The inner bitch comes out to play.

I tend to show the nicer side of myself on this blog. I have a rule about being very, very nice on the internet generally, as I have a theory that you get back what you put in. The wilder shores of the web can be very scary indeed, especially for women. One minute you are suggesting that it would be charming if Jane Austen were on a banknote, the next you are being told by complete strangers that you are an evil cunt who must die. I try to avoid ad hominem generally, as it’s cheap, but I especially avoid it on the internet. I don’t want to get forest fires burning. Besides, I really do sometimes cry actual tears when people are mean to me online, so it is only right that I do not indulge in meanness myself.

Instead, you get my better angels, my best self. Look, here I am being sweet with my beloved mare, and cooking my old mum her breakfast, and loving the nieces.

However, this blog does strive for authenticity, and I have to admit that I do have an inner bitch. I try and keep her on a tight leash, but sometimes she comes out and does the fandango.

I’m trying to make plans for a short trip south and some of them are proving complex. I have had to be butch and say no to a couple of suggestions. One of them was to go to a restaurant in west London which is fashionable and adored by the people who go there. I hate it. In the old days, I would have gritted my teeth and gone, but I only go to London once every eighteen months, and then for two or three days, and my life is whistling past my ears. I don’t want to go to some awful trendy place where everyone knows what this season’s ‘must-have’ is, as I pick out the hay from my hair; I don’t want to sit in a room with people who think that a shoe which is not a Louboutin is a sad excuse for footwear.

I had to write an apologetic email, to a very old friend. The truth is, I wrote, that I loathe the place. It’s those beady women, I wrote, who haven’t touched a carb since 1997 and who stare at me as I eat the bread.

As the regular readers know, I do strive to avoid labels, reductive thinking, and tribalism. I am a feminist, and I believe in the sisterhood, and that men and women should be treated equally and not viewed as objects. I try to avoid assumptions.

And there I am, bitching up a group of women of whom I know nothing, in a most reductive and unsisterly manner.

The inner bitch is laughing her head off. Serves them right, she says, waving her Sobranie in the air and ordering a martini with three olives, with their fad diets and their invented food allergies and their insane obsession with being thin. When they lie on their deathbeds, cackles the inner bitch, will they say: ‘Thank God I never touched gluten.’ NO THEY WILL NOT.

My nice, sensible self is horrified. What did these women ever do to me? If you cut them, will they not bleed? They have hopes and dreams, night demons and moments of glad grace. They have had broken hearts and dashed ambitions and attacks of fear and angst. So what if they don’t want to eat carbohydrates? They are not polluting the groundwater or fixing the LIBOR rate or robbing old ladies of their pensions. They just want to be a size eight. Is that so wicked?

Not what Mrs Pankhurst fought for, mutters the inner bitch, who, in an entirely contradictory manner, does not let her admiration for the suffragettes stop her judging other females for not living up to her rigid standards.

But you believe in each to each, says the nice, sensible self. As long as a person does no harm, surely they must choose their own path in life? The nice self is a true liberal and does not want to corral people into boxes and only give them conditional approval if they select the right box.

Jung talked a lot about the light and the shadow. He believed that only by exploring and embracing one’s shadow side can one find the gold within. Easy for him to say. I suppose I have to look the inner bitch in the eye and get her measure, but I am quite shocked by her sometimes, on account of the fact that she does not give a bugger about all the things I think I hold dear.

Maybe I should let her out to play, every so often, in a safe space. Maybe I should stop trying to be so damn nice all the damn time, and give vent to the irrational, mean, contradictory thoughts, so that they are out in the world and lose their power.

Should I admit?

Should I tell you that I want to punch people on the nose when they use the Redundant So or the Universal We? Should I confess that the three words which make me want to throw heavy objects through windows are: ‘Welcome to Midweek.’? Should I say out loud that my inner bitch does judge people who write breaks when they mean brakes or there when they mean their or it’s when they mean its?

Probably not. You may judge me in your turn and you would have every right.

The nasty part of me is amazingly critical and judgemental. It cannot understand why so many politicians will not answer the question, or why management types speak in empty jargon, or why holy men insist that they love all of God’s creatures but cannot stomach the idea of a man marrying a man. It thinks that tottery high heels are stupid and video games are the work of the devil and reality television is asinine. For no decent reason, it gets really irritated when people say veg instead of vegetables, dangle modifiers, or refer to horses as neddies. It goes batshit insane when the default pronoun is he. (I admit, the nasty part may have a point with that one. I know that people who refer to the entire human race as ‘he’ are not bad people who adore the patriarchy and think that women should stay barefoot and pregnant, but I do think that they might consider before they ignore 50% of the world population.)

Ah, there it is. I’ve let her out. She’s tired now and she’s had one too many martinis and she’s going for a little lie-down.

I quite often say that every day can’t be Doris Day, and I pretend that I mean it. Intellectually, I understand what Jung was on about, and that the light cannot exist without the dark. I know there are good days and bad days, and that humans have good sides and bad sides. The crazy part of me does secretly wish I could be Doris Day, every day. I’d like to be kind and forgiving and not judge people in mean ways and not get irrational irritations which have no basis in fact. But it turns out that is not possible.

Bugger. The inner bitch has woken up again. She’d like to remind me that she thinks the new actor playing Tom in The Archers is really, really wooden.

Stop now. That’s quite enough of that.

 

No time for pictures today. Just this face, clearly saying – you think what???

She was a dream this morning, as soft and sweet and responsive and light as I’ve ever known her. No inner bitch for her, just an inner dream, and an outer one too. She adores the cold, crisp weather and she is all furry and happy and, for whatever reason, the high thoroughbred spirit which has animated her for the last week has gone, and been replaced by a deep, spreading peace. I can feel it coming up out of her body. When she is like this, I only have to think right and she moves right. I quietly say walk and she walks. I sit deep in the saddle and she stops. I squeeze the reins lightly and she backs. When she is like this, she feels like a miracle horse, and all between us is light and harmony, and I want to sing. Maybe she was trying to prove a point. You may have gone all bitch-tastic, she was almost certainly saying, but let me show you how a real lady behaves. Once a duchess, always a duchess, I suppose. I love her so.

The enemy of the good.

I have slightly been living, like a camel, off the hump of the triumphant visit of the red mare to the care home last week. It was such a crossing of the Rubicon in so many ways. Flushed with the happy memory, I went back to easy, slow work in the safety of our home fields, doing things at which we could not fail. I became a little shy of marring the Great Moment with any subsequent setback, as if now only the highest accomplishments were acceptable, and any ordinary, muddly imperfections would render the whole thing a phoney and a fake. (The irrational mind really is a fiend from hell sometimes.)

Perhaps because of this, we had not made a firm date to return, although it was in my mind that I wanted to, since turning my lovely girl into a proper therapy horse is the dearest wish of my heart.

This morning, the sun was gleaming and beaming in a most unScottish way. We had a lovely lope out into the hayfields and felt friendly and relaxed and in tune with each other. I am crazy busy just now, and did not think I had the time to go and see the old people today. But I decided on a whim that we would just cross the main road into the village, so that the iron bars did not harden in my soul, leaving us once again paddock-bound.

Last week was low and cloudy. Today, because of the glittering sun, there were dazzles and reflections everywhere. Glancing light on shining surfaces has been one of the red mare’s bugbears since very early days, when she could go into top-speed reverse at the mere glimpse of sun on water.

Up went the head, on came the aristocratic snorting. Something had caught her attention like a laser, and it took me a moment to work out what it was. She had seen herself, in full view, reflected in the window of the local bank. Whoa, whoa, who is THAT??? For some moments, she could not process this new apparition in any meaningful way. The ladies in the chemist were laughing their heads off.

Bugger, I said to myself. I thought it had all been going so well. We’d got everything so soft and low and lovely, and now she was high as a kite again. For a moment, I was seized with shame and a sense of crashing failure. Then I took a grip, and worked her through it. Rather madly, we went down to the tiny industrial park, where the car mechanics are, and the recycling plant and the mysterious shuttered units with secret lorries coming in and out. There, as the rattly recycling trucks trundled back and forth, with their recorded voices shouting ‘CAUTION; LORRY REVERSING’ and their beep beep beep, we worked on lateral flexion and delicate turning to left and right until her stiff neck relaxed and stretched and eased. It took fifteen minutes. The lady with magenta hair walking her dog clearly thought we were nuts in the head.

Perhaps it was a little step backwards. If you educate a horse well, it should be able to deal with almost any amount of stimuli. But before I fell entirely into the beckoning pit of shame, I reminded myself that we are still in a learning curve, and that we did work our way through it. She came back to me, and stopped snorting at the glitters and gleams and the strange people and the alarming moving vehicles. She breathed out a long sigh, and decided that the mountain lions were not, after all, going to eat her whole. She dropped her dear head, and flicked her ears back to listen to me once more, instead of blindly staring at the hills, from when the attack bears would surely arrive.

So, after all that, we went to the old people. Because settling her had taken longer than I thought, they were going in for lunch. But two enchanting ladies disdained such ordinary things as food, and came out and gazed at the mare and admired her and said hello. She stood beautifully still, and tickled their hands with her whiskers. One of the ladies was so overcome with delight that she sang a special song. ‘Tail up, horsey,’ she sang, in a light, reedy, happy voice; ‘and bring out the sunshine.’ Red dropped her head to listen, much struck. I practically burst into tears. ‘That,’ I said, staunchly, ‘is a great song.’ My lady smiled so much her ears almost fell off.

As we rode home on a loose rein, composed again, a line came into my head. ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.’ I have a suspicion it was first said by someone very wise, and possibly very famous. I don’t know where I heard it or how I know it.

It was not perfect. There was tension; there was snorting; there was some initial fear. We are progressing in so many ways, but my work here is not yet done. The progress will never be seamless and Whiggish, on a smooth upward curve. There always shall be blips and small reversals. The important thing, I think is to mark the fact that the good was so good. She was still and gentle with the two delightful women. She walked right up into a strange porch and looked in the great plate-glass window of the care home, so that those inside could smile at her. She brought joy to people who are stoically dealing with the twilight of their lives, when dignity is so easily stripped away, and mortality is starkly on show.

And once again, most generously, she left a steaming pile of dung for the roses.

 

Today’s pictures:

All hosed off and cooled down and posing graciously for her close-up:

And demonstrating her tremendous ground-tying skills:

Which is doubly remarkable when you consider that Stanley the Dog was having a hell of a rumble with his new best friend Spike:

Write it down.

One of my best beloveds once told me this story. I must allow for human misremembering and natural tendency to embellish, but I think it is true.

The Dalai Lama travels everywhere with two scribes. Presumably they are there to make sure no pearl of Lama wisdom is dropped. The great words may all be recorded, and codified, and made available to the world. One day, in skittish mood, the Dalai Lama made a rather frivolous joke. (It may even have been a slightly risqué joke. I can’t remember.) The scribes’ pens hovered over their paper, uncertainly. The Dalai Lama saw the hesitation, and said, with a mock imperative in his light, sing-song voice: ‘Write it down, write it down.’ Then he burst into peals of laughter.

That story has always stuck in my head. I love that story. I hear the words ‘write it down’ in the Dalai Lama’s voice all the time, and they make me laugh.

My own write it down is less a words of wisdom thing, and more an obsessive-compulsive thing. Life does not quite exist, until it is written on the page. It certainly makes no sense until it is mapped in words. Writing brings order, and reason, and sense. I think that is why humans love fiction. Fiction has a shape, which life does not. A good narrative has foreshadowings, and Chekhov’s gun, loaded in the first act. In life, the shot just rings out.

There was no foreshadowing to the bringing down of a commercial airliner by unruly Ukrainian separatists, using a surface-to-air missile almost certainly supplied by the Russians. There was no presentiment, as those three hundred humans boarded their flight to go on holiday, or visit family, or attend a conference about AIDS. Everything must have seemed very ordinary and usual. In the quiet Ukrainian field where the wreckage now lies, there would have been no portents.

Everyone will write that down. The pundits will write of the geo-political ramifications, and the experts will write of the ramping up of the conflict, and the armchair psychologists will attempt to get into the mind of Mr Putin. People will try to give it a shape, try to make sense of it. It has no sense. It is one of those events that is so shocking and unexpected and tragic that it goes into the realm of the meaningless. It is where words fail.

In my quiet, ordinary life, a world away from havoc and mayhem, the red mare and I have a trot in the hayfields of such lightness and grace that it makes me shout out loud. The swifts fly with us, over the green grass. As this shining moment happens, at once I think: write it down. Then I think: no, you don’t have to start making sentences in your head. Just live it. Just let it happen. Not everything has to go into paragraphs.

I get back to my desk, galvanised for a big day of work. A letter sits waiting for me. It is from an old friend. She had been going through her photograph boxes, and she had found a picture of my dad. Her mother and my father were friends from childhood, and knew each other in their dancing youth. ‘Very funny and very naughty,’ was how her mother described him, with the remembering, indulgent smile that people always use for my dear old dad.

There he was, vivid and alive, making a face, as he would have said, all the funniness and naughtiness there in the twinkle of his eyes.

‘Oh,’ I said, out loud.

I burst into tears.

Even as I wiped away the tears, the voice came back. Write it down, write it down.

There were so many things to say – the sweet thoughtfulness of the friend who sent the picture, the sudden resuscitation of the dear departed, how much I still think of my father, even three years after his death. I thought of the curious act of alchemy: when someone dies, they leave their best self behind. It is the glory days that I carry with me, in my heart, all my father’s better angels. That is the paradoxical gift of death. I remember him at his most mighty, before age and care wore him down to a shadow of his fine self. I remember the laughter and the courage.

Then, again, the other voice said: don’t start putting it into words, not yet. Let it lie. Sit with it. Let it go into your body and feel it. The writing can come later.

I think, quite often, of how easy it is to miss your life. One is so busy thinking of what must be done tomorrow, or worrying over the mistakes of yesterday, or fretting about the possible pitfalls of next month, that the present moment is entirely lost. But that moment is your life, and each one must be cherished.

I was riding a few days ago, down past the burn, with the blue hills lazing in the light. As usual, I was thinking of twenty different things. Quite often, when I ride, I am writing my book in my head, getting ready for going to the machine and typing. If I am not doing that, I am thinking of different training techniques, or what I want to do with the mare tomorrow, or what possible errors I am making. I suddenly stopped, and paid attention. The birds were singing. They were singing their dear heads off, a perfect orchestra of nature; I was in the front row of the stalls, and it was all for free. I realised I had not even heard them until that still moment, because there was so much noise in my head. Listen to the birds, I thought; don’t miss the birds.

I used to think that writing it down would capture life and mean that none of it was wasted. It was an armour against forgetting. The thing would be preserved. Now I see that if you are always writing it, shaping it, whipping it into the euphony of perfect prose, then you are in danger of letting the thing shoot past your ears. Sometimes, one just has to live it. It astonishes me that something so simple can be so hard. It should come naturally, but the antic mind is oddly afraid of letting itself go slack. Thinking can be a diversion and a defence.

I love thinking. I love words. I love thinkers, and people who can make language dance. But sometimes, sometimes, life must simply be lived.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are all about the best beloveds:

The dear old pot table, a bit scruffy this year, but still with its own loveliness:

This is the picture I saw as I opened that envelope. My kind friend is in the middle. My dad is on the left. You see what I mean about the twinkly eyes:

Red mares and life lessons.

Author’s note:

This is for the horsey ones. To the other ones I apologise and say please do come back tomorrow. It does contain some human life lessons, but it centres around the horse. It is also absurdly long. So sorry about that.

 

The kind of horsemanship I practice has many names. The one that people seem to dislike is natural horsemanship. I can see why. It is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing natural about horsemanship. You are taking a herd animal out of its native habitat, strapping a bit of another animal to it, this one dead, and asking it to perform actions it would never dream of in the wild. You carry your hands exactly where its predators sink in their claws when they strike. You stroke it in the exact place that those predators plunge in their sharp teeth, to sever the spinal cord. Just because you keep it in a field and work with it at liberty and try to mimic its lead mare does not mean any of this is natural. That is why working with a horse is so elemental and astonishing, because, mostly, it gives its consent to all this.

I think of this new horsemanship, which is in fact very old but never had a name before, as mostly practical. Sure, I get a bit misty and hippy from time to time, and think about the universe, and believe that my mare contains it in her deep eye. I like to believe that these methods have taught me to understand her and be in harmony with her. But mostly, they have a strict utility. I grew up in the old school, where the solution to most problems was hard schooling and more tack. The idea was that you got so good at riding that you would not come off when they bronced or bolted or bucked. If a horse was a rearer, it was a rearer. If it was a spooky bugger, it was a spooky bugger. If it was a bolter, it was a bolter, and you either rode it in the strongest bit you could find, or you just stuck on and prayed. There was absolutely no notion that you could change any of these behaviours. You might be able to teach a horse to settle in a race, to conserve energy, and you could brush up its jumping; you could educate a pony to go on the bridle, and make some nice transitions; but that was it.

This new school says that you can get a horse so relaxed and responsive that it will not pull, or buck, or shy, or rear, or charge off into the blue horizon. You can teach it not to barge, not to rush, not to bash into your personal space. The techniques for this are not complicated, but they require a lot of patience, consistency, thought and time. You can’t get lax or skip bits. You can’t take your frets and tensions down to the field and expect your horse not to notice. You have to be your best self, the good leader, who will keep your kind equine safe from mountain lions.

The red mare has been a bit reactive and tense in the last couple of days. She went from dozy old donkey, walking out so relaxed that I dropped the reins and the irons and just rode her with my body, to fired-up thoroughbred, snorting and staring and jumping at shadows. She even did a fabulous cartoon spook at a duck, with skittering hooves and airborne leap, something she has not done for months.

Well, I thought, she was a racehorse. Her grandfather did win the bloody Derby. I’m still riding her in a rope halter. We have not ended up halfway to Inverness. And she is a horse, after all, whatever human methods I apply to her.

There is a tremendous Australian horseman called Warwick Schiller, whose precepts I follow. There are many great horsemen and women on the internet, and I learn avidly from all of them. Some of them are no longer here, but their words and wisdom survive, in the ether. I learn from the late Ray Hunt and the Dorrances; I learn from the very much alive Buck Brannaman and Ian Leighton and Richard Maxwell and Robert Gonzales.

Schiller is particularly good, because he puts up practical videos, where one can see the ideas in action, and he also has a forum, where he patiently answers endless questions about groundwork and lateral flexion and all sorts.

On this forum, yesterday, I posted a question. Will a horse always be a horse, I asked, and have its moments of reaction to unexpected stimuli, or, if you are doing everything right, should it remain relaxed and soft and focused? I think I was looking for excuses. I think I knew the answer to my own question. I think I knew that when the tense snorting comes, it is always to do with human failing. Still, everyone was thoughtful and kind, and people wrote of the importance of building the foundations and remembering to take Square One with you wherever you go and minding your body language and getting your head straight.

Inspired by these good reminders, I took the red mare out this morning and went through all the foundational steps, one by one. I did not let anything slide. I was firm and rigorous and fair and even. I thought a lot about feel, and practised it. And I got my lovely, low, easy girl back again.

SUCCESS, I shouted in my head, like John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. Success. We were Olympians; we were Grand National winners; we were golden.

And then, fatally, I got cocky, and pushed her a little too quickly, and everything fell apart. I could not get the canter. Her stride was all broken up, her head was in the air, her neck was braced, she was rushing and pulling and not listening to me. I had envisaged a beautiful cowboy lope, and instead we had a Calgary Stampede plunge. (My old dad once rode in the Calgary Stampede. It was not his most glorious moment. ‘On for nine seconds,’ he said, laconically, afterwards; ‘and out for nine hours.’)

I was furious with myself. Fuck bugger bollocks and arse, I shouted in my head. My unbalanced horse was all over the shop. Her unbalanced human was all over the shop. Failure, I thought bitterly. Failure, failure, failure.

I took a deep breath, and went back to the beginning. We are going to be here for hours, I thought, in rage and I’ve got work to do. I counted to ten. I did the lateral flexion. I got the easy walk on a loose rein. Her ears flicked back towards me, listening again. I thought beautiful thoughts and relaxed my body and invited her into a canter, trying not to expect the awful ragged gait we had just suffered through.

And suddenly, like a miracle dropping from a fine blue sky, there it was – light as air, easy as breathing. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, out loud. The reins were loose, and I kept my hands soft, opening the door for her. She went through the door. She was carrying herself. I went with her, keeping out of her way, letting her feel the confidence of being a horse at home in her own powerful body.

We went round again to check it was not a fluke.

It was not a fluke. We were flying like the swallows which swoop over this wide green meadow. We were of the earth, the sky, the trees, the hills. There was no telling where the world began and we ended.

As we walked back, her head low, my hands off the reins, I gently scratched her withers in love and congratulation, and I thought about all the things this great professor teaches me.

There were two huge lessons. The first is: everything is my responsibility. Mares have different moods and off days and mornings when they get out of bed on the wrong side, just as humans do. But if I am doing my job well, she will be well. I can’t blame her, or her high breeding, or her previous job. I can’t blame what is going on in the world. If I am right, she is right. My absolute number one job is to let her know, at every moment I am with her, that I have what it takes to keep her safe. Actions have consequences, one of the great rules of life.

There was a small sub-lesson in this one too, which is: you have to be dogged. Never give up. Don’t let discouragement whack you round the head. Keep on until you find that lovely shining note, on which to end.

And the second lesson was how I thought about that morning. I could have taken the negative from it. The rotten part was pretty rotten. We were both at our worst, for those horrid minutes. I could have seen this as a rank failure and castigated myself and decided all the work I have done so far was for nothing and I should not be allowed to keep a gerbil, let alone a thoroughbred. Instead, I decided to take heart from the beautiful parts.

There were two steps backwards, and I shall learn from those. But there were floating, dancing, magical steps forwards, and they cannot be sullied by what came before. They existed; they shine in my memory as I write this. Nobody can take those away from us.

And perhaps my last great lesson is a very simple one, which I should really know by now, but which I need to be reminded of, often. It is: if you want something lovely and fine and effortless, you have to strive. You have to practice. You have to be rigorous. It’s exactly like writing. Gleaming prose is not sent by the language gods. It is the result of daily struggle. If I want a soft and happy and light horse, I have one great tool at my disposal. It is free, and it is available to everyone. It is the most valuable bit of kit in any horsewoman’s box. It is: time.

 

Two quick pictures, after all that ridiculous prose -

After a hose-down and a damn good roll, she moseyed over with her Minnie the Moocher face to have one last scratch before I left her:

And then a very well-deserved drink:

Oh, that face. It never fails to make my heart sing.

There is a road.

Years ago, a friend and I sat down to write a screenplay together. That was the kind of thing we did in our bold twenties, when we did not understand how the world worked and the word no had little meaning for us. He was an actor and I was a novelist and we would write a brilliant film and make our fortunes and Working Title would be banging down our doors for more. That was the plan.

Of course the thing went absolutely nowhere, but we had a blast doing it, and we mostly sat in his tiny upstairs room in Peckham and laughed and laughed and laughed. I adored him, and still do, even though I now mostly see him on actual television. In the process, we invented lots of catchphrases and in-jokes, the origin of which I cannot remember. For some forgotten reason, the phrase ‘there is no road’ reduced us to hysterics. We repeated it to each other in sonorous voices and fell off our chairs. There must have been a context which made it funny, but I can’t recall it. Anyway, the line stuck in my head, and I can still hear it now, as if it were yesterday instead of twenty-five years ago.

Sometimes, there is no road is not so funny. Sometimes, I feel like I have run out of road, or crashed off it, or can’t find it in the dark. Once, I drove through Glenshee in a sudden snowstorm, and the road did literally disappear before my eyes. I at last realised what those odd metal poles were for. When everything is white, you have to navigate from pole to pole, and pray the engine does not seize up.

Three years ago, I lost the road. There were things beyond my control which induced a catastrophic career crash. I did not talk about it much or write about it here, because I didn’t want to whinge or complain or be a bore. It happens to everyone, one way or another. I was not special. It was emotionally and professionally difficult, and I had to grit my damn teeth and bugger on like I’d never buggered before.

That was what all the secret projects were about. I had to come back. I had to do something else. I had to produce. I was out of contract and on spec, almost as if I were starting all over again. The only advantage I had was that I now knew how to carry a tune. I could write a decent sentence at least; I knew how to craft a paragraph. But still, a whole book carried its old challenges. I’m fairly good at the prose side of things, but structure and tension and narrative and pace are as hard as they ever were.

On I bashed, hoping, hoping, fearing, dreading. What if it were all for nothing? What if it were no good? What if this new road was a mere figment?

I just spoke to my agent. Good, good, good. Both of the secret projects are a go. Bloody Thunderbirds are go. I now appear to be writing two books which she thinks are viable entities that may one day exist in the world. I cannot express to you what this feels like. It is terrifying and galvanising and liberating and almost unbelievable. (At least, I think, as I write these words, I have not grown jaded and blasé with age.) I have to work like a crazy person to my new deadline of the 15^th September, and then, perhaps, with a little luck and the light coming in the right direction there may be a contract, and I shall be back.

There is a road.

Light and shade; or in which I witter on about the blindingly obvious.

Life is so curious. Up and down it goes, round the houses. There is a thing that people say – are you a happy person? Or an optimistic person, or a cynical person, or on and on with the single adjectives. I think that there are underlying character traits; of course there are. I tend to see the best in things, I believe in acts of will (teeth gritted, dander up); I am cussed, dogged, emotional and more sanguine than jaded.

But I think that the idea that one is a certain type of human is a little misleading. Even the happiest person will feel grief or regret in the face of sorrow; it would be absurd to do anything else. I begin to believe that life is a matter of moments. There is joy in one hour, and fret in the next, and melancholy in the one after that.

This is a new theory that has just wandered into my mazy brain, and I always like a new theory, so I write this on the hoof, my notions inchoate and incomplete. But it makes me think of the raging arguments about social networks – Twitter is evil, Facebook is crass. It’s the same mistake, almost a category error. Some people on the internet are ghastly, just as some people (despite my enduring faith in human nature) are catastrophic in life. They behave in a manner which is rude or boorish or bigoted or cruel. There is a possibility that they may comport themselves slightly better at cocktail parties than they do when protected by the curtain of anonymity which the theatre of the web provides, but they are still do what they do, to greater or lesser degrees. 

So although I like to think of myself as a fairly cheerful person, I don’t think one can necessarily categorise oneself into happy or optimistic or whichever box is beckoning. What I do think is that retaining the capacity for joy is the most enduring thing.

There is a thing which happens to horses, because of course I must bring everything back to equines, when they have been overwhelmed by life. They shut down. You see it mostly in riding school ponies, or horses who have been overworked in a discipline which does not suit their character. They’ll go through the motions, but their eyes have a dead blankness in them. That’s the aspect I think that humans too must be wary of. One can’t be joyful all the time, unless one is on strong medication; it would be idiotic. But being open to the sorrows and the joys is perhaps the key.

Sometimes I feel a bit peculiar when I can mourn one moment and celebrate the next; there is a skittering sense of guilt, as if I may be callous or unfeeling. There is an old lefty voice in my head, from the black and white days of my youth, which says: how can you laugh when the world is so oppressed? I think, now I am older and more bashed about, with those clean, sure edges worn off by time, that one must laugh when the world is so oppressed. Wandering about in a cloud of baleful despair because of all the misery that exists in the dark places does not shed light, but only deepens the umbrous veil.

So, yesterday, I was amidst the shadows, and today I walk out into the light. The sun came out, literally and metaphorically. I wrote 1798 words of book, I felt delight as I watched my mare take her ease in the morning grass, actual real-life humans made me smile, virtual online friends brought me gladness. There is some interesting racing on, and I shall watch it and bet on it and shout for my thoroughbred darlings, at Leopardstown and Yarmouth and Sandown. And tomorrow, I shall start all over again.

Up and down it goes. And round those dear old houses.

 

Today’s pictures:

Her Ladyship was very happy this morning, out at liberty in the wild spaces where the good grass lives:

As was the dear little American Paint filly, who was allowed to graze off the rope for the first time:

Stanley the Dog was delighted on account of HIS MOST EXCELLENT STICK:

And Myfanwy the Pony was preening with pride as she was given a show pony groom:

Congratulating Red after a lovely, bouncing canter through the high grass:

One of the things that made me smile the most today was that the Older Niece put up a whole lot of pictures of the family weekend. You know that I said there were actual humans playing the actual maracas? Well, I am completely busted, because I was in fact one of them:

The Brothers were lost in merriment:

As were The Sister and The Younger Niece:

Moment of still as The Older Niece plays her haunting guitar:

And then, of course, there was Scottish dancing the next day on the lawn:

I very rarely put up recognisable pictures of the family on this blog. I’ve got a weird privacy thing. It is this which makes me give everyone special blog names, even the animals. Red’s name is not really Red. Although, for some odd reason, Stanley is actually called Stanley. But these are all on Facebook, so they exist in the world, and they are so sweet in their simple happiness that I wanted to show them to you. We are not always like The Waltons. We bicker and groan and get scratchy with each other, as all families do. But this particular past weekend was of a shining loveliness, and everyone was in harmony, and I want to mark it. Remembrance again, I suppose.

Today’s hill appears to have a HORSE LOOKING AT IT. You see with Red the Younger Niece’s friend, who had to sell her own horse when she went to university, so now, in the holidays, she comes and rides mine. They are having a ball together:

As I read this through I think: goodness, that was a little exercise in stating the bleeding obvious. But it was what I was contemplating at the time, so I’m not going to go back and change it. And I suppose that obvious is not the very worst thing one can be. And, and, part of the point of this blog is that you get me warts and all. It’s not Look Ma, no hands. It’s not shiny and impervious. It’s one ordinary life, with the Scottish hills, and the love and trees, with the mare and the dog and the family and the rotten time management and the good and bad word counts and the incapacity to tidy the office and the sudden terrible weather and the days when my brain does not work, and the moments of glad grace. I get a little baffled by those glossy magazine lives. I want people to nod their heads and say: oh yes, I know that. And nobody does that when there are no warts.

Or something.

Stopping now. Really am.

Finger hovers over the publish button. Should I write something better, cleverer, less rambling and ambling? No. Bugger it. The Dear Readers will understand.

The seas of the internet continue stormy. But there are shining shafts of light.

I have, as usual, yet another secret project. I am always starting secret projects and then getting distracted and letting them lapse. This morning, I write 1079 words of this one and wonder whether I shall stick with it. It is a long-term project, and I love it, but I am not certain if it will come to anything. Still, some imperative drives me on, and I blindly obey.

Then I must turn to the other work of the day, attempt to get my house in order as the family begins to gather for the highland games, and do some particularly knotty and rather dispiriting admin. I hate admin because I am very bad at it, and it reminds me keenly of my own glaring shortcomings. (Why, why, why can’t I be one of the Organised People?)

In the midst of all this, the internet still throws up its outrages. A writer I follow is being pestered by a nasty Twitter troll; not violent or abusive, but unkind and persistent. The writer, not surprisingly, feels sad and beleaguered. Hannah Bettss writes a measured and sane response to the whole Caroline Criado-Perez saga, and expands it to encompass the amount of abuse that many female writers get when they venture online. Beneath the piece, in the comments section, on the august Telegraph, that elegant old lady of Fleet Street, one man writes that ‘Speaking for myself I abhor the notion of violence towards women, but that doesn't change the fact that I wish, most of the time, that they'd just shut the hell up. Women talk too much. They always have, and they probably always will.’ Another instructs that feminists should lock themselves up with their dildos. To the Telegraph’s credit, this comment was later moderated, and the dildo part removed.

Oh dear, I thought, demoralised. All my vain beliefs in the goodness and kindness of strangers were tottering and rocking under a wave of general crossness and intemperance.

And then, an enchanting thing happened. There is a woman I got to know online who works for a big and ancient and storied organisation. I had the pleasure of meeting her in real life this spring, and I follow her both in her professional capacity (she organises, very brilliantly, the entire online life of her important organisation) and in her personal incarnation on Twitter. We share a love of thoroughbreds and racing, and it proves a delightful bond.

Today, she put up a particularly enchanting picture on Facebook which made me smile through all my fraught stressiness. I sent a little comment, saying how much it had cheered me. And she replied that she had been thinking of me when she posted, and had hoped this might be the effect.

In the rush and dash of the worldwide web, this is a fleeting act of kindness. It would not make headlines or put a dent in the furious rows which are currently raging about online life. But to me, it was a shaft of light and reason and goodness and sanity in a mad world. I WAS NOT WRONG. Look, there, there, is the good heart, the thoughtful pause in a busy day, the moment of blazing generosity. This is the lifebelt which keeps me afloat on a stormy sea.

I’m not saying the sea is not stormy. I’m not so Pollyanna-ish as all that. I may cling to a kind of defiant naivety, but I am not an idiot. What I do say is that the lifebelts are there, the small boats, the brave little fleets that sail out into the teeth of a gale. And there are enough of them to make a difference.

 

The fraughtness continues, and the time management does not improve, so no time for the camera today. Just one picture, especially dedicated to my kind online friend. You know who you are. And a picture of my duchess, with her goofy face on, reaching over the fence to get the tips of the lush long grass is my best thank you.

Oh, that face is saying: the absolute, sheer, absurd DELICIOUSNESS of the long green grass.

 

And one more thought before I go. Sometimes, in the clamour of the internet, one may feel shy to say something nice, or complimentary, or plain encouraging. The person does not need to hear from me, you may think. I often do. I am oddly bashful about offering words of kindness. Perhaps it is the British in me. Perhaps I am afraid they may come across as mildly patronising even. Oh, well done, pat on the head, blah blah.

But you know what I think? Risk it. Say the thing. If in doubt, write the kindness. Put up the picture of a sweet foal for your friend who loves foals, even if half the rest of your more urban followers will think you an idiot. (I did this yesterday. I know my friend in Brooklyn will have been rolling his eyes. But my friend in Norfolk was in transports.)

Because the only way to counter the mean voices is not to challenge them directly – they will shout back at you even louder and call you names, because their bitterness and misery is too deeply rooted – but to lift your own voice in generosity. It’s like a good choir belting out show tunes to drown out the sound of death metal. If there are enough determined singers, then Oh What a Beautiful Morning wins.

And that is my thought for the day.

Well, that, and: fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

Love, hate and Twitter. Or, the good and bad of the internet.

Yesterday, someone called me a pompous, sanctimonious arse.

I was ill for three days; that is why there has been radio silence. There was a fairly ordinary state of health one moment, and then – hit all over with hammers. It’s that kind of thing when you can hardly move or speak, just groan. It made me think of how I take health for granted. I always say of course, of course it’s the most precious thing, but I’m not sure I really stop to appreciate the actual truth of that. When your entire body hurts and you can’t move, nothing is worth anything. You could have a cellar full of rubies downstairs, and it would not matter a damn. I thought of all those people who struggle with chronic pain every day of their lives, and felt very small and very grateful.

Anyway, it’s a Sunday, so I’m going to tell you a rambling story. Yesterday, I was a bit better, but still very tottery, so I lay in bed with my swimmy head and Stanley the Dog gazing at me with his best Florence Nightingale eyes, and watched the racing. I still get rather grumpy with Channel 4 for aspects of their coverage – they have the maddening habit of putting banging, non-specific music over all their montages and even across Clare Balding saying interesting things about the history of Ascot, almost drowning out her accomplished words – but I do appreciate that they allow me to watch the racing live on their website. (I have no television in the bedroom.) It was good racing and even though my eyeballs felt like boiled sweets I was enjoying it.

A mighty German horse called Novellist absolutely hosed up in the big race of the day, under the great Johnny Murtagh, and, because it is that time of year, all thoughts turned to the Arc.

Twitter is fascinating in its sociological and cultural make-up. Quite unexpectedly, the racing community has adopted it wholesale, and you will find everyone there from jockeys to betting shop managers to clerks of the course to work riders. One of my favourite Twitter friends turns out to be the head of Coral, which I find rather grand. It’s clever too; he is so nice that I now bet with Coral as well as with William Hill, which is my default account.

So, immediately after the race, where the classy French horse, Cirrus des Aigles, underperformed, and the German horse smashed the track record, a great post-mortem broke out. One gentleman got very shouty and I suddenly could not deal with it, in my weakened state. Instead of sensibly just unfollowing him, I announced it.

This is the danger of social media. It’s in its infancy, and the rules and mores and small etiquettes are still being worked out. Also, I find that when I am in a Twitter storm, which happens usually during sporting events, I often type before I think. I get into a zone, and everything goes public. Some of my kind followers find this faintly diverting, but sometimes it is dangerous.

I did not mention the gentleman by name. I just wrote something like: ‘Am unfollowing cross people. Too weak.’

The cross people clearly knew who they were. Back came the reply: ‘Good riddance.’ Hm, I thought, mazily. Ungracious. I pondered what to do. He is a stranger, and I generally do not have conversations with him; the online ones who have the power to hurt are those with whom one has struck up a relationship. I was not wounded, but perhaps my pride, or something, was a little dented. Foolishly, I wrote another tweet. It went something like: ‘Don’t take it personally, cross people. Festivals of crossness must not be stopped. Just not my thing. Each to each.’

I admit, this was a bit passive-aggressive. The rational part of me knows that some people find a bit of expressed fury marvellously cathartic and invigorating. I believe ardently that speech must not be shut down. On a purely subjective level though, I really do hate it. I do wish that everyone was polite and minded their Ps and Qs. So I was being a little disingenuous. If I had been entirely honest, I would have said: oh, for God’s sake, Cross Person, stop being so grumpy and shouty and rude. I was especially narked because he was shouting at another racing person whom I rather like, and for not much reason.

And that was when he got really cross. ‘You are a pompous sanctimonious arse,’ he wrote.

Well, I thought, that’s that. I went back to the racing, and felt happy as clever, canny Sir Mark Prescott, one of most idiosyncratic characters in the whole of racing, had a quickfire double, with two tremendous, doughty campaigners, Big Thunder and Alcaeus, both of whom are on an unstoppable winning streak. I had them in doubles and trebles and a fivefold accumulator, and I won a shed-load of money, even with my viral load, and I felt that that would show the cross person.

But it’s slightly scratched away at me ever since. I was not hurt, because, as I have discovered online, you need to have built up a degree of intimacy for a sudden attack to hit the target. I am vulnerable on the blog, and on my Facebook page, but not to random Tweeters. On the other hand, there was a part of me that really did want to punish that rude person for being so disobliging and intemperate. I wanted to smack him back and hang him out to dry, even though I knew that would be ridiculous, and the only thing to do was gently move on.

Just as I was examining all these feelings, I came, rather late, to the saga of the Jane Austen hate club. I don’t know if you have followed this story. A woman called Caroline Criado-Perez started a campaign to get dear Jane on the British banknotes, and succeeded, and all was lovely, until she started getting a vicious, concerted set of tweets, some of them containing rape threats.

This put my little spat in perspective. I at once went over to sign a petition for Twitter to put up a Report Abuse button, so that these kind of haters can be dealt with. This felt meaningful and pointful, and I forgot my own tiny pinprick.

The whole thing made me think again about the nature of life online. I choose to regard the internet as a benign place, and treat it as such. Most of my blogs and tweets and Facebook posts are positive; I try to resist the temptation to let my inner bitch come out and dance. I feel I should confine her to the privacy of my own room. Unless Channel 4 Racing drives me to a pitch of distraction, which I admit it sometimes does, I attempt to emphasise the positive and skip over the negative.

In particular, when writing racing tweets, I have a very strict rule not to criticise jockeys, even if they do make a hash of a race, because I grew up with a jockey and I know damn well that even the most brilliant will have an off moment, run into traffic, misjudge the pace, and that they will be far too busy criticising themselves to have any need for outside help. Besides, I suspect that the armchair jocks have absolutely no idea what it must be like to have to make split-second decisions whilst going at forty miles an hour on half a ton of youthful thoroughbred, perched on a saddle the size of a postage stamp.

Generally, I find that I get back what I put in. At the very same time the cross man was calling me names, another lovely gent, with whom I have bonded over our mutual love of lurchers, was sending messages of ineffable funniness and sweetness. The good and bad were marching there together, and I chose to let the good win.

But I am perhaps a little naive, even wilfully so. As the blameless Caroline Criado-Perez found, you can do something which seems utterly ordinary and uncontroversial, and suddenly insane people are threatening to violate your very body.

As always, I’m never quite sure what to make of all this. I shall bash on in my hopeful view of the online world, because 90% of it is charming and funny and illuminating and generous and kind. I get glimpses of other lives, radically different from my own. I get sudden belly laughs from complete strangers when I am feeling low. People I shall never meet ask after Stanley the Dog. Properly useful information is shared. There really is wit, and quite often wisdom too.

There are moving collective outpourings, such as the very touching concern for St Nicholas Abbey, as he recovers from a life-threatening injury and two complicated surgeries. He is a great horse, not much known to the general public, but hugely beloved by racing aficionados, and the hope for his welfare touches my heart.

If the price I pay for this is the occasional sanctimonious arse, I think I may count myself lucky.

As for the real, vicious haters, the ones who attack women from behind the craven cloak of anonymity, the interesting thing about them is they do seem far outnumbered. The majority has risen up against them, pointed the finger and said no. They may never go away. We shall never know what private miseries and bitternesses drive them to their own twisted outpourings. But I do know this: they shall not prevail.

 

Today’s pictures:

Pouring with rain outside and still too tottery for pictures, so here are some quick beloveds:

Stanley the Dog does not give a bugger about the internet, BECAUSE HE HAS A GREAT BIG STICK:

And now he is going to look for another one. You can’t keep a good dog down:

And Red the Mare, after our last lovely ride, thinks only of the green, green grass:

Musing on light and shade. Or, the good parts and the bad parts, and all points in between.

Happy Independence day to all the dear American readers. It is also the happy birthday of my beloved Older Niece. So it is a day of jubilee all round.

Sometimes, as you may have noticed, I sit down to write this with hardly a thought in my head. Because I have taken on idiot amounts of work and have a horse and a pony and a dog to look after, my days are an endless parade of Not Enough Time. As a result, the blog has morphed into a series of small snapshots: this is my small life.

It once was a place where I could muse on the great matters of the day. I could parade my feminism and my politics and my old bleeding liberal heart. I liked doing that, and I liked the Dear Readers joining in the debate. It was like a little Mrs Merton all of its own.

There is no space for that now. The Today programme beams into my room each morning, and as my brain charges up with all the things it has to do, it takes in shards of news – horrors in Syria, the raging arguments over leaks and government surveillance, the oddness that is happening in Texas, the Where’s Waldo life of Edward Snowden. I contemplate these things in brief snatches and then gallop on to my immediate life, which has to be lived.

As I drive down the rutted HorseBack drive after my morning visit, looking up at the blue hills, where weather is swishing back and forth, veering between hard rain and bright sun, I think suddenly of the blog, and what it is all for, and what effects it may have. On my Twitter timeline, which I glance at quickly before settling to work, someone has put up a link with the words ‘Lifestyle envy’ on it. I resist the word lifestyle; I like to think that we humans have lives, not styles.

But there is something about the internet which does encourage a lifestyle. People put up little snatches of their existence – an amusing picture here, a paragraph of achievement there, a lovely view, a sweet canine. They generally show the good parts. I suspect that most people want to live well, and now in the age of the online life, they want to show that they live well. And sometimes this does lead to envy. I occasionally feel a bit of a pang when I see a perfect paradise of paddock and barn, or an ex-racehorse covered in rosettes, or a woman who has conquered the dizzy heights of chic. (This last makes me look ruefully down at my blackened hands and muddy jeans; dirt is a constant when you work with horses.)

I do tend to tell you the Good Stuff. I wail sometimes about a fraught day, or the moments when my heart aches for the Dear Departed. Mostly though, I say: see, here is a magical moment with my mare, or this is my great word count, or this is the kind thing some kind person said. You will notice I no longer boast of my cooking skills or my garden; both of those have rather gone by the wayside as my time has contracted. I am more likely to eat a ham sandwich than some intricate oriental dish, and have let the garden find its own way, so it has taken on a wild aspect, everything seeding itself where it will.

I think: is this bogus, or is this a charming little bit of light relief? Humans, after all, as TS said so wisely, cannot bear very much reality. You do not want to hear my daily frets and moans; much better to see the handsome face of Stanley the Dog and hear of the latest triumph of Red the brilliant Mare.

On the other hand, I scent the whiff of whitewash. Am I guilty of presenting a lifestyle, rather than a life? Middle age is filled with the rocky stones of reality. The Old People are going. (Another of the Good Old Men left us on Sunday.) I worry about all my responsibilities, wish I were more organised, lash myself to get more things done.

Despite the good word counts, I sometimes feel this book is just spinning its wheels. I wish that my poor mum was not in pain most of the time. She is brave and stoical, but it is a hard thing to have a body that hurts.

I struggle with the brutal fact of mortality, which is something I think pretty much everyone is up against at this time of life. My sleep patterns are sometimes erratic; I get scratchy and over-tired. In the wider sense, I worry about bigotries and hatreds and stupid tribal rivalries. My old inner hippy comes out and I wish everyone could just accept that love is love, and humans are humans, and there is more that unites us than divides us.

I have no answers to this question of how much dark should balance the light. I am just musing out loud. Perhaps the silver lining aspect of the internet is a good thing, not a phoney. I do smile when I see the delightful pictures of service dogs or wild places I will never visit or baby elephants that pop up on my Facebook timeline. Perhaps all this is not whitewash against reality, but a useful corrective, a reminder that in all the small daily frets and tensions that infect even the luckiest life, and the big global injustices and horrors out in the wider world, there is also goodness and beauty and small, potent acts of kindness.

Perhaps it is a fine thing to be in the presence of my old stalwarts, love and trees, literally and metaphorically. I genuinely don’t know.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack morning:

Even though I was in a rush as usual, I stopped and spent ten minutes with this girl. She is one of my favourites, sweet and solid and kind and earthy. We stood together for a while and had a damn good chat, and she walked with me round the paddock, and I felt my raging mind calm and the centre hold. There is an astonishing thing about horses; all the existential doubts and fears fall away when I am with them. They are so authentic, so wonderfully anchored in the moment. They are like little four-legged yogis:

This dear mare is about to foal at any moment. All fingers are crossed for her:

Home:

The girls and Stanley the Dog having a good graze in our little makeshift arena before their afternoon’s work:

Red was astonishing today. In the blinding sun, which cast light and shade, with the wind up, she walked, step by delicate step, over a billowing tarpaulin, backed, again one step at a time, moving the very foot to which I pointed, through a narrow L made of rails, and followed me without blinking under a low makeshift arch with a flapping curtain on it. (The Remarkable Trainer is getting very imaginative in setting up her desensitising obstacle courses.)

These exercises require a huge amount of trust, accuracy and concentration. They are foundational, building confidence in us both, so that when the great day comes when we ride off to Mount Keen or some wild place, we will have no fears. They can throw anything at us.

I love the work, because it is gentle and slow and precise. I love seeing what my miracle mare can do. I love that she defies all stereotypes about thoroughbreds and mares and chestnuts. I love that her glorious lower lip wibbles throughout. I love her so much it sometimes feels as though my heart will burst.

And it has to be said that sweet Autumn the Filly was foot-perfect too, as if she had done this kind of thing all her life, when in fact she is only just four and at the beginning of her education. These clever girls give us so much joy.

And the hill, taken this morning before the sun came out, lost in the mist and murk:

Another life lesson I have not quite got the hang of.

Author’s note: this contains a rather self-serving story. Forgive me. It’s been bloody snowing all day and I am a bit weak.

 

When I am doing my faintly bogus wise woman act, I often tell people that the thing they are dreading almost never comes to pass. They (we, you, I) invent a doomsday scenario, fret over it, torture themselves with it, and then discover it has in fact only existed in the echoing halls of their own heads.

As the regulars among the Dear Readers know, I sometimes struggle with theory and practice. I am shit-hot at theory. (There is no false modesty on this blog, no sir.) I am buggery bollocks at practice.

So, for the last two weeks, I have had a most excellent doomsday scene running in my head. Each day, I added carefully to it, just to make sure that the tension ratcheted up another notch. I pretended very well that I was fine and sane and dandy. I cooked food, I worked with my horses, I made jokes, I put on my lipstick. Because, you know, I’m not living in Chad, and I have my opposable thumbs, and nobody loves a whiner.

The small scene stretched into a three act opera. I was seriously considering setting the whole thing to music.

Then, this morning, an email came, not with the end of the world, but with Good News.

It was not throw your hat in the air, hold the phone, break out the bubbles good news, but it was News, and it was Good. It was hopeful. It was a first step down a beckoning road. It probably means I shall not have to give the whole thing up and do something interesting with goats, which is my usual default position when the doomsday gets too much for me.

So here is my big bloody reminder, to myself, to those of you lovelies in the blogosphere who kindly read, to any random person who stumbles upon these pages: people are almost never thinking the bad thing you think they are thinking. They really are not.

This reminds me of a big lesson in this exact thing, which I thought I had learnt in the summer. 

My very kind landlord had rescued me and the equines from a most unsatisfactory situation and spirited us all up to his field. It was an act of pure, undilute generosity, and I was keenly aware of the debt I owed.

I was filled with slight trepidation that I should be intruding, as I roared up and down his drive and put all my kit in his steading and was generally in his space. Because we have a lot of extended family living in quite close quarters, we are all quite careful about privacy and delicacy, round here. I am very much of the good fences make good neighbours school of thought.

Still, it was very lovely for me, because I got to see the World Traveller and the small great-nieces and nephew daily, but I did wonder if the poor Landlord sometimes regretted his rash act of goodness. I was always there.

I also wondered whether he observed my endless strange groundwork with the horse, and my obsessive nature, and laughed a bit, in the privacy of his own head. It was all a bit odd, even I could see that.

Then, one day, the World Traveller told me that he was impressed.

‘By what?’ I said, my mouth hanging open in cartoon astonishment.

‘By the amount of time you spend with that mare,’ she said. ‘Morning and night, there you are, doing your work.’

‘He doesn’t think it’s all a bit nuts, and middle-aged cliché, and generally peculiar?’ I said. I had decided that this, after all, was what it all was.

She shook her head, laughing kindly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He likes it when people do things well.’

One shouldn’t really repeat compliments given to one. I am British after all; I live and breathe self-deprecation. Telling stories that reflect well on oneself is like tap-dancing with pom-poms and shouting LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME.

But I’m making an exception in this case, because it is illustrative, and I always tell my writing students that they must deal in specifics. And also, because I wanted to remind myself of the truth of the matter. Which is that half the time, when I am convinced a person is thinking a bad or a dark or a critical thing, quite often they are thinking the diametrical opposite.

There are, of course, the times when they really are thinking the gruesome, disobliging, mean thing. They may be thinking that thing with knobs on. But in that case I say: sod ’em if they can’t take a joke.

 

Today’s pictures:

Too blizzardy to take out the camera, so here are a few photographs from the last couple of days:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Autumn the Filly:

Red the Mare:

Lucky they have their stalwart new shelter:

Stanley the Snow Dog:

Hill, from slightly different angle than usual: