet, the cross voices still persist, shouting defiantly in my ear. They are on a roll, and will not be turned away so easily.

I go out again, into the rain. On days like this, the very land seems drowned, as if the elements have defeated it. I want to take a picture of it, to show the gloom. As I begin to focus the camera, I find not gloom, but beauty. The raindrops dance off the puddles like little firework displays. Tiny beads of water cling to singing green leaves like diamonds. All the greens are so green. If it were not for the rain, I think, there would not be this lush, verdant glory. I imagine the relentless nature of the desert spaces, where rain is hardly known. I think of the people of California, who are running out of water.

I stare at the beauty. There it is, in the small things, on this dark day.

I feel better. The oppression lifts.

I go inside, laughing at my own absurdity. The Beloved Cousin rings up, always a moment for celebration and delight. She makes me laugh more than anyone I know. And England take a wicket.

It’s just a little bit of rain.

 

Today’s pictures:

As I finished this, I thought – I’ll just get on the Google and see if there are any nice poems about rain. The only line I could think of was that enchanting one from ee cummings – ‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’ Which of course is not about rain at all.

The first poem I found was this one. It is by Longfellow:

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Jumping for joy. And why it matters.

It was a funny day. The sun shone, but the bitter winds, howling in the from east, kept Scotland in winter submission.

The agent rang to say we are not quite there yet. I was brave and cheerful about it. ‘I am a professional,’ I said. ‘This is part of the job.’ Not quite there yet haunts me, and I must be very, very flinty and practical and sensible and stare it in the whites of its eyes and not let it make me sad. It’s just a bit more time and a bit more work and there really are worse things happening at sea.

I did something catastrophically stupid which has led to practical and logistical problems and I had to walk the fine line of rightly scolding myself and not falling into a brown study. I needed to get my categories in a row. I had to face the stupid thing, understand it did not make me an entirely worthless person, prevent myself from falling into a frenzy of lashing and regret, and take stern steps to put the stupid thing right. I had to resist a sudden urge to fling myself into a defensive crouch. I breathed. I reminded myself that nobody had died. I remembered that imperfection is what makes a human lovable. (I really, really hope this is true.) I fixed up the stupid thing and tried not to let the stupidity haunt me.

Although I had caught up on sleep, I still felt a bit tired and out of sorts. Even though I did not have a deadline to meet, I still forgot to make lunch. (Going to do it now.)

It was a mmm, blah, scratchy, scritchy, uncomfortable sort of a day. It was not a show tunes kind of a day. It was the sort of day when I say, with my fatalistic, philosophical hat on: EVERY DAY CAN’T BE DORIS DAY.

Ah, well, I thought. Not the end of the world. Everyone goes through this, one way and another. Better tomorrow.

Then, as I went down to the field to give the duchess her tea, this happened:

Evverything was better. It damn well was Doris Day, after all.

It was not just that I had the good fortune to bump into The World Traveller and the two great-nieces, the very sight of whom never fails to lift my spirits. It was not just that all one of the little girls wanted to do was sit on the red mare, and that I could confidently say yes, because the dear old duchess is now so soft and relaxed that I can trust her with my best beloveds. It was not just that the mare was so enchanted by the small people that she blinked her eyes at them and wuffled through her nose, so that the smallest small shrieked with delight, making a noise so high that virtually only bats could hear her. It was not just that The World Traveller allowed me to vent all my worries and woes without seeming to mind that I forgot to ask her a single thing about herself, opening up her generous heart and spreading empathy like balm on my wounds. It was not just that they are ridiculously pleased to see me, and love me whether I have sold a book or not.

It is that they are so completely themselves, so happy, so bright and bonny and blithe that they literally jump for joy. You can’t be gloomy and scratchy when there are people jumping for joy in front of your very eyes.

In reality, the universe is a vast uncaring thing, full of dark matter and black holes. Almost every element of it would kill a human stone dead, from solar winds to cosmic radiation to primordial gas. It does not send portents, or care about puny humanity, or do anything but exist. But sometimes I do think of it in a metaphorical, magical sense. Sometimes I think the universe sends me what I need at the exact moment I need it. This is not literally true, and is very, very bad science. It is a metaphor, not a literal fact. But it is one of those things that can feel true.

Today, the universe sent me kind true hearts, and people who jump for joy.

And, of course, a very, very happy horse. If she had her way, they would come and set up camp in the field and live next to her in tents, so she could gaze at them in joy.

Stanley the Dog loves them too. ‘STANLEY, STANLEY, STANLEY,’ they cry, in chanting unison, as he demonstrates his skills with a stick.

Who could fail to love such loveliness?

I did not have to wait for it to be better tomorrow. It was better now.

 

PS. The thing that makes me laugh is that these pictures really are not the best I’ve ever taken. I was laughing so much and so eager to capture every moment that I merely pointed and snapped. They are technically deficient, but they are filled with sweetness, and the happiness of that half hour pours out like starlight. They are a potent reminder that things do not need to be perfect, or even very good, in order to shimmer with loveliness.