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:

I am grateful.

I’ve been reading about gratitude lately. Gratitude sounds a bit hippy-dippy. It may be practised by those rather maddening earnest types who are always buggering off and finding themselves in foreign parts. To the phlegmatic, stoical, faintly sceptical British spirit the whole thing may seem faintly embarrassing.

But it has science to go with it, and I love a bit of science. There are empirical proofs. If one is grateful for what one has instead of cross about what one does not, everything is better.

Apparently, gratitude has even more teeth if one looks at a thing about which one would normally complain and finds some good in it. The most usual example is: when it is raining, don’t complain about the rain, feel happy you have an umbrella.

I am far too cussed for fads, and disdain bandwagons. (Watch them rumbling past with everyone leaping on the back. What a shower.) On the other hand, I have a natural feeling for gratitude. I’m always looking at the trees and thanking nature for the green leaves. I can find acute joy in a piece of moss. I sometimes grow fraught about my job, and the hoops through which I must jump. Then I remember that I have opposable thumbs, so that I can type.

Today, I’ve been looking through my ridiculous photographic archive and trying desperately to organise it. Because I am a most amateur but very enthusiastic photographer, and I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, I tend to take an inordinate amount of photographs in the hope of capturing one golden moment. (Sometimes, to my amazement, this does happen, due to sheer dumb luck.) Usually, I get a bit grumpy about the bulging files and the poor over-loaded computer. Today, instead of growing scratchy, I thought: gratitude.

And there they were, all the things for which I am grateful. There was Scotland, and the trees, and Stanley the Dog, looking crazily handsome. There was the sublime red mare and my family and the people I love. There was the sea and the sky and the hills.

There was, in a wider sense, the fact that I have eyes to see, a good camera that works, the time to stand and stare. There was the lovely good fortune which means I may record all these weeks and days, all the things which mean so much to me.

So, I’m still walking in the rain and riding in the rain and standing in the rain. I’ve gone a bit hippy-dippy. I’m not going to go and find myself, because really. But I am damn grateful.

 

Today’s pictures:

From that good old archive; a little gratitude list of their very own:

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:

In search of the middle ground.

The dancing mare could not quite make history. Treve did not win the Arc. Golden Horn did, with a glorious, imperious burst of power, under a ride so audacious that I need new words for audacious. (At one point, Frankie Dettori appeared to be taking his colt for a nice little wander in the Bois de Boulogne.)

Even though I love and admire Golden Horn, and screamed my head off when he won the Derby, I felt desperate for the mare. There is something about great thoroughbred mares which removes all my sense and wrings my heart.

She doesn’t care that she could only finish fourth. She’s gone home to the people she loves, had a good night’s sleep (this was reported by the racing press, in exactly those words), will be let down and then go to stud and have lots of babies. She’ll stay with the Heads, who brought her into the world, and when she is too old to breed she will have the happiest of retirements in the beautiful French countryside. Not too shabby.

It made me think about proportion, and wanting things. I think one should want things. Lassitude and indifference are not very taking traits. Passion is good, surely? But if one wants things too much, and they don’t happen, there is the terrible psychological crash. This is ridiculous, and exhausting. My instinctive liberal mind searches, as always, for the bloody, buggery middle ground. Yes, yes, you can want things, you can have passion, but not too much. Save your strong feelings until you see the whites of their eyes. Don’t fritter away pointless emotion on impossible objects. Can I teach myself this, as I teach myself to be a better human for my horse, so that she feels settled and happy and safe? (Too much jangly human emotion can make an intelligent thoroughbred nervy and uncertain.)

My passions are faintly ridiculous. I don’t really mind that. I’m used to being faintly ridiculous. I think though that I would like a little proportion, before I run out of iron tonic. I used to think all or nothing was rather marvellous. Run at life, as fast as you can. Now I wonder. My poor old mental legs sometimes feel the ache. Perhaps I could learn to be sensible. Perhaps not.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from yesterday. A lot of family sweetness and happiness, in the dazzling Scottish sun:

The big question I cannot answer; the small things I understand.

A sharp frost, the first of the autumn, was followed by wild sunshine and brilliant blue skies. I rode my mare early and then she and her friend, the little Paint filly, were loaded into the trailer and taken to the vet to have their teeth done. Going to the vet sounds a workaday chore, but here it involves driving up a long slope and looking out over one of the prettiest views for twenty miles. The valley opens like a book and the line of high wooded hills rolls away to the horizon. I always mean to take my camera and I always forget.

The mares were immaculate and the teeth were done and we put them back into their quiet field and then I raced to my desk and wrote 2089 words and did my HorseBack work. I had a heartening message from the wife of one of our veterans and she allowed me to reproduce it on the Facebook page. (For any new readers, HorseBack UK is a charity which uses horses to help veterans with life-changing injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I write their Facebook page for them. It’s the first voluntary job I’ve ever done, and it brings me weekly joy.)

I think quite a lot about the wives and husbands, the children and parents, the ones in the background, quietly getting on with it, bravely facing their new reality. For all that we concentrate on the veterans themselves, it is never just one person who comes back changed from a hot war. The ripples spread outwards, from a dark pool. This morning, it gave me more satisfaction than I can say to give those families a voice.

Across the Atlantic, another horror is spreading, another shooting, another pointless set of deaths. There are new families who will never be the same, who have to look their own hideous reality in the eye and somehow take its measure. I don’t know how they do it; I don’t know how those smashed hearts go on beating.

I don’t write much here about the big world happenings. I used to, in the beginning, because I am interested in geo-politics and the news. I have twenty-seven opinions on every current event. I’m not sure whether it is my age, or whether it is the internet and the rolling twenty-four hour news which never sleeps, the websites, the vocal commentariat, the Twitter feeders, but it appears, to my bashed old mind, that the world is growing more inexplicable and sometimes mad. Children should not be dying weekly in the greatest superpower the world has ever seen. (Forty-five school shootings this year alone. Forty-five. If that had happened in Britain, people would be marching in the streets; teachers would go on strike; politicians would resign; Whitehall would be thronged with protest banners; the BBC would talk of nothing else.) America, it seems, can do everything except stop its own citizens from being gunned down. It is a place which fascinates me. It is a land of great gifts, rich culture, dazzling talents, astonishing achievements, glittering hopes and dreams. It gave us jazz and put a man on the moon. It has more Nobel Prizes than the next ten countries combined. And yet, for all its brilliance, it cannot do this one thing. It cannot keep its people safe.

A huge question like that – why? why? – defeats me. The madness and the pointlessness, the sorrow and the pity, beat me, in the end, which is why the blog turned back to the small, ordinary things. The known things, the consoling things, the things the bruised heart and the battered mind can take in and understand: these are the things of which I write.

So, as this shattering news broke over a wounded people, I gentled my horse, and watched my dog race over the ground softened with dew, and looked at the hills, and did something for the veterans, and wrote a book, and made some strong coffee and clung on, by my fingernails. As life gets bigger, the small things grow more important, in a wry paradox. If I can hold on to the small things, the turning earth shall not tip me off.

 

Today’s pictures:

This is why.

My work at HorseBack is almost always done in a hurry. I dash up, canter about taking pictures, make some bad jokes, shout with laughter, wave and grin at everyone, yell ‘GOOD WORK’ a lot, give my favourite horses a good rub on the neck, make some more bad jokes, and gallop away again, in a rush to get back to my desk and knuckle down to my day job.

Today, there was such a great group, and some very welcome visitors, and people I really wanted to talk to, so I thought bugger it, the day job can wait. As I was chatting to one veteran, and admiring Red, my favourite HorseBack mare, I suddenly found one of the great stories being told.

I learnt, early on, to keep very, very still when I am privileged with this kind of information. I’ve heard stories which were so extreme that I could not write them. I’ve been taken to the limits of human endurance, and, sometimes, when the sights and sounds and horrors are unrolled before me, I have a visceral reaction, as if all the atoms in my body are so outraged that they must rearrange themselves. It’s like a kind of existential pins and needles.

I stand back, taking the pressure off, just as I would with a horse, listen hard, and keep my face utterly straight. I do not exclaim or interrupt. I do not let my eyebrows shoot up into my hairline or allow my mouth to fall open. Most importantly of all, I do not do the pity face. These men and women do not want pity. I’m not even sure they want empathy. I think, although nobody has said this in so many words, that they need a witness. Sometimes, I am lucky enough to be chosen as that witness.

In conversation, these veterans are, variously: courageous, wise, angry, philosophical, fatalistic, stoical, and wounded. They are always funny, with the gallows humour that runs through the forces like a black seam of obsidian. They are searingly honest, utterly straightforward, and almost painfully authentic. Many of them have seen things which no human eye should have to see.

Today’s story started off bad, got worse, grew ridiculously awful, and went back to bad.

I stood still and listened. I employed a bit of heavy irony. (Irony is much, much better than sympathy.) I asked a couple of questions. I am very sparing with my questions, as I don’t want to be intrusive. I did not cry, although that would have been a correct reaction. I did what they do. I laughed. I hoped there was human companionship in that laugh.

Then, the gentleman smiled, and looked at his horse. The mare was dozing gently behind him, her head by his shoulder. She knows nothing of Afghan or Iraq or Bosnia, where he had been. She knows nothing of the roaring torrents of post-traumatic stress, or what too much hot war does to the human brain. She knows only this man in front of her, as he is in that moment. She likes him. They have forged a fast and deep bond. This does not always happen, but, in an amazing number of cases, it does.

The veteran gentled her and tenderly pulled her forelock. She blinked at him, at peace in her world. The little atoms in my body moved and shifted. ‘She does not judge me,’ said the veteran.

Some people don’t get it about horses. They regard with bemusement my love and admiration for the gentle, brave, beautiful creatures. Perhaps they ask themselves why anyone should be filled with admiration for a half-ton flight animal. I can talk until my ears fall off about honesty, and courage, and generosity, and heart, and it may mean nothing.

This, this is why. That moment: that wounded human, that fine mare.
 
Today’s pictures:

‘We are a partnership,’ said the veteran. Yes, they are.



My own fine partner:



I did say one thing, as I was listening to that story. When the gentleman got to the part about the horse, and how she made him feel, I burst out, because I could not help myself: ‘They do bring out your best self. They require your best self.’ He nodded, as if this was perfectly obvious. I have too many flaws to count, but when I am with my red mare I hear the wings of my better angels flapping.

The Rat Man.

Today, the rat man came.

Thank goodness for the rat man, or I don’t think I’d ever have written this blog again.

I went away on holiday, to the enchanted island of Colonsay, and the sun shone and I saw old and dear friends and Stanley the Dog charmed everyone and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

Then I came home and various things were a bit fraught, so I thought I’d leave the blog for a bit until life settled down.

This was fatal. I started thinking about the blog. The first rule of the blog is NEVER THINK ABOUT THE BLOG.

The moment you start thinking about it, the internal conversation goes something like this:

I’ve got to come back with a bang, because the Dear Readers have been waiting. At which point, the Critical Voices, who are already on their second martini, laugh with so much derision that their hats fall off. Waiting for what? they scoff, wondering whether they should move on to a Gibson.

But, continues the dialogue, the world is getting madder and madder and sadder and sadder and there are huge tragedies unfolding and what price my absurd, tiny life and my flimsy, flaky thoughts in the face of all that? Can I really talk about love and trees and Stan the Man and the perfect cowgirl canter the red mare did this morning, in the face of outrage?

It should have wisdom, says a determined voice, suddenly. That’s the ticket. Rework the whole concept. Every day, give them one paragraph of wisdom. You’ve lived life, you’ve been round the block, you know a thing or two. Be useful.

But I have no wisdom, wails the hopeless voice, who is feeling a bit beleaguered and does not really know how anything works.

The Critical Voices at this stage have gone into a huddle and are bitching about something called a Kardashian.

Might as well give it all up, says the hopeless voice. Nobody needs to know what you think about the world. You have two jobs and three secret projects and a horse and a dog and family obligations. There is no time. There’s no point doing a daily tap dance, saying look at me, look at me.

Then the rat man came. I’d just finished working the mare and she was dozing outside the feed shed. Stan was sunbathing at her feet. The rat man and I talked about rats, and voles, and working dogs, and pointers, and evolutionary biology, and inter-species communication, and trust, and anthropomorphism. If I did not have work to do, I’d be talking to the rat man still. If I had the choice between talking to a rat man or a philosopher, I’d take the rat man every day and twice on Sundays.

And then, I came home and wrote this. Some odd Occam’s Razor had come and slashed its way through the nonsense.

It’s just a thing. Some people are disdainful of it, and that is their right. It hides in its little, poor, obscure corner of the internet, and nobody is obliged to read it. It does not need a reason, or a justification, or a validation. Any daily writing is good discipline; a free exercise of prose helps my fingers and my brain and my muscle memory. It is exactly what it is, no more and no less.

I bless that rat man, and all who sail in him.

 

Today’s pictures:

A small collection from the last couple of weeks:

Queen’s View, near my house:

Stan the Man:

The Younger Brother and me:

The beat of my heart, who, through all my recent grumps and groans, has remained magnificent. I need new words for magnificent:

Rare photograph of all four brothers and sisters together:

Stanley on holiday:

Colonsay: