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:

The good, the bad, and all the spaces in between.

Sometimes I do things so stupid and idiotic that I need new words for stupid and idiotic.

I think that words matter, so I try to say to myself ‘You did something idiotic’ rather than ‘You are an idiot’. But sometimes I am an idiot, and so it was this morning.

The folly usually arises from excitement. That is my Achilles’ heel. When I am excited about something, I forget everyone else. I bang on and wave my arms about and don’t pay attention to the things I should pay attention to. This is when disaster strikes. Then I feel like forty kinds of fool and going into a mad cringe of abasement and apology and remorse. I lash myself for my obtuseness, and have a twisted kind of esprit d’escalier. Why did I not think? Why did I not contain myself and think of others and act like a responsible adult?

Then, because of course I cannot let the thing be the thing, I have to parse it. My own feelings are not the point, I tell myself. When you do something stupid and wrong, you must think about the other person, and the repercussions, not your own sentiments of regret and angst. This is not my drama – look at me, feeling bad. The feeling bad has no utility. It does not undo the thing which should not have been done.

I think quite a lot about being wrong and how one should work to get good at it. On paper, my answer is lovely and clear. Admit the mistake, apologise for it, make no excuses, put right anything that can be put right, learn from it, and MOVE ON.

In life, it is not quite so easy. The on paper answer is good and true, but I’m still struggling a little to apply it. I’m not quite moving on. I would like to be more thoughtful, more steady, less impulsive. Not every damn thing is about me. Not everyone finds the things which I find so thrilling as delirious as I do.

That’s my plan for next week. To grow up. It’s a good plan. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In other, happier news, I have a new thoroughbred mare. I said to someone this morning: ‘I got a thoroughbred mare because I love nothing in the world more than a thoroughbred mare.’ The person looked at me and said, dry as a bone, ‘Yes, I think we’ve got that.’

She was a sprinter and then a top polo pony. She had to retire, and she has come to me to live a gentle life in Scotland. She is exceptionally beautiful, very kind, and unbelievably clever. I taught her some new things this morning which I thought would take a week to get right. She understood them in twenty minutes. I looked at her in awe and wonder.

The other life lesson, I think, as I type all this, is not to let the bad thing ruin the good thing. I always wonder why the bad is so often more powerful than the good. I think of it in quite bathetic ways – a bad smell always conquers a sweet scent, a mess is always much easier to create than order and tidiness. This morning, I did one really stupid thing, and one absolutely brilliant thing. I toot my own trumpet in a most un-British way, but let’s have the word with no bark on it: I worked that mare well. All the things I have learnt from my dear red mare, my finest professor, paid off, in spades. I have to look the wrong thing in the whites of its eyes, and get its measure, but I must not let it cloud the memory of that first day of work with my clever, gentle new girl. It’s a precious moment, and I want it to shine.

It’s good old life: there are good bits, and there are bad bits, and there are all the spaces in between. I suspect the secret to being an adult human is learning not to let the wrong parts bring you too low, and not to let the right parts take you too high. Balance in all things. Or something like that.

 

Today’s pictures:

The enchanting new mare. Although in the past I have, for some goofy reasons of privacy, given even the animals blog names, I really think there is no need for that now. Besides, she has a really good name. Her name is Scout. I’m not sure if it is in homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’d like to think so:

The red mare, watching her new companion. She found the whole thing very exciting. They did live together in the south, in a big polo herd, but I can’t really tell whether they remember each other. After some initial hooleying about, they have settled very quickly, so perhaps there is a memory:

The first greeting:

Stan the Man was delighted by the whole business and ran around like a wild thing, elegantly ignored by the horses:

The road home on Tuesday:

A bit of autumn colour for you, from the garden:

And one more red mare, because I can’t resist. She was particularly adorable this morning, not minding at all that I spent all my time with the new mare. She went off and did her own thing and then came over to spend some time with me, giving me her head so I could scratch her sweet spots, a kind and dozy expression on her face, as if to say ‘I am still your best girl’. Which she is, because she taught me everything I know and I’ll never stop being grateful to her:

The right reasons.

Today, I had twenty versions of the blog running round in the mazy corridors of my mind. Some were grumpy, some were confessional, some were, I am ashamed to say, a tiny bit passive aggressive. I have a truly dreadful habit of expressing subliminal anger under the guise of sweet reason. (People sometimes say to me: don’t be so hard on yourself. I agree that pointless lashing is pointless. But I also think one must look one’s flaws in the whites of their eyes and get their measure. And the phoney sweet reason is a flaw that must be stared down.) One was certainly self-indulgent, which will surprise nobody.

Then I had a hard ride. I don’t mean it was difficult, but we were doing some serious work so I had to concentrate. I had to call on all my powers. I was thinking about balance, and softness, and feel. I was very conscious of my body, and my centre of gravity, and letting my physical self go in harmony with the mighty thoroughbred body underneath me. I was in, I think, that wonderful state called flow, where everything drops away, and all that matters is mastering something that is very slightly beyond your capability.

All the stupid things dissipated into the bright air.

There was an authentic, beautiful, funny, clever creature, in a green field starred with clover, being her own true self. That was all that mattered. This time and this place were all that mattered. She really is a mistress of Zen, that mare.

And then my wise old owl voice, which doesn’t often get much of a hearing, because it is steady, and low, and does not shout, said: always do things for the right reasons.

That, my darlings, is my thought for the day. Good old owl. I should listen to him more often.

A slightly unexpected life lesson.

Quite a long time ago, with a lot of sweating and swearing and yelping, I hit the deadline for the manuscript of my current book. I whacked it off to the agent, after staying up all night, and then collapsed in a heap.

After all the rushing and striving and grand-standing, I had to wait quite a long time for a response. This sometimes happens, and I have learnt to deal with it. I am a pro, after all. At least the thing was done, and I could fill in the time by working on my other book, and, lately, on the new secret project, because I must always have a secret project.

There was, at last, good news. She loved it; she was very happy; she was fired with enthusiasm. She had plans.

Then there was a check. She thought perhaps it needed more work. A change in emphasis might be needed. A little structural tweak. She wanted to go away and think for a while.

I am a pro, I told myself.

Then, finally, finally, an email arrived. I read it so quickly that I did not fully understand it. I was clearly much, much more terrified than I had allowed myself to believe, and this seemed to blur my very vision.

What I thought it said was that she was losing faith. I thought that she was trying to shuffle me off, that really she did not like it any more, that she did not trust me to fix it.

I went into a wild defensive crouch. I kept trying to do the new draft, and could not. What price that famous professionalism now? I had many good excuses – complicated life mostly, but then everyone has a complicated life. In my experience, you only don’t do a thing when you don’t want to. The excuses are always bullshit, however good and shiny they might seem on the surface.

It took me two weeks to realise what was going on. What was going on was that I was FURIOUS. Not with the poor agent, who is a brilliant woman and who has stuck with me through vicissitudes which would have sunk a lesser human. I was furious with the whole shooting match. I was livid with the process.

Writing daily for the internet is a really good discipline. It has keen personal pleasures. I get to meet Dear Readers from around the world, and learn about other views and other lives. I can keep a record, which I like very much. There are precious jewels on this blog, which would have been lost to memory had I not written them down – there is the day Kauto Star won his fifth King George; there is Frankel in his pomp; there are my dear, adored old canine ladies, whom I still miss. The writing itself is important, as it keeps my fingers moving, locking the very act of writing into muscle memory.

But it is also horribly spoiling. I can write what I want, and it can go out into the world as free as a bird. There are no mediating market forces, cultural shifts, publishing shake-ups, economic turbulences to wreck it. It has a lovely purity and immediacy and ease to it. I write it; you read it. I am sometimes proud of it; you are sometimes bored by it. If it lags and sags, I must try harder. If I’m in the zone, it sings its song, and the Dear Readers smile.

I don’t have to do a tap dance, or a dog and pony show. I don’t have to edit and revise and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I don’t have to have any bloody meetings.

The perceived doubt of the email brought all those old rejections, imperatives, wilderness years into one ball of rage. Fuck them all, the childish voice in my head was yelling. I was not even sure who or what I was cursing. The fates, the demands of the job, life itself; the whole buggery mess and muddle.

I was so angry that I then refused to write at all, and listened to the Ashes instead. The voice of Blowers on Test Match Special was the only thing which made me feel as if my fragile world was not rocking on its axis. That, and the red mare, who rose to the occasion, and was more sweet and funny and responsive and adorable than I’ve ever known her. Each ride was more enchanting than the last, as if she knew that something was up, and understood that it was in her sole power to give me the gift of peace for two hours every day.

But then the Test Match was over and I had my deadline to meet and I had to stop being such a sulky fool and do the damn work. Otherwise I cannot keep the mare in hay. (I had tried, over the weekend, to win thousands of pounds on an accumulator so that I could retire on the spot, but it did not go well.)

Crossly, after too much coffee, I went back and read the email again, to see what it was the poor agent really wanted.

It said not one single thing I had inferred.

It was still filled with enthusiasm and belief. She just wanted a few small changes, and then it was all guns blazing.

I read it again.

What had I been thinking? She had written one thing; I, in blind fear, had read another.

I sat down and did all the major edits in one session.

I’ll still need to do some more pondering and have another polish and sharpen up some of the self-indulgent parts, but all is not lost, my career is not yet over, light is shining through the tunnel.

I often say that I am an idiot. Then I have to remind myself sternly that I am not quite an idiot, but an ordinary human who sometimes does extraordinarily idiotic things. There is an important difference. This is one of those idiotic things. Will I ever learn? Back to the drawing board I go, back to the schoolroom, back to learning yet another life lesson that I don’t seem to have imbibed.

Read your emails carefully does not sound like a lesson for the ages. But in this case, it really is.

 

Today’s photographs:

Just one today, because I’m exhausted with all these revelations of my own folly. But it’s a good one, because it’s how I feel. Born free. And also because it’s of the person who has stopped me collapsing from mild hysteria into the very depths of the abyss. She really does have that power.

Age cannot wither her. Or, bugger the menopause.

I am, for no known reason, re-reading Middlemarch. I picked it up because I was thinking about my father and the racing world I grew up in. It was a marvellous world, and I remember it with flinging fondness, but it had absolutely no thought in it that was not about horses. When I first plunged into the wide prairies of Middlemarch, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I could not stop talking about it. (What a dead bore I must have been.) After a while, my father patted my hand gently and murmured, very kindly: ‘And this George Eliot, has he written any other good books?’

He was a horseman, what can I tell you? He read Timeform and The Sporting Life.

I was fourteen. Now, thirty-four years later, I come back to it and it is just as dazzling as I remember. But the perspective of age has changed it all. I had quite forgotten Eliot’s sly jokes, so naughty that they make me laugh out loud. (I don’t recall laughing at the time, I was far too earnest.) I now understand, after only a moment, exactly why Dorothea marries Mr Casaubon. At the time, stupidly romantic, I could not understand one word of that. Those moles. Now, I see why her ardent soul could not bear all those well-meaning relations and friends and neighbours, why poor Sir James with his ridiculous puppy and his good-hearted cottage schemes would not do for her.

I think: how funny it is that schools gave me these books to read when I could not comprehend half of them. The summer after Middlemarch, I was reading The Knight’s Tale, L’Étranger and George Herbert. After that: Huis Clos, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Keats and Robert Lowell. I must admit I never got on with pious Mr Herbert for a solitary second, but I was all over the existentialists and convinced that I had the measure of Lowell’s knotty Nantucket poems. I was living proof of the correctness of Donald Rumsfeld (not a phrase I ever thought I would write): a perfect festival of unknown unknowns. I had no idea how little I knew.

When I am not wigging out about mortality, or getting cross with myself for making schoolgirl errors when I really do know better, I like age. As I motor towards fifty, I think that there are lots of lovely things I have now which I did not then. My vanity has almost entirely disappeared. I have a ten-second moment of despair when I see pictures of myself looking bonkers, with terrible hair and no chin. (I never had much of a jawline, and it is running away now, gravity taking its toll.) But most of the time, I don’t really care what I look like. I have a uniform, suitable for doing horses and writing books, and I stay at a reasonable weight so that I do not burden the red mare’s delicate back. I brush up for the races, because it’s the least those fine thoroughbreds deserve, but that’s it.

I know that, apart from actual life and actual death, things really are not a matter of life or death. I was thinking this morning, as I happily walked my horse out into the long meadow, the view reminiscent of the green grass of Wyoming, of the broken hearts of my twenties, when I really believed that not being loved by a certain gentleman meant my life was over. I don’t do that any more. I keep emotions saved up, until I see the whites of their eyes. At this age, there is death and loss and sickness, a great generation going, brilliant minds fading. I save my sorrows for those.

I can work out now which is Object A and which is Object B. I know that when some people seem scratchy or distant or cross, it is not always because I have done something wrong. It’s usually their stuff. (This is the technical term.) I understand that the humane thing is to leave them alone to work it out, and not make it my drama. I know too that turning everything into a drama is dull and selfish, and drains away the life force from those around you. I think I was a bit of a drama queen in my youth. I’m glad I grew out of that.

I know now, which I did not then, that not everyone sees the world in the way I do, and that is all right.

There’s so much about growing older which is a relief. There are so many circuses which are not my circuses, and so many monkeys which are not my monkeys. The ability to step away does not sound like much, but I think it’s a life-changer.

I can still twist myself into a pretzel of angst, and I don’t expect I’ll ever learn about how to deal with the Cupboard of Doom, and I still get stupidly easily hurt and take things to heart which should not be taken to heart. I’m a bit of a muddler and a bit of an obsessive and my geekiness has never left me. I can fly to vertiginous heights of enthusiasm, which means there is usually a crash afterwards. I can get out the twisty little firestarter of self-sabotage, when things are going too well, as if it’s too scary to sit with good fortune or calm seas.

But there really are a lot of things which have changed for the better since I first picked up that mighty novel. I’m writing them now because I like the idea of them, and I think they should be marked. Women are told so often that age is a disaster, that they become invisible, that the mean old menopause and the hideous wrinkles and the sagging skin tone will render them sad and sexless and altogether negligible. I think this is a big fat lie. I say: bugger the menopause. I say: be as visible as you want to be. I say: those wrinkles, which society says you must despise and regret, are the story of every smile and every frown. Think of the brain. Think of all the things it now has in it which it did not have, when the skin was smooth and unlined. Think of the human heart, which has been beaten and battered and bruised, but which somehow survives, expanding against all the odds, which now has the love of many, many years in it, which can tell the difference between the lasting adoration and the fleeting fancy, which beats steadily on, as the years roll by.

Who needs a Grace Kelly jawline, when they have all that?

 

Today’s pictures:

Actually weren’t very good, apart from the HorseBack ones, so here is a small selection from the last few days:

Not caring about a really bad hair day:

The mare’s hair is a bit scruffy too, but she cares even less than I do:

The Younger Brother took those two last ones. Always credit the photographer. That’s another of the important things I have learnt.

The Power of Admission.

I was going to give this post the title: The Answer to Everything. Obviously, that would be crazed hyperbole, so I restrained myself. However, it’s not that far off.

Here, instead, is the Answer to Really Quite a Lot:

1. Do something foolish.

2. Hurl yourself into a defensive cringe, covered in angst.

3. Raise your head, and admit the folly.

4. Share the experience with a group of kind people.

5. Smile and smile as they all say: oh yes, I did the exact same thing.

6. Realise that everything is perfectly all right.

Everybody knows that everybody does perfectly idiotic things from time to time. Everybody forgets that everybody does those things, and so when they themselves do them, their irrational mind believes they are the only one. And that is the point when one goes into the garden to eat worms.

The power of admission is one of the great overlooked powers in life. It’s as strong as love. It’s incredibly tempting, when something horrid and stupid happens, to run away into a cross little lair, to turn in on oneself, to sit alone in a world shrunk to just you and your angst. The critical voices in your head, who are on their third Negroni and are punchy by now, are yelling that you are pointless and useless and feckless and there is no health in you. They find this hysterically funny. It’s impossible to argue with them because they are so convinced of their own rightness and they do that annoying drunk thing of moving the goalpoasts.

To use the simple declarative sentence, to say plainly this is what I did, becomes almost impossible, because everyone is surely going to laugh and point. Your folly is then compounded and shame comes storming down the outside with an unstoppable run and wins the race.

Admission is the only thing which can beat these brutal battalions. Because people really don’t laugh and point. What they do is say, kindly, ruefully, empathetically: oh yes, I did that too. At which point the sun rises, the orchestra strikes up, the bluebirds begin singing, and the world, which was dark and angry, is suddenly filled with light.

The thing is still the thing. It was folly, or silliness, or wrongness, or carelessness. But usually, it can be fixed right up, amends made, lessons learnt. The power of the thing, however, has been completely taken away by the kindness. The kindness is quite often, in this rushing age of social media, that of strangers. It can also come from one human you love. Either way, it works in spectacular fashion.

Words are important too. Yesterday, I chose my words wrongly, because I was so in the grip of the critical voices that I could not see straight. I wrote: I am an idiot. I was wrong. I’m not an idiot. I sometimes do idiotish things. (More often, perhaps, than I would like.) This is quite different. That nice shift of perspective was also what was brought about by the admission and the generous reaction.

I sometimes think the sweetest words in the English language are: me too.

Thank you. Thank you all.

 

Today’s pictures:

The hill:

The oystercatchers on the roof, singing their dear heads off:

The Younger Brother, who is off to Ireland, looking at the view of the hill from his bedroom:

The Sister, who is moving south, standing in front of her hill for the last time. I’m very sad, but I’m not making a big thing about it. Or, not too much of a big thing:

There was a lovely photograph of the Brother-In-Law too, who has generously completely forgiven me for the car fiasco, but he says he does not want to be on the internet. ‘You won’t put me on that blog?’ he says. I think guiltily of the times I have snuck in the odd close-up and shake my head. Here are the ears of the red mare instead, on our ride this morning:

And here she is, graciously standing for her photograph after the ride. She can do this for many, many minutes, untethered, only sighing a very little at the absurd antics of her human:

Trying too hard.

Author’s note: this is very long, and it is all about me. I’d love to think you might extrapolate some universal human truths, but let’s have the word with no bark on it: it’s all about me. It also features the red mare. She now has her own Facebook page so that I don’t bore you witless with her every whicker, but today she’s come galloping back to the blog. I just wanted you to know that before you started.

 

I love triers. People who try can bring me to tears. Horses who try have me in pieces. Children who try, with that wonderful, youthful sense of optimism and determination, pull on my heartstrings like nothing else.

And yet, I have lately been reminded that you can try too hard.

Of course I knew that. I don’t want you to think I am a complete booby. One of the surprises I have found as I motor through middle age is that I know much, much more than I thought I did. I got quite cocky about this for five minutes, until I realised that I have a fatal habit of forgetting all those good things I know. That’s when the gap comes between theory and practice, and I find myself falling into elephant traps and lying on my back, legs flailing in the air, thinking furiously: but I knew this.

­This week, I had a little parable about trying, from my red professor.

Since I’ve come back to horses, I’ve taught myself a whole new way of horsemanship. I’ve learnt from two great horsemen – Robert Gonzales, in life, and Warwick Schiller, on the internet. Schiller provides an amazing resource for people who want to have happy horses, easy to ride and handle. At his place in California, he takes in all kinds of horses who have problems. He’ll be presented with a 17 hand dressage horse who can do a test, but who can hardly be rugged up without freaking out. He is sent buckers and rearers and bolters, horses that can’t get on a trailer, horses so riven with separation anxiety that they can’t think straight. He’ll take the horse right back to the beginning, go through the methodical steps, find the frets and the worries, iron them out, and by the end will have a soft, responsive equine who can do everything on a loose rein with its head down. He videos this, explains exactly what he is doing, and posts it on his page as a learning tool for people all around the world.

It has been a revelation for me and the mare, and because of it I’ve never in my life been so in tune with a horse, or had a horse who is so at ease with herself.

This week, Warwick Schiller is coming to Scotland to do a clinic. The moment I heard, I booked my place, and started dreaming of the great moment when the red mare would meet the master. Yesterday, a pincer action of three disasters meant that I had to cancel. There would be no trip to St Andrews, no glorious meeting.

Part of me was very sad about this. I’d been working so hard to get the mare ready. We’d gone right back to the beginning, found all the things I was doing wrong, concentrated on fixing them. I’d upped the ante, asked her new questions, pushed her harder. I’d sat up late, rewatching all the videos, trying to figure out where I was going wrong and what I needed to improve. Each day, I went down to the field with my teeth gritted, trying like buggery, because we had to get our gold star.

I say part of me was sad, because there was another part. Another part was, and this is so odd I can hardly write it, relieved. Today, I suddenly realised that I had been going to that clinic for a lot of the wrong reasons. I’ve written, over the months, about the red mare and her wonders on the Warwick Schiller forum, so that she is well known there, carving out her tiny piece of internet fame. I think that I secretly believed that I would arrive in St Andrews and say: Look, look, here is the famous Red Mare, IN REAL LIFE. And everyone would gasp at her beauty, and gaze in awe at all the clever things she can do, and give her a round of applause and a laurel wreath.

In fact, they would have seen a perfectly ordinary thoroughbred, with a kind white face, who is, I have to admit, a little bit short in front, and who sometimes slings her head and rushes her trot. In my eyes, she is the embodiment of a dream; to anyone else, she is just a sweet chestnut mare, with all the flaws that horses are heir to. She has not travelled for a long time, and the journey might have unsettled her. She would have had to stay in a strange stable surrounded by unknown horses, leaving her charge and field-mate behind. She could have wigged out a bit, even after all the good training we have done. She might, whisper it, not have shown her best self. Where would I be then?

Of course I wanted to learn, and of course I hoped that the last knotty problems would be instantly unpicked by those knowledgeable eyes. But I am slightly ashamed to say that much of the driving impetus was an awful sort of showing off. My competitive spirit, which I pretend is not there but which is always yelling, in the back of my mind, give me a cup, had hijacked the whole thing and was running riot. That’s why I was going down to the field every morning with gritted teeth.

Gritted teeth are not always bad. Gritted teeth got AP McCoy to twenty jockey championships. They got my old dad back in the Grand National after severe doctors had said he should never sit on a horse again. They got me, in younger days, round huge cross country courses, to Peterborough and Windsor, through complicated dressage tests.

But gritted teeth are no good to the mare. In this new horsemanship, she has been taught the ways of softness. When I grit my teeth, she thinks there are mountain lions in the woods, and her lovely, floating stride breaks up and her neck tenses and she fears that the storm is coming. She does not know I am absurdly trying to prove myself and improve myself; she just feels the tension and dreads the worst.

As a result of all this damn trying, we had lost that elusive trot. We’d had it, so beautifully that it made me weep tears of joy, and then it went again. The basis of this method is that you should be able to walk, trot and canter on a loose rein. You are teaching your horse self-carriage. It’s one of the things I love. Instead of giving it information every two seconds, you ask the polite question and then leave it alone. You are not saying a bit slower, a bit faster, a bit more collected. You just say go, and then sit as still as Ruby Walsh on Douvan in the Punchestown sunshine. You trust the horse, because you have taught the horse to trust itself. This requires a steady mental state. Trying too hard wrecks all that work at a stroke.

This morning, in a curious combination of regret, sorrow, wistfulness, release and relief, we went for a ride. We were no longer getting ready to show the teacher what we could do; we were just being together. I let the mare wander where she would, which is a basic teaching exercise I do every morning. She struck out towards the darkest woods, the ones that use to make her snort and rear. She was in her most intrepid explorer mode. She ignored the little Paint, who was doing her own private rodeo in the field alongside. At one point, the Paint and Stanley the Dog were staging an antic series of barrel races. The mare did not so much as flick an ear. I had no hand on her rein; she was brave and free.

By the entrance to the terrifying woods, there is a high granite wall, very typical of this part of the world. In it, there is a door. The door is exactly like that in The Secret Garden, one of the books of my childhood which most touched my heart. The mare walked up to the door and put her head through it and looked into the garden beyond. I leant down along her neck so I could see what she was seeing. There was a slope of grass, the young trees we planted for my late father, when the family gathered, including his sister, his nephew and niece, his children and grandchildren, and the blue hills beyond.

The good horse and I stood, for many minutes, looking through the secret door. It felt symbolic of something profound, I was not sure what. I said, out loud, in her ear: ‘Thank you for this.’

We were not going to do any work today, because we are no longer preparing for a great occasion. But I thought, damn it, let’s just give that trot a go, just for the hell of it. And there it was, as if it had been waiting for me all along. She was as poised as an ambassadress, as delicate as a duchess, as gentle and relaxed as an old Labrador. We did it on a loose rein; we did it with no reins at all. I put my hands out into the cool Scottish air, and she bent her beautiful, mighty body round in a curving circle, found her own lovely rhythm, beat her own delightful drum.

I had stopped trying, and that was when she gave me my greatest gift.

So, after all that, the thing which was a bit of a disaster turned out to be the best thing which could have happened. I needed a lesson in not letting that wild competitive drive get rancid and wrong. I needed to be reminded that I don’t actually require a cup. I needed to know that sometimes I can crash everything when I grit those absurd teeth too hard. I had forgotten all these things, and circumstance and this generous horse came along and set me right.

Trying is good. I try to write better prose. I try to do my work at HorseBack well. I try to be a good friend and a reasonably decent human. I try to be polite and see others’ points of view. I try not to judge in a mean way, and I try not to bitch and moan. I try for stoicism and balance.

With this ravishing mare, I try to follow the example of those two dazzling horsemen, not because it will make her a supreme champion, but because she will be happy in her skin and have a human on whom she can rely. It also means I am less likely to fall off and bruise these old bones. That’s a good kind of trying. It’s trying for the right reasons.

And it means that we get a glimpse of the view, through that low door in the wall.

 

Here she is, after all that loveliness, having a happy breakfast with her questing friend. The Paint always hopes that if she stands there with her Oliver Twist face on, she might get a go. She never does. The red mare knows perfectly well that she’s had her own breakfast, and this orphans in the snow look is pure theatre:

The more you give, the more you get.

Everyone says, looking at the sky, British stoicism in their voices: ‘The snow is coming.’ It’s hard to believe as I stand in the warm field with my dozy mare. The sun on her back has sent her into a dream of pleasure and everything about her is soft and relaxed. All is good in her world.

I run up to HorseBack to do my work there. One of the lovely things it has taught me is not to be afraid of people with damaged bodies. I used to have an embarrassed terror of what I once called disability. I didn’t know where to look or how to act. I tried so hard to be normal that I fell into a high-voiced phoniness, overcompensating to beat the band. Now I’m so used to it that I genuinely don’t notice it. The prosthetic is registered, and after that I just see the person. There is no voice in my head shouting, at crazed Basil Fawlty pitch: ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T MENTION THE LEG.’

Volunteering for a charity can sound terribly pious and po-faced. Oh, oh, look at me, doing good. In fact, I think it’s one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done. I do get the gift of feeling I’m putting some tiny thing into the world, but the gift is much, much more than that. My mind, which I had not even realised was closed, has been cranked wide open. I have listened to stories and heard perspectives and seen attitudes which I would never have known otherwise. I may now converse with any human missing any part of the anatomy without falling into a sinkhole of terror that I shall say the wrong thing. These people turned me authentic where I was once artificial. That is one of the greatest presents you can give to a human being.

I think a lot about language. Language is one of my great loves, my enduring delights. I never lose my awe and wonder at what words can do. They are worm-holers, time-travellers, scene-setters. Tiny black scratches on a page can take you to 19^th century Russia or 25^th century Mars. They may transport the reader into other minds and other worlds. Those scratches may cause water to come out of human eyes, or provoke laughter to make the stomach ache. They can enlighten, soothe, galvanise, reassure. The act of writing itself can release anger, cure angst, calm a harried mind. Write it down, write it down, sing my better angels. These little words I play with every day make a record of my love for my dear red mare, so that when she is only a memory I shall still have her with me. She will always exist, in the language of Shakespeare and Milton.

Because of going to HorseBack every week, I don’t use the word disability. It’s not out of some mealy-mouthed political correctness. It’s because I have come to realise that it is not the right word. Language matters. These men and women are the least disabled people I have ever met. They might have been blown to smithereens by roadside bombs, but they can still climb Ben Nevis in the rain and the murk. They work with horses and make unrepeatable jokes and carry themselves with no trace of self-pity. They do bear scars in their bodies and in their minds which mean that they may struggle with things which other people might take for granted. Just because I do not focus on their wounds does not mean that I do not appreciate the challenges they face. But disability is not the word. I prefer to describe the thing as it is. There is a limb missing; the fingers are gone; the Post-Traumatic Stress includes hyper-vigilance and agoraphobia. I don’t think that one word, that single label, is insulting or demeaning or belittling; it just doesn’t tell the thing like it is. The choice is my own, and it means something to me. It’s a decision, not a judgement.

Oddly enough, as I was writing this the telephone rang. It was a nice man called Pete from Action Aid. Apparently I have been supporting Action Aid for twenty-two years. Pete, who sounded as if he was not born when I set up my first direct debit, had amazement in his voice. (I had a rueful moment of thinking the astonishment was that anyone could be that old.)

I remember the impulse as if it were yesterday. All my life, I have carried the hum of First World guilt in my ears. I shall never quite understand why I had the luck to be born in a liberal democracy with running water and a temperate climate and a roof over my head. In a shameless manner, I thought that if I whacked some money each month to a good cause then I might ease that guilt. It was not the most salutary reason in the world, but, anyway, Pete seemed pleased.

He was ringing to tell me about disaster prevention and told me of a family in Vietman who had spent three days on the roof of their house as the flood waters rose. Could I spare another two pounds a month so that they could have an early warning system? Yes, I could. How can I say no to two pounds when I am about to shell out fifty times that for some hay for my horse?

HorseBack, however, has nothing to do with assuaging guilt. There is no consciousness of others not having the fortune I have. It’s part of my life. It’s hard work. Far from feeling saintly, I sometimes get scratchy and manic and even grumpy about the demands on my time, even though it’s entirely my own choice to do it. It’s an eye-opener, a mind-expander, a weekly perspective police. I don’t feel like a good person when I am there; I am far too busy being interested and laughing my head off and listening to things I should never hear anywhere else. I canter about and make bad jokes (‘Are we playing innuendo bingo?’ I hollered, at one point this morning) and frown as I try to get a good angle with the camera and give my favourite horses a good scratch and catch up with the returning veterans.

I suppose I sometimes feel useful, part of something bigger than my own small self, but mostly I feel galvanised. There is a reason that people say there is a paradox in volunteering. The paradox is this: the more you give, the more you get. It’s that damn simple. And I love it.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack UK course, this morning. All these veterans have gone through life-changing injury, physical and mental. They have seen things no human eye should see. Until they came here, most of them had never even met a horse. And here they are:

At one point, I started faffing around with angles, trying to get arty. These pictures are not technical successes, because the focus is all wrong, but I rather love them anyway:

Back in her quiet, sunny field, the duchess is enjoying her Thunderbrook’s. This is a top-quality feed which I have shipped in at vast expense, by couriers who believe I live in the Highlands, however often I tell them I don’t, so that they can charge me an extra premium. I don’t care. Only the best is good enough for the red mare:

The peace is coming off her in waves. She is my own little Zen mistress and she was at her most Zennish today:

Meanwhile, Stan the Man is HUNTING. Again, not the best picture I ever took but I like it because you can see the determination. He is a very busy dog. Some days, he can’t even stop to say hello because he has jobs to finish: