A ray of light

After the horror of Woolwich, something remarkable happened. This week, as part of my work for HorseBack UK, I’ve been following the progress of the Banchory Academy Across Scotland Challenge. The young teenagers have been cycling, walking and canoeing their way across Scotland to raise money for the charity. They are accompanied by a HorseBack team, including two double amputees, who did the canoeing and the biking, using specially modified bicycles. Yesterday afternoon, as the news of Woolwich still disfigured the airways, I went out to meet this group as they charged down the Deeside Way in frigid temperatures and driving rain.

It was like a great big blast of joy. They were so filled with energy and purpose that you could sense it coming off them like smoke.

Later, they settled for the night in an old walled garden not far from where I live. I went up to talk to them and found a group of the funniest, brightest, most articulate, larkishly antic teenagers I’ve ever met. I was tired after what I thought was a long week. They had just travelled about two hundred miles under their own steam, and they were still making jokes, striking poses, teasing each other, and laughing like drains. Although they are doing a fabulous thing, raising thousands of pounds for HorseBack, there was nothing pi or do-goodish about them. They were just exceptionally nice people; authentic, charming, interesting, absolutely themselves.

As I worked at my desk, and the dusk fell, I heard the odd shriek and laugh as they cycled past my window. Even after thirty miles of hard effort that day, in snow and sleet and rain and absolutely bloody freezing temperatures, their energy was undimmed and they still wanted to explore.

This morning, I rode the mare up to see them. They duly admired her, which of course won my heart even more, if such a thing were possible. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘she’s beautiful.’ She was slightly freaked out, as she had never seen twenty-three mountain bikes gathered together before, but they did not mind. They are all so positive that they seemed to see the best in everything.

HorseBack’s Scott Meenagh, who has seen quite a lot in his life, having been blown up in Afghanistan, said that they restored his faith. All the adults with them were bowled over. Faces shone with admiration and pride. I can’t begin to express what a tonic they were. They were like a shining beacon of goodness and trueness in a sometimes dark world.

Regular readers will know that one of the things that drives me nuts is the lazy idea that infects the media like a nasty virus. The Young People, this tired old assumption goes, are only good for texting and gaming and traducing the English language with their LOLZ and other bizarre acronyms. I’ve never thought this was true. Occasionally, I have a little rant about it. I’ve always believed in The Young People, and now this mighty cohort have come along and proved my point for me. I had to restrain myself from hugging them. (I did fling my arms round most of the HorseBack grown-ups, who stood it manfully.)

I got on with my day, but my mind was filled with these delightful young people. Every so often, I broke out smiling, just at the thought of them. I admit, in my great-auntish way, I feel quite teary about witnessing that amount of sheer loveliness. It was as if they were sent to remind me of all the fine, bright things, at a moment when the news was filled with bleakness.

 

Today’s pictures:

The brilliant adventurers, setting off this morning:

Scott, on his special bike:

Having fun last night with Jura the Puppy:

Out from the beech avenue they come:

Posing for group pictures. The diagonal arms are a thing:

My last sight of them:

And one more of the special bike. Scott rides horses as well. Nothing stops him:

Meanwhile, back in the garden, everything has suddenly turned green:

Stanley the Dog, with his socking great stick:

Red the Glorious, a little dopey after having her teeth done by the very clever vet:

The hill:

Glimpses of light; or, one for the Dog People

Rather madly, I decide to sit up all night and watch the election. I have worked out secretly in my mind that it will be an Obama landslide, and I must see if my psephological chops are still sharp.

Actually, this is mostly sheer wish thinking. And partly predicated on my inability to understand how anyone would vote for a man who once strapped his dog on the roof of his car and drove it to Canada.
I slept badly the night before, and am in the blank exhaustion stage of grief, so at first I do not enjoy it as much as I normally would. I start to get a little testy with Chuck Todd and his implements. Brian Williams cheers me up a bit; there is something about his wry intelligence which makes me feel better about almost everything.

Then, something lovely happens. Obama begins to win. He wins because the Americans, whom doughty Britons occasionally think of as rather antic and flighty where we are prosaic, who do not have our obsession with the Blitz spirit or the insane Dunkirk pride, are queuing round the block. Egregious partisans in some states are performing blatant voter suppression, but the voters will not be suppressed.

All the pundits except for Rachel Maddow have been muttering knowingly about the enthusiasm gap. Obama’s base, apparently, has no taste for the fight any more. The feckless young people will not pitch up; the African Americans are demoralised. It is the tea partiers and small staters and the pro-lifers who have the bit between their teeth. Peggy Noonan even writes a hilariously wrong column about how the President seems joyless, how his campaign is ‘small and sad and lost’.

In the end, the African American voters come out in greater numbers than ever before. Somebody says it is because they are so furious at the attempts to deny them. (Voter suppression gets targeted at non-white neighbourhoods, apparently, although my mind has to stretch and twang to comprehend that someone would do something so wicked.) The Latinos come out, and the Asians. The college-educated women, which is another vital demographic, marches out in droves, dreaming of Nellie Bly and the Pankhursts.

Suddenly, there are pictures of happy, smiling crowds. People are still queuing in some states, even though the result is now certain. Some of them waited for eight hours. I love them. Someone on the BBC jokes: if we had to wait ten minutes to vote, we would turn round and go home and have a nice cup of tea.

My Twitterstream explodes with joy. I send incoherent messages to people I have never met, congratulating them on the sweep of the battleground states. Mitt Romney ran an ugly campaign, and I am really pleased ugliness did not have its day. I imagine Paul Ryan consoling himself with a nice comforting copy of Atlas Shrugged.

At half past four, light-headed with tiredness, I go to bed. I cast a glance at the Pigeon’s bed, beside my desk. In 2008, she and her sister sat up with me all night. I say, out loud, to the empty space: ‘You would have been quite bored’. She liked the racing; not so keen on the politics. No barking and cartoon jumping for Cuyahoga County.

This morning, the air is light and mild, and the sun shines, and I spend two hours with the equines. I work the mare; I have a long conversation with the Horse Talker, which soothes me. I think about the election again; I realise that I am really, really delighted.

The World Traveller comes out and I tell her the result. She had missed the news. She smiles all over her face. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I am so glad.’ I too am glad. The very fact that there can be gladness feels like a bit of a sign. It is the first thing I have been properly glad about since Friday. I tried to watch the racing, but even the sight of the imperious Silviniaco Conti putting down his marker for a glittering future could not lift my heavy heart. Now, for the first time, there is a glimmer of lightness.

That’s the thing I have to look out for, the first gleam of light. I find that I have to concentrate very hard on learning loss, all over again. What do I do? Is it chicken soup or small acts of self-kindness or hot baths? Is it writing it down, giving sorrow words so the burdened heart will not break?

It is, I think most of all, looking for the light. I stare, stare, stare until the first watery ray is glimpsed. Then, I know I shall be able to bash on. It’s quite odd that the election of a man in a faraway country should prove to be that first glimmer. But it felt like a triumph of the better angels.

It’s not that everything shall now magically change, and Congress shall do good work, and perfect policies shall fall into place, and everyone shall have jobs. The political situation is much as it was. But there was something profoundly moving about those hopeful queues of voters; I am glad most of all that their stalwart endurance was rewarded.

My friend the Expatriate calls, from Santa Monica. ‘I think that Barack Obama is a proper person,’ she says. ‘I’ve been watching him and his wife, and I think they actually are really good people.’ I think so too. Good people don’t always make perfect politicians, but it is oddly reassuring sometimes to see that virtue is given its due. Obama could have taken his glittering Harvard degree and made millions in the corporate sector. Instead, he went to work with deprived communities on the south side of Chicago. That is a mark of character.

Plus, he is really nice to his dog.

As my sleep-deprived brain grows more whimsical, and I search hopelessly for my final sentence, I think perhaps that is why I am quite so pleased. It was a triumph for the Dog People. It was one for The Pigeon.
 
Today’s pictures:

Morning light:

















The happy herd:







They really were amazingly contented today. They have settled so well, and relaxed into themselves, and that too is a ray of light:



I imagine if the old girl were still here she would be saying – you didn’t really think they would elect a man called Mittens?:



No, no, not they. They remember Seamus the Dog:



The very thought makes me do my Lady Bracknell face:



Forgive me. No sleep really does make for inexcusable whimsy.

The hill, very blue today:

Of goats and mountains and climbs

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

One of the things I like about the internet is that it is very levelling. There are no ivory towers out there in the prairies of cyberspace. (My only fear about this is that the levelling can go too far, and lead to abandonment of decorum, so instead of saying, ‘I’m not sure I quite agree with you,’ people scream ‘die, bitch, die’.) If ever I should get a bit above myself, I only have to look at the search terms which bring people to my blog.

In my hubristic mind, these might be Universal Verity, or Most Beautiful Canine in Existence. In reality, they include Goat Climbing Mountain.

I should be thinking about serious things like the morality of banking bonuses, and the tottering world economy, and whether poor Andy Murray shall ever stop being shouted at for not winning a grand slam. (I’m not very interested in tennis, but I find the Murray phenomenon fascinating. He works incredibly hard and is very talented; he is at the top of a highly competitive game; the three men who routinely beat him are titans; yet he seems unable to shake off the label of dour Scottish loser.) I should be contemplating big serious questions about government cuts and fiscal austerity and what is going on with Hungary and the IMF.

Instead, I am slightly obsessed by the whole goat climbing mountain thing. I don’t think I have ever actually written about goats. I may have reported on the half-joke plan that The Sister and I hatched in case the entire economy does, finally, implode. We are going to grow vegetables and keep goats. You see how cunning and finely conceived our plan is. Ha. The crazed bankers and know-nothing economists can do their worst; we shall have the goats to keep us warm. However, none of this involves mountains, or, in fact, climbing. How the Google gets to me from the clambering goats is a mystery.

I also love the idea of people sitting down and bashing ‘goat climbing mountain’ into a search engine. It’s either a Dadaist form of poetry, or someone is doing espionage. Goat climbing mountain could be Moscow Rules. Just as I imagine discreet operatives going up to each other in St James’s Park, which as everyone knows is where all the spooks meet in their lunch break, and saying ‘The geese are flying south for winter’, so I could see that ‘goat climbing mountain’ is clearly code for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The other, even more perplexing search is: girl fawn Maddow. This is code so abstruse that even Bletchley Park might be left wondering. I do write about Rachel Maddow quite a lot. I love her. The love might, I suppose, sometimes pitch over into fawning. But I do not think, at 44 years and 362 days old, I could be described as a girl, even by the most unreconstructed patriarch.

I don’t know. Perhaps Rachel Maddow secretly has a thing for fawns. The most brilliant thing about this odd search is that now, every time I watch the coruscating Maddow show, I shall think of baby deer. Which is probably a very good antidote to the latest loon thing Newt Gingrich is saying.

The sun is fading now, and the last of the frost lies still and white on the cold grass. It’s been a long week. I have, as is so often the case, not done quite enough work to satisfy. I bash on and bash on and think: come on, come on, not there yet. More, more, I think.

I have thought a lot about my father. In yesterday’s life post, I wanted to say: remember your dead well. Then I thought: that is a stupid thing to say, of course we all remember our dead. I don’t need to write that down. But then I wondered whether there is a part of mourning where one shies away from thinking of the departed. There is a childish, magical part of the brain that wonders: if I do not think about them, perhaps they will not really be gone.

On my desk, I have a photograph of the first man who ever believed in me as a writer. Since, at the time, I was writing books so bad that I need to invent a new word for execrable to describe them, his belief was a real leap of faith. He was not a relation; he had no skin in the game. He was an artist, who, for some reason, picked me up, and encouraged me. I was twenty. I knew nothing. But he treated me as if I were Virginia Woolf.

He died, much too young, from AIDS, many years ago. Every day, I look at his picture, and feel gratitude, and wonder what he would make of it all. I remember him well.

One day, I think, I shall be able to look at a picture of my dad in the same way, with glad remembrance, rather than a tearing in the heart.

 

I know it may be rather vulgar to keep harping on about this, and it could sound like the worst kind of pandering, but the Dear Readers have really been magnificent this week. And now I know I have the goat mountain Maddow fawn people on my side, I believe I can do anything.

 

Pictures of the day.

It was another afternoon of astonishing light. Most of these pictures are of the hills and trees I can see when I look due south. I hope they are not too same old, same old. But there is something about the Scottish light, seen at that angle, that is so magical I can't quite get over it:

This one is completely out of focus. But these are two of my favourite little birches, and I rather love the blurred effect, as if they are in a painting:

The old iron fence. I can't get enough of that, either:

The beech avenue, from a low angle. (More attractive crouching from me, as The Pigeon looks on in bemusement.):

This happy face is because I bought her a new ball. I know I'm always banging on about how all you need are free sticks, but sometimes I like to get her an actual bought object to have fun with:

Here she is, with the bright orange thing in her mouth, doing what I used to call 'bottom in the air', but which I know now from the Dear Readers is actually a serious yoga pose called 'downward facing dog':

As my friend The Playwright says: do admit.

The hill:

Now I really am ready for the weekend. Happy Friday.