Good parts, bad parts. Or stoicism and loss.

I’m back in the missing stage, today. Yesterday I was in the stripped of my skin stage. The day before I was in the baffled, hit a brick wall stage. Today, all I can think is: I miss you. Oh, I miss you.

It was every day, you see. I saw my mother ever day. That’s part of the problem. It’s the good part and the bad part. The good part is that we saw each other each morning as I went in to make the breakfast. On Saturdays, I collected her Racing Post from the shop and delivered it and stayed to talk about the day’s runners. (‘Oh, Ruby,’ she would say, a wistful, maternal note in her voice, as if these were not tough men at the top of their profession. ‘Oh, AP.’) On Sundays, we all had a lie-in and I would just get a telephone call if Hurricane Fly or Annie Power had done something marvellous at Punchestown.

That’s all good part. The bad part is that this means there is a vast daily rupture; a daily absence; a daily reminder. The lovely Stepfather and I eat our eggs and doggedly talk of the news. We speak of Paris and fundamentalism and tolerance and intolerance and the lessons of history, and we pretend that there is not a great, gaping hole in the house. We do a lot of speaking. The one thing we do not say is: ‘Oh, how we miss her.’

I write about my mother and father as if they were paragons. They were not. They were as complex and flawed as all human beings. They were both dazzlingly brilliant parents and occasionally absolutely useless parents. There were times when they drove me mad, and times when I drove them mad, mostly through my shocking stubbornness.

But the interesting thing about death (at least, it is fascinating to me) is that almost at the very moment of passing from the mortal realm to whatever lies beyond all those flaws and frailties and maddening bits are burnt away, as if in some grand Phoenix-like fire. And from the ashes rise all the glorious parts, the good bits, the moments of glad grace, the idiosyncratic talents, the laughter, the kindness, the sheer otherness. (They were both quite unusual, in their different ways. I only realise this when I tell someone a story which I think perfectly normal, and see the arched eyebrows and look of astonishment.)

I like that part. I like remembering them in their glory days; I carry their very finest selves with me, locked into my heart.

I got used to being without my father. It took about two years. I still think of him every day and sometimes miss him so much that I can’t breathe, but mostly I think of him with a great, spreading fondness and keen pride and a lot of wry laughter. I’ll get used to this too, although I think it’s going to be harder and longer, because of the every day aspect. A huge chunk of the cliff of my life has crumbled into the sea and I have to make a new path.

The Stepfather, who is a gentleman of the old school, as my brother said at the wake ‘the greatest gentleman in Britain’, said a very kind thing yesterday. We were talking about stoicism. Mum had it; he has it; it is one of the virtues that is still stitched into the culture of this dear old island race. I admire it more and more as I get older. ‘I think you are very stoical,’ he said, nodding his wise head.

I felt as if someone had given me a medal. When I was young, I wanted to be charming, brilliant, eccentric, talented. I wanted glittering prizes. Now, I want to be steady and stoical.

It doesn’t mean that emotions are not felt, or honoured, but that one does not make a three act opera of them. One may stare them in the whites of their eyes, but not wallow in them. It’s a very, very fine line to walk. Sometimes I feel that even writing this is a bit of a tap dance. Look at me, with my grieving. On the other hand, sorrow must have words, and this is as good a place to put them as any. I put them here, and people may read them and understand them, or they may pass on, and I don’t have to bore poor real-world humans and frighten the horses in the street.

Also, I want to remember. When the missing stage has faded, shrunk back to its proper place, become gentled with time, I shall take down this book and slowly read. I find it curiously soothing to know that it shall all be there, waiting for me.

 

Today’s pictures:

The remarkable thing is that the one place I don’t have to be at all stoical is down in my enchanted field. The mares are so funny, affectionate, clever and beautiful, so authentic and present and real, so honest and absolutely themselves, that merely standing next to them banishes all sorrow. It is really quite odd. It’s my daily rest, my morning holiday from wearing emotion. I can’t quite work out what it is - their sheer loveliness, the purity of them, their own complete lack of sentimentality, their faintly flinty life must go on aspect. Or perhaps all of those things. Whatever it is, I am more grateful for it than I can say.

It’s gloomy today, so these pictures are from a couple of days ago, when it was sunny:

Stardust.

I now move into the vastness stage.

The vastness stage sounds like something from Glastonbury, the place where all the prog rockers go to strut their stuff.

In fact, it is the moment that I look at this thing and see the size of it. It is much, much bigger than I had suspected. I had a moment of terror last night, looking at the bigness. I thought of TS: ‘I shall show you fear in a handful of dust.’

It was not that I was in denial. I had looked reality hard in its basilisk eye. I understood very well the fact of death, the fact of absence, the space left behind. I knew all that.

But somewhere, in the back on my mind, a voice hummed from my practical self, from my Britishness, from the culture itself. The song this voice sang was very plain. It said: this happens to everyone. Everyone’s mother dies. I think I made a category error. I muddled up usual with small. It’s also to do with age. Eighty-one is a pretty good age. The great span was achieved; the race was run. There was none of that jarring tragedy of a person cut off in their prime. So there was a natural order to the thing.

It’s the paradox of death. It’s so normal. And yet, it is oceanic and odd and shocking and wrong. So, there was a moment when I looked onto the vast spaces, and felt fear.

I find it amazing that such a little person could leave such a great gap. She was tiny, like a little bird by the end.

That is what I am contemplating now. It came as a bit of a surprise. I have to stare at the vastness and accept it. I remember that I carry vastness inside me, since I, like all humans, am made of stardust. I love that fact and never cease to be astounded by it. A gentleman was talking about it on the World Service a couple of days ago. I like to think that humans came from stars and will, in a metaphorical way, go back to stars. The depth of the absence is like the depth of the universe. I go outside and look at the night sky and imagine all the Dear Departeds twinkling down on me. There’s quite a party, going on up there.

I don’t know where people go when they don’t exist in the world any more. For the moment, I’m going to put them in the sky. (Sometimes I give them to the hills; sometimes they live in the woods; sometimes they exist still for me in the wind.) Just now, they are stars, shining down from the infinite spaces. They are gentle and beautiful and merry, and a very, very long way away.

 

Today’s pictures:

I have no star pictures, so here is a hedge and a hill and a wall instead:

A day off, a day on.

Yesterday, I decided I would take a day off from grief. I was going to have a happy day. I was perfectly prepared for failure (failure and I are old, old friends) but I thought it would be interesting to see whether through sheer force of will I could give my mind and body a rest.

The amazing thing was that it worked. Two of the great-nieces came to see the horses in the morning. There was a lot of sweetness and laughter. I worked the new mare on the ground and then walked in the rain with my sister and Stanley the Dog loped beside us. I saw the dear Stepfather and watched the racing. There was one little blip when the telephone went just after Bobs Worth won at Sandown. I thought for a second it was my mother. She always called when one of the horses she loved ran a huge race.

It was not her voice on the line. I won’t get that telephone call ever again.

Then I rallied and brushed myself up and put on a jewel and went out for dinner. I sat next to a gentleman I had never met before, a kind, intelligent man with an open face. We spoke of many things. Then he mentioned a name. The name was well known to me. It was the son of a man who once saved my father’s life. I said, quite calmly, ‘Well, you know, if it were not for your friend’s father, I would not exist.’

This sounds melodramatic, but it is true. On a drunken winter’s afternoon, in a house by the water’s edge, someone rashly bet that nobody could swim across the Thames. My father did not hesitate. He leapt into the icy water and made it to the other side. The fellow who made the bet bawled that it did not count unless Dad swam back again.

I looked at the kind gentleman. ‘Dad being Dad,’ I said, ‘he plunged back in and set off at once.’

Half way across, my father got cramp and started to sink. One man had the courage to swim across and rescue him. This man, whom I remember well, a smiling, sophisticated, charming fellow, was the parent of my dinner companion’s old friend. It was before I was born. So, without that brave swimmer, I would not be typing these words.

The dining companion seemed to take this on the chin. I quietly marvelled at the odd strands which can connect complete strangers. Then we changed the subject and talked of the financial crash. ‘Iceland,’ I said. ‘A whole country was wiped out. All those fishermen who became hedge fund managers.’

The most odd thing was that on the stroke of midnight, as if I were Cinderella, the melancholy returned. It had been waiting for me, in the wings. My experiment worked. I could take a day off. The force of will could be employed. But it was only a delaying tactic.

It’s good to have a rest. It’s good to know that one can find laughter and interest among the wreckage. The thing I understand most of all is that time will come along and do its thing. What time does is allow one to remember the Dear Departed with smiles instead of tears.

Tonight, I cooked my stepfather a lovely soup, an invention of my own which was a riff on Vichyssoise. (Cauliflower and watercress instead of leek.) We talked of many, many things. We spoke of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper; we discussed Winston Churchill’s odd attitude to money; we talked of the Remembrance Day service and how the British do that kind of ceremony so very well. We did not talk of my mother. At the end, we looked at each other, and it was all there. We did not need the words. We are buggering on, and we do not make a three act opera of it.

Yesterday, I had a day off. Today, I had a day on. Sorrow and I are known companions, and grief walks beside me like an old hound. Yes, I say, I know you. There is no trick to it, no secret, no brilliant strategy. I think one has to let it in and not fight it.

Today, the nation stopped at eleven o’clock to remember all those massed ranks of the Dear Departed. I always watch that great ceremony at the Cenotaph, but this time I could not do it. I got on my fine red mare and walked her gently into the middle of our Scottish field and held my own private two minute’s silence. I heard the distant chimes of the church bells and bowed my head. She stood like a statue. I was never so glad in my life that I taught her to be still.

Today, the hundreds and thousands and millions of war dead were held in the collective memory. I thought of them, those lost who fell in numbers I can hardly imagine. And afterwards, I thought of my mother and missed my mother and mourned my mother.

I will find a safe place to put her. That is another thing that takes time. I found it for my father, and now I shall find it for her. The safe place is in that good corner of the heart where the dead still live.

Today’s picture:

From her eightieth birthday party, last year:

Love and trees.

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

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

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

I wanted to thank him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

A little rowan I planted in my own garden:

The woods I see every day:

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

The ones that keep the sheep sheltered from the wind:

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

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

The avenue that leads to my mother’s house:

And her roses:

Not not not the screw top.

Cremation people: I am sure you are good and thoughtful and kind to children and animals, but who had the meeting where it was decided that the default urn would have a screw top? No human should end up with a screw top.

And logistics people: who invented the form which asks Did the Deceased die from violence?

What the buggery bollocks were you all thinking?

I’m in the irrational anger stage. You may be able to tell.

I loathe the horrid questions and decisions and things to be done. My mother has gone. Her mortal remains mean nothing to me. She is locked now in my heart, and, in time, I shall commit her to the mountains, to Glen Muick, which is my cathedral. I’ll give her back to the earth and the land and the hills and the sky. That is my own private memorial. We shall also have a little family ceremony. But the forms, the questions, the decisions and indecisions mean nothing to me.

The poor undertaker came today, and had to try and understand when I said something of this to him. He had no language in which to reply. I could see his ordered brain searching around for an answer and coming up with: No Correct Response. He is trained in the ways of formality. There can be no you or me, only yourself and myself. I had stumped in from the horses in filthy muddy gumboots and taken them off at the door. He was immaculately dressed. I sat in front of him in odd socks, with my most battered hat on because I was having a rotten hair day.

Even my sister was slightly surprised by this. ‘What is with the hat?’ she said, before she could help herself.

‘I’m having a bad hair day,’ I said. ‘Even a bad hat is better than bad hair.’

The poor, poor undertaker. I don’t think they trained him, at undertaker school, to deal with a crazy woman in no shoes and a bonkers hat who does not care what it says on the nameplate of the coffin.

Then I went and watched a Marine work a thoroughbred, and sanity returned. The Marines really, really know about death. Especially when they have been blown up twice in Afghan. He had all the language I needed, the directness, the authenticity, the keen emotional intelligence, the absolute lack of fear in the face of mortality. For half an hour, I was soothed. I could speak words that made sense, and know I was not frightening anyone. It takes more than a distracted woman in a lunatic hat to strike fear into the heart of a hoofing Royal.

I made my sister Irish stew and we spoke of life and death and love and pain.

More kind words flew in, from all corners of the internet – email messages from old friends, lovely comments on the blog, sweet flutters of generosity on the Facebook.

On my Twitter feed, there is a young boy who recently did a charity walk for the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. I’d found him on my timeline and sent him many messages of congratulation and encouragement because I found what he was doing so inspiring. It was one of those rather touching, fleeting meetings of strangers, in the ether. This young man took the time to send words of kindness and condolence. I think he is ten. He may be eleven. Imagine doing that, at such an age.

The irrational anger will come. It’s a bit of a bastard, but death makes me cross. I have to let that one roll through me, until it is out the other side. To counter it, and balance it, I must pay attention to all the good things, however small. The stalwart friend who held my horse for the farrier this morning because I was late and had to dash off; that fine Marine; that dear young stranger on Twitter; the good companions, the ones who have been with me for over thirty years, who write to make sure I know they are thinking of me. The people who say: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do that.’ (Almost the sweetest words in the English language at times like this.)

Put in the plus column the cooking gene, so that my kitchen is now filled with soup – beetroot soup, and cauliflower soup, and my own mysterious green soup. All the people who really get it. The people who are not scared of death and strong emotion, and can be easy with those hard masters. The good Scottish weather, forecast to be dour and cloudy, which changed its mind and sent me some gentle sun. The lovely mares, in their secret field. The thoughtful neighbour, who took the time to drop in a card. All the good things. There are so many good things.

I can’t quite forgive the screw top. I expect I shall learn to let it go. I don’t care about the name plate on the coffin, but I shall do some ravishing flowers, because I do funeral flowers like nobody’s business. The flowers should not really matter either, but they do. I’ll send the old lady off with the best damn arrangement. She shall not be insulted with maidenhair fern. I find a furious consolation in that thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are of the simple, beautiful things to which I cling:

Showing up.

The Sister says: ‘Did you ever write that book about what to do when your dad and your dog die?’

My beautiful black dog died four years ago, on the night of my father’s funeral. I really, really wanted to read that book but it did not exist, so I said I would have to write it myself.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘yes, I did. It’s not called that any more. But I did write that book. It’s with the agent now.’

‘And what do you do?’ says the Sister. ‘And when your mum dies?’

‘I learnt what to do from the red mare,’ I say, not even bothering to explain this slightly odd conclusion. ‘She taught me about the ordinary virtues. For the ordinary griefs you need the ordinary virtues. Not brilliance or charm or charisma or talent, but reliability, consistency, kindness, firmness, fairness, steadiness. That’s how you train a horse, that’s why you can get on the red mare and canter about on a loose rein.’

She had just done that, in the open field. She had only ever sat on the mare once before. Red was so happy and relaxed that I had no qualms. I cantered her round the wide spaces of the set-aside first, to check that everything was all right. It was so all right that I threw my arms in the air and whooped into the low cloud and, under me, that mighty horse just kept on rolling, as collected and contained as the ambassadress to Paris. Then The Sister did it.

‘Look at you,’ I shouted. ‘Just look at the two of you.’

The Sister used to be a top show rider and side-saddle diva and some of that never quite goes away. Now she was riding the red mare cowgirl style. For half an hour, in that green field, everything was all right. There was no grief, only this horse, these humans, this landscape, this joy.

‘She learnt to do that,’ I say. ‘She did not just eat magic beans. I taught her to be relaxed and mentally balanced and to carry herself. And I did that by showing up, every day. That’s what you have to do. You have to show up. And maybe that’s what you have to do after there is death. Every day, you show up. And then it gets easier.’

This is my theory and I’m sticking to it. It’s not very clever, or sophisticated, or philosophical. Nobody will put it on a bumper sticker. It has no poetry in it. But it’s mine and I like it and it works, most of the time.

The Younger Brother says, sounding very sane and peaceful, which is not what he is famous for: ‘She is out of pain now. That’s what matters. Nothing can hurt her any more.’

‘And we,’ I say, knowing he will finish the sentence for me.

‘Keep buggering on,’ he cries.

On, on, on we bugger.

I think of the things in which I believe: the human heart, the kindness of strangers, love and trees, the small things. I think of my own private slogans: say the thing; KBO; stare at your demons in the whites of their eyes; be kind. I think of the things I adore: a funny dog, my sweet thoroughbred mares, the brave racing horses I watch every day, my family, this Scotland, these hills, my dear, dear friends. I think of the tender words which have been flying in from around the wilds of the internet and feel grateful for every one. Oh, yes – be grateful – that’s another of my rules to live by.

But perhaps most important of all: you have to show up. Not just sometimes, but every day, in the wind and the weather, through the fair and the foul, the thin and the very, very thick.

I think Mum would approve of that. As long as I said please and thank you.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are of the family, the last time we were all gathered together, this summer. We knew it would be the last time, and so it was:

And this clever, clever person, who can pull joy from sorrow with her bare hooves. I owe her so much, but never more than today:

Lester’s boots. Or, love and grief.

This morning, at 7.30, my mother died.

She has been ill for a long time. I have not written about it, for two reasons. First of all, I did not want to be a bore. (I am British. Being a bore is almost my greatest fear, apart from going mad in the night and waking up in the belief that I am Queen Marie of Roumania.) Second of all, until the final days when she was too weak to look at the internet, she used to read this blog. It cheered her up. She liked hearing about the red mare and seeing the pictures. I did not want her to tune in and find me wailing about her horrid pain.

She was in horrid pain, mostly from osteoporosis, which is an absolute bastard. Eat your calcium, I want to shout at everyone. Don’t go on stupid diets; get those bones lovely and strong.

She bore it with great stoicism, until, in the end, it was too much for her, and she went gentle into that good night. It was very peaceful, and she held my stepfather’s hand as she slipped away.

I don’t have any regrets, because I have made her breakfast every morning for the last few years, and took in her Racing Post each Saturday, and talked of Golden Horn and Treve and all the horses she loved. Sometimes, after a great race, she would ring me up and say: ‘Are you crying?’ And I would say: ‘Weeping like a mad woman.’

I’m so glad she saw Frankel, whom she adored, and Kauto Star – ‘he has the look of eagles, just like Arkle’ – and Quevega and Annie Power, her two favourite mares. ‘Oh, Annie,’ she would say, with a dying fall, as the mighty athlete powered to another soaring victory. She loved Ruby Walsh and AP and Sir Henry Cecil, whom she knew from the old days in Newmarket. ‘Henry did love his roses.’

And I do have regrets, because however much you have done, and however much has been said – ‘I love you,’ I said yesterday, as I went out of the door to see to my own mares – there is always the wish for one more question, one more story, one more checking of the facts. She was my last archivist, and now she is gone. I wanted to ask her again about the time she saw Mill Reef, and how she and Dad went to Nijinsky’s Arc (Dad lost a fortune), and what it was really like when Arkle won the Gold Cup.

Most of all, I wanted to hear for one last time the story of Lester’s Boots.

This is a story that has gone into family folklore, but I can’t tell how much has been embroidered over the years. When my mother and father were young, they were very beautiful and rather glamorous, and, on the racecourse, they met all kinds of fascinating people. Just after Lawrence of Arabia came out, they went to Newbury with Peter O’Toole. (The bit I can’t remember is how or why. What were they doing with Lawrence?) Drinks were taken. As they went to the car park, they lost O’Toole, and turned round to find him weaving towards them, a look of devilment in his eye and a suspicious lump under his coat.

As they drove away, he sat up in the back seat, fumbled under his coat, and produced a pair of riding boots. ‘Lester’s boots!!!’ he proclaimed in triumph. He had liberated them from the weighing room, a crazy prize from the champion jockey.

My father was a very naughty man indeed and never met a rule he did not break, but he had a great respect for the sanctity of the weighing room, and was horrified. My mother instructed him to get up early the next morning, and drive back to Newbury, and return the boots.

Lester’s phlegmatic valet was unmoved. Apparently they were the oldest pair of boots and almost ready for retirement. Dad’s mad dash had been almost for nothing.

Mum used to laugh and laugh when she told this story. I don’t know why, of all the stories, this is the one I cherish most. I kept meaning to ask her to tell it again, so I could get all the details right, but I never did. I’m sad about that.

I’m sad that she did not meet Scout, my dear new mare, who stood by my side for ten minutes this morning, as if knowing I needed comfort. I had a wild plan to get the bed wheeled out to the front door with Mum in it, so I could bring the kind mare up the steps to say hello. Too late for that now.

I am making tomato soup for my dear, dear stepfather, because it is his favourite. ‘I must keep your strength up,’ I say, staunchly. We had breakfast together this morning, the house unbearably quiet as my mother’s spirit has gone from it. ‘It is so strange,’ we said to each other, over and over again. I had no idea how much she filled that house until she left it. She was still there, in the bedroom, but she was gone, and the absence was shocking.

I rang the Beloved Cousin first, because she is always my first call, and she is the wisest person I know. We were together for her parents’ deaths, and it was to her house I drove, in a lovely English spring, after my father’s funeral.

I spoke to my good sister, who is on her way north. We did not need to say much. We have been through this before. We know it all.

I talked to my cherished friend, The World Traveller, who said: ‘You will come here when you need to?’ I said: ‘Yes, because the only thing that makes death bearable is love.’ Then I made some mordant joke and we both laughed, and I said: ‘There it is. I’ve made my first death joke.’ (Did I mention that I am British? There must always be laughter and irony to go along with the tears. It’s our great cultural imperative.)

The Landlord called, to say that he would go and collect my sister from the airport. ‘You are so damn clever,’ I said. ‘That is what I need just now. Practical help.’ The practical is very important in grief, because one is all at sixes and sevens, and it’s hard enough to tie one’s shoelaces, let alone drive a motor car. That was a fine act of love, I thought. He is a proper human.

I went to the shop to get tomatoes for the soup. There was a new girl at the till, very friendly and jolly. ‘How are you today?’ she said.

I gave the standard answer. ‘Not too bad, thank you.’

In my head, I shouted: my mum died.

We talked about the weather, because that is what we do.

‘I hope you have a good day,’ she said, with a blinding smile.

MY MUM DIED, the voice in my head bawled.

I nodded quietly. ‘I shall,’ I said.

It poured with rain this morning. Now the sun is coming out, thick and yellow and ancient.

My mother was brave and beautiful. She had some sad times in her life, more than I would wish, but she found great joy in the last years with the husband she loved so much, and who adored her. She went the way she wanted to, quietly, and with dignity, at home. She dreaded the hospital and the tubes and the machines. We dreaded that for her. In the end, she took it into her own hands. She did this thing, in the way she wanted. It was an act of will. She had had enough, and so she went. She is at rest.

Why do I write this now? The imperative to get to the keyboard and type was mighty. Give sorrow words, Shakespeare said. Words are my love and my solace; words, I sometimes think, are all I have.

I wanted to mark it; I wanted to pay respect. I wanted also, in a very plain and authentic way, to share it. I know that, out there in the long prairies of the internet, there are many, many people who know this grief, who will nod their heads, and say: ‘Yes, yes, I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.’ (Actually, not that many people will say exactly that, but I always come back to TS, in the end.) What I mean is there is a communion in sorrow. We all have human hearts, and those human hearts creak and break and crack. And we all put them back together, with sellotape and binder twine and hope, and keep buggering on.

I miss my mum. I am passionately, profoundly glad that she is out of that wracking pain. But I miss her. Love is love.

 

This is my favourite picture of my mother, at the races, with my sister and the younger of my two brothers. Wasn’t she fine?

In memory of Kauto Star. With love and thanks.

Kauto Star is dead.

Those are four heavy words to write. I never even met the bold beauty, yet, as so many people in racing did, I loved him as if he were my own. There are mighty horses that come along once in a generation, that have a sprinkle of stardust about them, that gallop straight to the heart. Kauto Star was such a horse.

For years, I tried to work out what it was about him that was so thrilling, so visceral, so lovable. I think it was because he had it all. He had dash and power, a supreme natural talent, and, in the early days, a rather terrifying and exhilarating recklessness. He sometimes seemed to be having a little joke with the crowd, ploughing through the last fence, miraculously finding a fifth leg, before picking himself up and storming to the line. He had a lilting exuberance, a dancing stride, a joy in him, as if he really loved his job.

But he had dour courage as well. I’ve seen him win on the bridle, as he liked, leaving good horses floundering in his wake, and I’ve seen him put his head down and scrap through the mud and the rain, straining every sinew to get his nose in front, his will to win gleaming through the gloom and the murk. He could shine like the sun, and he could fight like a tiger.

His partnership with Ruby Walsh was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in racing. They had a harmony and communion and understanding which is rare and glorious. They knew each other and they liked each other. ‘Ah,’ said Ruby, that hardened professional, on live television, to an audience of millions, ‘I love him.’

He was the beating heart of Ditcheat, ridden every day by his devoted Clifford Baker, loved and cherished and honed by a remarkable team, who kept him sound and kept him fresh and kept him loving his job. To bring any horse back, season after season, with all the physical and mental demands on those fragile legs and those sensitive thoroughbred minds, is something. To keep them winning at the highest level is an achievement beyond compare. Paul Nicholls deserves every single superlative in the book.

Kauto Star was as handsome and filled with charisma as an old school film star, and like any great presence, he knew how to please a crowd. He did it in so many different ways, whether it was becoming the first horse to regain a Gold Cup, or dancing to his fourth King George victory by an imperious distance (which means so many lengths that the officials could not be bothered to count), or, in perhaps his most moving and stirring moment, coming back when everyone had written the old boy off to win his fourth Betfair Chase at Haydock. There really was not a dry eye in the house on that grey afternoon.

He had that extra indefinable something which the great ones have, what my mother calls the look of eagles. Arkle had it, and Frankel had it, and Desert Orchid had it. Horses are flight animals, easily alarmed by noise, but when Ruby Walsh would canter Kauto down in front of the stands after a majestic victory, with shouts and cheers ringing out into the winter air, the bonny champion would lift his head and turn his intelligent eye on the roaring thousands as if knowing that it was all for him. Pride is a human word, but I think he felt it.

Very few horses go beyond the racing world. But Kauto Star, with one of those mighty, streaming leaps, the ones when he took off outside the wings and landed as far out the other side, jumped from the back pages to the national headlines. For years, he was the perfect Christmas present, soaring round Kempton as if it were his spiritual home. His relentless, rhythmic gallop rattled into the minds and hearts of many people who hardly knew one end of a horse from another. But they knew brilliance and beauty when they saw it; they knew class and guts and glory. He was a supreme athlete, but he was also a great character, his bright, white face recognisable and beloved the length and breadth of these islands.

Like any storied character, he had his troubles, but he always came back. There seemed something indestructible about him. There were no doubters he could not defy, no fence he could not jump, no record he could not smash, no peak he could not scale.

It turns out, after all, that he was destructible. One freak field accident, and a superlative equine hero is brought to dust.

It was a privilege to have seen him. He gave me more joy than I can express. I loved him with that pure love I always feel in the presence of greatness. It is all sunshine in Scotland today, but it feels as if a light has gone out.

He has gone to run another race, somewhere we cannot follow him. I hope he has springy green turf under his feet and the wind in his mane and the echo of those adoring crowds in his dear old ears, as he passes his final winning post.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one photograph today. I cannot show you a picture of Kauto, because I am strict about copyright. You can find wonderful shots of him all over the internet, many of them taken by the exceptional Edward Whitaker. Here is a picture of my blue hills instead. These hills are my cathedral. Whenever anyone I love dies, I commit them to the hills. The Scottish mountains were here for millions of years before I was thought of, and shall stand for millions of years after I have gone. I find a curious consolation in that, and a sense of peace and perspective.

PS. As I finished writing this, and was about to press publish, I had to go back to the internet, just to check. My magical mind was saying: it must be a mistake. The big fella cannot possibly be gone. But he is, and so I make my farewell. He will live on in my heart, and in those precious memories which no amount of time can erase.

Thoughts on love and loss.

I’ve written quite a lot about the old friends lately. I think it has to do with motoring towards fifty. I shall be forty-eight at the end of this month and there is a feeling of taking stock and counting the years. The love for the old friends hums in me, and there is a sweet comfort in all the history we have together.

I love them all in different ways, and they bring out different parts of me. One of them is a very dear man with whom I have always had a very straightforward relationship. We’ve never had a cross word or a falling out. We smile and laugh when we see each other. The ineffable fondness pours out, like starlight. I’m in Scotland now and he has done dazzlingly well in his chosen profession and is often travelling for his work, so we don’t see each other for long stretches of time. But we pick up just where we left off, beaming at each other in delight. It’s a friendship of absolute ease.

Today, I got an email from him telling me that his mother had died. I wrote back, a long, winding essay, all about that profound and shocking grief when a parent goes. It is like nothing else. I told him of my feelings for my father, when he died, and how I could not make sense of the world and how I had to lie down on the Scottish grass and hold onto the earth because I feared I might just fly off into space. I hoped that knowing he was not alone might help, although I am keenly aware that words are paltry things in the face of such oceanic sorrow. I have to write them, but I feel inadequate in every line.

In the end, after all the scribbling, I just sent love. Call if you need to talk, I wrote.

I thought of the long process of grieving. It is a process and it has to be done. You can’t cheat it or skip it or find a shortcut. You have to plunge into it and damn well do it. I kept thinking I was done, with my dad, and then I would find myself on the floor, weeping Railway Children tears.

I feel now the sharp serpent’s tooth of loss. I am sorrowing for my dear friend and his adored mother and his broken heart. As I do that, I remember all over again that tearing loss, that awful realisation that my father, that vivid, laughing titan, that man who risked his very life over huge fences (the docs told him to stop; he ignored them) no longer existed in the world.

I was talking to another of the old friends, a few weeks ago. She too is one of the most straightforward, love and admiration and affection growing between us like flowers in springtime. I said, rather out of the blue: ‘I’ve found a place to put Dad.’

It’s taken three years. He exists now, safely, in my heart. He lives with me. I think of him every day. I write about him quite a lot, here, on the Facebook page, in my Twitter feed, where there are many racing people who still remember him. He is with me every time I put on an improbable bet (the unlikely accumulator was one of his trademarks) and every time I go down to my mare. I did not realise it at the time, but I bought that mare to be closer to him, because he was a horseman to his bones.

Reading of my lovely compadre’s bereavement makes me think of the vastness of grief. Every ordinary human has to go through it, and, at this age, one starts to face more funerals than weddings. It is part of life; it has to be woven in. It is ultimately expected and natural and yet it feels as if it tears apart the very fabric of being. The missing never goes. You just have to find a way of folding it into yourself, so that it does not overwhelm you. I’m still not quite sure how I did that. I’d love to say I was very clever about it, and that the whole process was seamless. It was not. It was messy and painful and I got it wrong quite a lot of the time.

But in the end, I did find a place for him, my darling old dad. The really lovely thing is that I get the very best of him. That is what is left, it turns out. He was incredibly funny and charismatic and brave. People’s faces lit up when he entered a room. He had the happy gift of making people feel that the world was a slightly brighter place when he was in it. But he was also very naughty and irresponsible. As a father, he could not be relied on. He hurt, without even knowing that what he did was sometimes painful. Yet all that has flown away. I don’t even have to forgive it. It does not factor. I am left with him in all his glory – the idiosyncratic, beloved, mighty man, who threw his heart over a fence and whose horses would follow him to the ends of the earth.

Loss is loss, my sister once said to me. I was having trouble grieving for my dog, finding it hard to make sense of the depth of heartbreak for an animal when humans had been buried not long before. Loss is loss, and must be honoured. I miss my Dear Departeds, and that never goes away. But they exist within me, stitched into my heart; antic, shining and curiously alive.

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today. There was snow and sleet and gales when I went out this morning. These are from a Bobby Dazzler a few days ago:

Never send to know.

It’s quite an odd thing, to cry for a stranger. One may feel sadness and melancholy and regret for so many deaths: the ones in the newspapers which run into horrifying statistics, almost beyond the ability of the brain to process, like the Yazidis or the Syrians or the Gazans, or those closer to home, the teenage car crashes or fire fatalities reported in the local press. John Donne’s lines live always with me:

Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee. 

But still, to find oneself weeping blindly in an ordinary kitchen, making an ordinary cup of coffee, on an ordinary, rainy Scottish morning, because of the death of a famous person, as if that person were a best beloved – that is quite strange.

And yet, perhaps it is entirely explicable. Many other people seem to have had the same reaction to the shocking loss of Robin Williams. I sat with a friend in the field in the rain, as the red mare listened, and tried to work it all out. It was not just the straight sadness of a bright spirit snuffed out too soon. It was not only the thought of the family and friends left bereft. It was, we thought, the terrible poignancy of a man who gave so much joy, who lifted up so many hearts, being unable to stop himself from sinking.

We came back to the same line: if Robin Williams could not make it, who could?

Perhaps too there was the contemplation of the power of those demons, which robbed him of hope. If they could overcome such a dazzling, inventive mind, such a good heart, such a glittering talent, they must have been almost supernatural in their agency. The thought of the long fight he must have waged with them was one of unimaginable terror.

Depression is a bastard, and it is a thief. It is random and it does not discriminate. It takes the brilliant and the beautiful, the kind and the good, the funny and the clever. It does not give a shit how much you are adored or how much joy you give or how many prizes you win. It is no respecter of money or class or fame.

As the affection and grief roll round the internet, my friend and I say, as one: if only he knew how much he was loved. There is the silent, melancholy rider: it would have made no difference. Depression does not count blessings. Blessings, ironically, may make the sufferer feel even worse. How dare I be afflicted when I have all this?

Out in the open prairies of the web, where so often the craziness of crowds lives, comes the wisdom of crowds. People are shining lights into those dark corners where debilitation and shame live. It’s a condition, they are saying, as real and painful as a broken leg. You can’t fix a shattered limb by the power of thought or will; you can’t say to someone with a smashed femur, cheer up, butch up, man up. Don’t be afraid to ask, people are saying; stretch out your hand for help. There is help, there are people who love you, you are not alone.

Ordinary people, touched by this extraordinary man, are remembering Captain, my Captain, and wanting to stand on their desks and be remarkable.

I met Robin Williams once. I was a waitress in a tiny café  in a valley in Scotland, and I went over to a table and asked the new arrivals what they would like, and stared straight into that familiar, smiling, open face. I have an odd benchmark of character: I judge people very much on how they treat waiters. Williams was enchanting. He was gracious and polite and regular; he had no sense at all of the Big I Am. He was gentle and quiet, with no trace of that wild, manic, public persona. The other lovely thing, in that small highland village, was that everyone left him alone. Nobody pointed or stared or asked for his autograph. They gave him the courtesy of allowing him to be an ordinary man, just for one day.

I have a fantasy in my mind that he ordered the special lentil soup that I had made that morning. It was a long time ago. I think he probably did not have the soup. I think he just had a cup of coffee. I prided myself on my barista skills, newly learnt, and I made the hell out of that cup of coffee. I don’t expect you can really judge someone on one brief transactional meeting, but I was left with the impression of a very, very nice man. A gentle goodness shone out of him like starlight. Perhaps that is why so many people, from the humblest waitress to the most storied Hollywood star, are so sad.

He did not belong to us. I think of the heartbreaking moment in Out of Africa, where Meryl Streep looks down bleakly on a mound of dry earth and says: ‘Now take back the soul of Denys Finch-Hatton, whom you have shared with us. He brought us joy, and we loved him well. He was not ours, he was not mine.’

And yet, so many of my generation feel as if Robin Williams was stitched into the fabric of our lives, from Mork and Mindy in our youth, through Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets’ Society in our formative years, to the later, darker films of our middle age. He was so reliably present that perhaps many of us thought he would always be there.

There is something tragically democratic in his loss. Perhaps that too is what speaks to every bruised heart. He might have seemed to live up on that higher plane, where coruscating invention and wild talent and universal fame exist, in the troposphere where ordinary mortals may not go. Yet this kind, funny, haunted man was no more immune from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than the most workaday amongst us.

I very rarely use the universal we. I don’t like to speak for anyone else. But I’m not sure I have seen such an agreement on anything, in the rushing new age of the internet. There are no dissenting voices, no snide remarks, no cheap jokes. There is a collective sense of love and sadness, in their most authentic, unifying form.

In the end, there is not much point in trying to understand or dissect the extraordinary reaction to the death of one brilliant man. In the end, it is what it is. It is a shining light gone out, a brave soul lost, a fighting heart broken.

He gave us joy, and we loved him well.

Go free, now.
 


As I choose this picture, I think:

Tell someone you love how much you love them; take solace in the small things; be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle; lift your eyes up to the hills. Those are my resolutions for today.

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:

Happy Birthday.

Today would have been my father’s 84^th birthday. I sometimes think he should have lived to be a hundred, but the truth is that he hated old age. When he died, he was ready to go. He wasn’t even particularly ill. He was in hospital, but not for anything catastrophic. He sang a song he had just invented specially for the sweet Australian nurse who had taken his fancy – Dahlia from Australia, he sang. Then he drank some Guinness which was smuggled in for him. Then he said he was going to have a little sleep. He did not wake up.

It was a bloody brilliant way to go. There was no drawn-out departure, no beeping machines and snaking wires. For a long time, his bashed old body had been failing him. He was a physical man, strong and hard in his prime. Even when time put weight on him, his arms were still like steel hawsers, from years of holding strong horses. As he went into the twilight of age, all the crashing falls and breaks and dislocations caught up with him. He had, after all, broken his back and his neck twice. The bones protested and cried out. His back stooped and hunched. He could no longer do the things he wanted to do. He grew fretful and melancholy. He would have loathed being a hundred. He had run his race.

I think of him every day. I can hear his ghostly laughter, as the last leg of my 3000-1 accumulator gets beaten a short head. I remember him as I work my mare. I think the sole reason I got a horse after thirty years was to feel closer to the old horseman. The funny thing is that he was not a brilliant rider. He was not the most stylish, or the most technically accomplished. But he had such dash and courage and sheer guts that horses responded to him. They are telepathic creatures, instinctive herd animals. He gritted his teeth and threw his heart over those great birch fences, and the horses, infected by his Corinthian spirit, would have gone with him anywhere.

He never really knew what the internet was. He was the oldest of the old school. But the internet knows him. As I rummage about the Google, I find kind words and happy memories from Brough Scott and Martin Pipe and regular punters and people who lived in the Lambourn valley and the Amateur Jockeys’ Association, of which he was chairman.

There is an old tweet from George Baker, who trained Belle de Fontenay to win a charity race at Newbury run in my father’s name: ‘To win anything named after the legendary Gay Kindersley is a privilege.’ I remember George when he was a young racing fan, devoting every spare moment to rushing off to Sandown and Newbury. Eventually, he chucked in his sensible job and followed his dream, and last season he lived the very pinnacle of that dream, leading the doughty campaigner Belgian Bill into the winner’s enclosure at the Royal Meeting. He is exactly the same person as a professional as he was when he was a fan: smiling, enthusiastic, fired with love for the mighty speed and strength and courage of the thoroughbred. The thought of him remembering Dad is very touching.

More touching still, I discover a photograph on the Amateur Jockeys’ Association website, of the Fegentri World Cup at Goodwood. There is my dear old Fa, aged but still doing what he called his grinny face, having just presented the trophy. To his left is the winning trainer, John Hills. John died last week, at the absurdly young age of 53. His race was not run; it was cruelly cut short. He too was a horseman and a gentleman. He and his brothers were a pulling thread that ran through my childhood. I have snapshots of my head of them flinging their ponies over massive jumps at high speed. They rode like cowboys, with wild élan. In the sadness of John’s death, I find a glitter of light, as I see him smiling next to the auld fella, both of them brought back to vivid life.

Mortality tugs at my sleeve, as I think of the Dear Departed. There are too many of them. They no longer come as single spies, but as battalions.

I think of Dad, and wonder what he would say. He would sing a song, and laugh a rueful, self-mocking laugh, and drink a drink. He would not put it into so many words, but by example he would tell me to live every moment as if it were the last.

He never gave me any advice, except not to back odds-on favourites. Instead, he showed me many good life lessons by example. Be generous, laugh at yourself, never give up, always be the first to buy a round. He judged humans on their true selves, not inessential externals or societal yardsticks. He lived high life and low life and saw no difference between the two. He did not understand any set of rules, but made up his own as he went along. He had the wonderful talent of bringing fun with him, wherever he went. Soon after he died, I ran into a gentleman who had been a steward with him for many years. ‘Oh, your father’ he said, his eyes lit with memories. ‘Every time he walked into the stewards’ room, it was a party.’

I ponder the imponderables of life, and I know exactly what my Dad would say. He would say: ‘What the hell is going to win the 7.30 at Windsor?’

 

Today’s pictures:

Very young and rather serious. Top boot action:

He did a huge amount for the amateur riders, and he loved doing it. The jocks and everyone at the AJA loved him right back:

The old riding style makes me laugh and laugh. Several things about this picture bring me joy. There are the tremendous britches, Dad’s traditional gritted teeth, and the bright face and pricked ears of his horse. I’m not sure which one it was; I’ll have to ask my mum. She remembers them all. She was the one who had to watch him roaring over those obstacles at high speed, sometimes through her fingers:

He would have loved this beautiful girl:

You’ve all seen this one before, but it remains my favourite:

And many, many years later, at Goodwood, with age on his shoulders, but still that blazing grinny grin. Dad is second from the left, then the winning jockey, and then John Hills:

An unexpectedly happy day.

There’s been much sadness in the family in the last week, but oddly enough, today I did not feel sad. I remembered my father, who died on this day three years ago, with a gentle, easy fondness. I smiled, rather than wept.

I spent a long time in the sunny field with the red mare, chatting to her. As the spring springs, I decided to give her a well-deserved day off. We mooched about together, in low harmony, communing. She was in her happiest mood, at peace with the world and herself.

‘Oh,’ I said out loud, ‘Dad would have loved you.’

Later, I did a nutty accumulator, in honour of the old gentleman. I put in it all the horses I loved, rather than the ones I thought would win. I do that sometimes. They are heart bets.

The first up was Thousand Stars. He has been a top class horse in his day, but he has not won anything lately, and the suspicion is that the mighty campaigner is past his best. In the glittering Irish sunshine, he set off across the green, green grass of Fairyhouse, ears pricked, leaping over his hurdles for sheer delight. I’m not sure I ever saw a horse enjoying himself so much on a racecourse. He went straight to the lead, and stretched out the field, and I thought, well, he’ll have his fun and then he’ll come back to them, and it’s just as well that acker was each-way.

But he did not come back to them. He kept on galloping, his big, strong stride eating up the turf, his jumping true and straight. They tried to get close to him, but he seemed to say: no, today is mine. He gathered his lovely athletic body and roared clear, to win by ten lengths.

It made physical tingles run up and down my spine, as if my whole body was dancing with delight. It’s one of the happiest sights I have seen this season. Everything about it was right – a faithful competitor coming back to his best, a beautiful thoroughbred doing what he was born to do, a horse at ease with himself on the bright emerald turf.

Dad would have loved that too. Especially if he had taken the 5-1, early doors.

As I think of him, I gather all the Dear Departeds to my heart, and keep them there.

 

Today’s pictures:

Dad, with his serious riding face on. I love those boots:

Dad, with his naughty I’m flirting with someone else’s wife face on:

This picture makes me laugh and laugh, because my father looks so naughty. On the left is Mum, in a perfectly ravishing frock, and the smiling gentleman with her is Dave Dick, who rode the winner of the Grand National in 1956. I’m not sure about the date of this photograph, but I suspect they might have been toasting his victory.

Stanley the Dog, who has been particularly sweet this week, lying guard by the side of my mother’s bed whilst my stepfather was away at a funeral:

Red, after our ride yesterday, with her most demure look:

Signs of spring:

Sometimes I think all the world is in that eye:

Light and shade.

There has been a death in the family. It was very sudden, and it is very sad.

There is the usual sense of rupture, of wrongness. The world should not exist without this person in it.

There is the usual daily papering over the cracks. We are, in very British fashion, carrying on. I do not mean that other nationalities do not carry on, or that they fall to the floor, ululating. It just feels like a very British thing to do. It is there, the loss, in batsqueaks. It is there in small pauses, sideways glances, moments of still. It remains, mostly unspoken, humming in us.

The sun shines, with steady, determined, yellow warmth. It shone like this when my father died, which was three years ago next week.

I think: one death is all deaths. All the Dear Departeds line up, close in my heart. One death is all mortality. I think: send not to know for whom the bell tolls.

Then I go down to the field and work the mare. She is light as air, soft as silk. We free-school in a way we have never done before, so relaxed and in tune that I shout out loud into the bright air. She looks at me as if to say: you didn’t think I had that in me, did you?

We go for a ride.

There have been thoughts to think and things to do and arrangements to make. I have not ridden for two days. I wonder, as I get on, if there will be a little spring fever, or just general thoroughbred high spirits. I sit deep in the saddle and give her a loose rein and trust her, and there she goes, with her glorious aristocratic neck stretched out and her ears pricked and not a bother on her.

We have one of the best rides we have ever had, and my heart lifts in gratitude and love.

 

Today’s pictures are a little photo essay, of a moment with the horses, and of going back to the fundamental things, which is what I always do at times like this. Watch an animal, being itself; look at a bud, a flower, something as humble and actual as a patch of moss and grass and stone. Go back to the true and the real, as unreality plucks at one’s shoulder.

After the ride:

Then a nice long cool-down and a little amuse-bouche:

At which point the sweet Paint does one of her step by step stealth moves, to see if she might be allowed some:

If I just stand here, very still, she might not notice:

She notices:

And then decides perhaps she has made her point:

And will graciously allow her small friend to lick the bowl:

Which she does:

Whilst Red has some of the good hay brought by the kind farmer:

Another moment of hope from the filly:

Then she thinks better of it, and takes herself off:

Watched by Red, who is the lead mare, after all, and must keep a close eye on her precious charge:

A nice, cool drink:

And I look around, at the green things, at the growing things, at the living things:

At the simple things: