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:

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:

National Poetry Day.

It’s National Poetry Day. I love National Poetry Day. I’ve been thinking about poetry from the moment I got up this morning.

The ones that live in my head are mostly Yeats and Auden, snatches of Frost and E.E. Cummings, lines of Robert Lowell, fragments of TS. (Do I dare to eat a peach?)

I thought though that I should find one about a horse, you will be amazed to hear. The best poem about horses is Yeats’ glorious galloping paean to Galway Races, but I posted that on this day last year. I read it at my father’s funeral. The last lines almost finished me off, in the quiet of the small Norman church:

‘And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.’

My father was a heartener.

Anyway, I wanted something new. So I hunted about the internet and there really wasn’t much that would do. There’s an epic poem by Byron but it goes on for about ten years and is quite knotty, although I’ll go back and read the whole thing later. There’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, but that is far too sad for this sunny day. One of the best things anyone ever wrote about a horse comes from Shakespeare, in Henry V:

‘When I bestride him, I
soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth
sings when he touches it.’

But that is not a poem, so today it does not count.

In the end, I found a slender sliver from DH Lawrence, so short that it is almost a haiku, so mere that is it is mystery. I never adored Lawrence’s novels, but I was ravished by his poems. I remember reading The Snake when I was eight years old and being quite mesmerised. I read it forty years ago, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember the feeling of heat and fascination and passion and shame that lived in the poem, and it made me think of snakes in a different way from that day on.

‘And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.’

This short poem is not one I have ever seen before. I felt rather astonished that it was so new to me, and I’m going to carry it with me in the Scottish sunshine.

The White Horse.

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on

and the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent, they are in another world.

 

That’s it. That is all he wrote. What mystery hovers between those lines. Did the horse and his boy exist in the world? Had Lawrence seen them, one misty morning, and remembered? Or are they symbols, metaphors, shimmering figures of the imagination? There is something almost holy in that tiny poem.

The funny thing is that the really, really good horsemen and women do work their horses in silence. I talk to mine, all the time. I tell her she is brilliant, or clever, or a silly old billy, or quite safe. I tell her that is only a cyclist and not a mountain lion. I say: ‘There are your sheep.’ She loves the sheep. I say: ‘Find your soft place.’ We are always looking for her soft place.

Opposite my house, there is a grand old building with arched windows and soaring roofs which was built a hundred and fifty years ago by some eccentric old gentleman for his cows. It is known as the coo cathedral, and the days are long gone when it housed cattle. It is used now for weddings and balls and celebrations. There was a charity sale going on there this morning and rows of cars were drawn up and people streamed across the grass in the dazzling sun to do their early Christmas shopping in a good cause.

There was no silence, but a great deal of bustle. I took the mare along to have a look. She likes an event. She said hello to some very small children. ‘Look, Fergus, it’s a horse.’

Fergus, who was not quite two, smiled all over his face. The mare blinked at him with elegant pleasure.

‘Yes, Fergus,’ I said. ‘She’s a very special horse indeed. She is a thoroughbred horse.’

I rode her down to the great old building and peered through the window. A lady saw us and opened the door and the mare poked her head inside and observed the throng, sagely. Within moments, she had many admirers. I felt the spreading delight of absurd pride. I love that she loves to greet complete strangers. I love that whenever any human eye falls on her, it lights with pure happiness.

There was no silence. We were in the world.

But when we went back to the quiet field, that DH Lawrence silence did fall on us, and we stood together, in wordless harmony, and we were, for a moment, like that horse and his boy.

Why does poetry matter? Why does it need a whole day, all to itself? Isn’t it too old school, too old hat, too out-dated, for the rushing modern world?

I think it matters because it speaks to the heart. It may console a bruised spirit, or remind a harried mind of a universal truth. It sings a fine and human song, and everybody needs a song.

It doesn’t really need to be for anything. It exists in and of itself: beautiful, immutable, true. It can be funny and it can be shocking and it can be stark. Unlike almost any other form of words, it can be read for the sheer beauty, even if one does not understand the precise meaning. (I have read The Wasteland about twenty times, and I still could not tell you what half of it is about. Some of it is even in languages I do not speak, and many of the classical references are lost on me. Yet, it still is a poem that can brighten my morning.)

If one is flayed or seared or bashed or blue, a good poem may fall on the battered human self like a balm.

I think that is worth a day.

 

Today’s pictures:

I don’t have a white horse. I have a red horse. And she is as bright and bold and bonny as the day is long. If I could write poetry, I should write a poem for her. But I can’t, so I shan’t. She has to content herself with the best prose my fingers can type.

I can’t write her a poem, but she is a poem, so it doesn’t really matter:

Ground Elder.

In a book whose name I cannot recall, Miss Marple puts her wise old head on one side and says: ‘When you get ground elder really badly in a border, there is nothing to do but dig the whole thing up and start again.’

She was using ground elder as a metaphor for some kind of fiendish crime of course, but I have always worried about literal ground elder. My dear little garden is plagued by it, and I am too much of an old hippy to allow it to be sprayed. I once had to stop a tall gentleman with a fanatical gleam in his eye from dousing it with Agent Orange. (I didn’t even know that was legal.) He had the hazmat suit on and everything. ‘No, no,’ I cried, hanging on his arm like a 19^th century damsel. I practically added: ‘Pray, sir, do not,’ in swooning accents.

So, every year, I pull out the mean little elders with my bare hands. I never win the battle, but my battalions keep marching on.

This morning, I saw to my horror that the things had gone crazy. Spring-time ground elders every damn where. I fell to my knees and started digging them up with my fingers. Stanley the Dog thought it a very poor sort of a game.

I uncovered some enchanting little vincas and some tiny box plants and rescued a lovely peony from despair. I am not digging up my bed and starting again. I’m going to go on battling.

I thought, as I crouched low with determination, my hands in the good Scottish earth, that I have ground elder of the mind. I don’t think I can ever dig up that mental bed up and start again. I think I have to keep pulling the stuff up by the roots, every day.

I think it is a lot to do with people leaving. My dad left, when I was seven, and I think that is one of the defining features of my life. I adored my father, and I missed him. He came to see us and I went to stay with him, but it was not the same. I missed him then and I miss him still.

Even though my rational mind knows that all humans are different individuals, with different lives and different thoughts and different loves, I have a magical part of my brain which really does suspect that everyone is just like me. (You can see this as horrid narcissism, or being a hopeful citizen of the world. I can’t decide.) I think that somewhere in the most nutty corridor of my mind I sort of believe that everyone has a red mare and is a politics geek and knows by heart the poems of Yeats. I don’t refine on my father leaving, because that part of me secretly believes that all fathers go. But they really don’t. Lots and lots and lots of fathers stay. Of course, some are dead bores and some are workaholics and some are emotionally absent, but some are not. They are there, at the breakfast table, entwined in their children’s lives. They know the small things, they get the private jokes, they understand the heartaches.

I believe in stoicism, and I’m not going to make a three-act opera of something that happened forty years ago. But it did happen, and I think one must mark it. The ground elder that springs from that leaving has to be pulled up, or it will choke the whole. It’s not a sorrow or a pity, so much, it’s just a thing. It is there. The beloved was beloved, and then he was gone.

That’s my thought for the day. It’s about balance, I think. I think one has to acknowledge the griefs of life, the ones that leave little scars and tics and scratches in the mind. One not need be defined by them, or sunk by them, or unhinged by them, but one must know they are there. And then, you just pull the buggers up, one by one.

Or something like that.

 

Today’s pictures:

The little Paint filly and Stanley the Manly this morning. Stan is helpfully eating up all the hoof parings from the farrier’s recent visit. They are like gourmet treats for him:

The duchess stopped doing her donkey ears for three minutes and put on her show pony face. I’d put my camera onto a new setting by mistake, so she’s come out rather more amber than usual, and I quite like the effect. It’s got an old school feeling to it:

And the same again here. It’s like we’ve gone back to 1962:

Work.

Author’s note: I’m not sure whether this makes any sense or is much to the purpose. I wrote it instinctively, without thinking, after long hours of editing and rewriting my book, my brain blank and empty from the effort of concentration. I’m going to leave it, as it came out, and hope it means some small thing.

 

Work is the answer.

Work is the resumption of normality, the balm for the troubled mind, the bulwark against uncontrollable events.

This morning, I worked my mare, steadily, and with concentration. She repaid me with sweetness and softness and willingness. My heart expanded in the golden Scottish light.

I worked my book, and that too seemed to respond as if it were an animate thing. It rose to my fingertips, as they tap tap tapped on the keyboard. My mind was active and engaged.

I’m sometimes not quite sure where my work ethic comes from, and then I remember my parents. My mother taught me that a tired pony had to be bedded down and fed a lovely warm mash and brushed off before I could come in and have my own tea. If we were lucky enough to have ponies, we had to look after them well. That was the deal.

My father rose before dawn every day of his working life, and mucked out three racehorses and rode out two lots and fed and watered and settled his good equine companions. He is remembered for being a roisterer and a boisterer, but at heart, he was a worker. No matter what he had been doing the night before, no matter how many songs he sang or drinks he drank, he would be up at five-thirty and would walk out into the dark, to see to those horses. They gave him speed and strength and heart and honesty, and he gave them the care they deserved in return. That was something he taught me without ever saying a word. It is the legacy he left. It is one of my truest things.

 

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:

Friday.

The work starts to shift. People sometimes wonder why it takes so long to write a book. I wonder why it takes so long, especially when I can bash out fifty words a minute when I’m really cooking. It’s not the word count. That’s not even a sliver of it. It needs a lot of gestation, after the initial words are down. You carry it with you and think and think and think and think. The 153,000 are there, far too many of them, but you can’t see which ones must die. So you walk and gaze and ponder. Then, one morning, you think: ah, the mother must go. So it’s hasta la vista, Mama.

There’s also a ruthlessness which takes time to arrive. At the beginning, the precious manuscript is like a baby bird, every passage coaxed out with tenderness and gentleness. It must be done in a safe private place, with no cruel editing eyes to see.

Then, you get a bit tougher in the second draft. You are coming out into the light.

Then, you have to get absolutely bloody. It’s because of the Dear Readers. You can’t write a book with a readership in mind, thinking I’ll crack that market. If you do that, all authenticity is lost. You have to write the book you want to read. But as the drafts go on, the actual Readers swim into view. They are busy. They do not have time for your self-indulgent flourishes. They want a good story and some good prose and perhaps a little bit of universal wisdom or human condition. They like a laugh. They are not there to watch you do acrobatics.

I’m reading a book at the moment by a very famous writer whose editor is clearly too afraid to wield the blue pencil. Page after page of showing off prose dance before me. A scene which could have taken ten pages rolls on for three chapters, with some very, very writerly writing. I shout in my head: what’s wrong with a good old declarative sentence? If it goes on like this, I’ll never have time to ride the mare.

That’s when the ruthlessness comes in, and why. It is the least the Readers deserve. Oddly, by this stage, it is really not all about you. But this mental shift too takes time. I’m just reaching it now. I feel my sinews harden and my resolve shine.

In ordinary life, I make breakfast for my mother, and go down to do the horse. My sister arrives and walks round the block with us. The red mare is delighted since this means that she does not have to do schooling or transitions or anything fancy, but can just mosey along without reins, my hands scratching her withers as she drops her dear heads and sighs with pleasure. We are going so slowly that she can stop and say hello to some children on the avenue. She adores children. She loves the sound of human voices too, so the low rhythms of the Sister and I chatting are her deep delight.

I have no interest in Halloween, but the great-nieces and nephew are coming round later and I make them a chocolate fridge cake. I know they would prefer commercial sweets, but I think of them getting loaded up with sugar and additives and decide that, for the sake of the grown-ups who will have to put them to bed afterwards, some nice black chocolate and nuts and honey and raisins, with no terrifying E numbers or artificial colouring, might be better. I swish about, doing my domestic goddess schtick, making some soup at the same time, something I have not had time for in ages.

The radio is on. A Day in the Life comes on. The first part of it was written about my uncle. He died in a car crash and my father got the call very late and had to drive up the M4, through a black, frigid December night, to identify the body. He left my mother, eight months pregnant with me, at home. He never spoke of that midnight drive. I can’t imagine it. Sixty bleak miles, with a dead brother at the end of it. And then the sight of the body on the slab, that beautiful golden boy whom everyone loved, all the life and promise smashed out of him. My grandmother never really recovered. I’m not sure my father did either. The beloved name was rarely spoken throughout my childhood, as if the very sound of it was too much to bear.

I think of what my dad survived. Not just near-fatal falls on horses, back and neck broken twice, shoulders dislocating like clockwork, an ear ripped half off, but a grief so dark that it could not be put into words. And yet, somehow, he managed to be the life and soul of every party, bringing light with him wherever he went, so that people’s faces lit up and they stood a little taller, basking in the glow of his funny, idiosyncratic charm. It was only at the very end that the demons got him, when he was too battered and tired and defeated to defend himself.

I think of the slow, gentle, private life I live, in these Scottish hills. It is what I can manage. I don’t want to ride in the Grand National or be a shining star. I just want to write some sentences and think some thoughts. I want to watch Stanley the Dog with his stick. I want to walk round the block with my sweet red mare. Lucky for me, that is what she wants too. She was bred to be a champion, but it turned out she did not have the character for it. She is a tender soul. She loves the slow quiet as much as I do. It’s a sort of miracle that we found each other.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from the week. They are not the best in terms of photographic quality. But they show the sweetness and that is what I want today.

So muddy and scruffy and happy:

The nicest of them all.

At last, my mother is home from the hospital. I lie on her bed and talk of Michael Scudamore, who has died.

‘I can see him now,’ says my mother. ‘Sitting on the lawn, in a director’s chair, drinking Pimm’s.’

­­­­I think how racy my mother must have been, to have a director’s chair on the lawn in the late fifties.

‘He was a very good jockey,’ she says. ‘He rode with your father. But the real thing about him is that he was so nice. He was the nicest of them all.’

Nice is considered a poor word. Writing manuals strictly instruct you not to use it, not if you want to be taken seriously. I like it. It is a small, humble, unassuming word. It does not show-boat, or take up all the oxygen in a room. And it does, whatever the sneery received wisdom says, mean something.

When I was young and heedless, I suspect I probably agreed with the sneerers. Who wanted to be nice? It was so dull, so safe, so workaday. Much better to be charming or wild or reckless. Now I am older, and chipped around the edges, I crave niceness. How lovely and reassuring to be nice, in a rushing, technological world, where internecine battles break out at the drop of a hat, and trolls stalk the internet, spreading their bile.

He was a nice man, Mr Scudamore, and that is a proper epithet for a gentleman of the turf.

My mother tells me about Dave Dick, who was the joker of the pack, and drove a car like a maniac. ‘He never had his eye on the road,’ says my mother. ‘He was always looking at you to see if you got the joke of the week. Oh, I was so frightened.’

‘Fred Winter was my hero,’ says my mother. ‘Because of how he rode a horse. He was the most beautiful jockey I ever saw over a fence.’

She pauses, remembering. ‘Then Francome came along. And he was beautiful too.’

I remember watching John Francome ride. There was a poetry in it.

‘The one I love watching at the moment,’ I say, ‘on the flat, is Ryan Moore. I watched him educate a two-year-old colt in a race the other day. He took him through the whole thing, very gently, step by step, letting him find his stride, sitting perfectly still, and then picking him up a furlong out and letting him rock into a flying rhythm and showing him his business. He won, and he never picked up his whip, just hands and heels.’

‘So the horse would not know he had a race,’ says my mother, smiling. ‘Scobie Breasley used to do that. He was a genius with two-year-olds.’

We talk of the Hannon two-year-olds, and how beautiful they are. Many trainers have a stamp of a horse. You can often tell, seeing the mighty creatures in the paddock, which yard they come from. The Hannons love big, strong, close-coupled horses, very deep through the girth, with short, powerful necks and finely-carved heads. ‘And Mark Johnston,’ says my mother, ‘likes those honest, long horses, rather old-fashioned types.’

‘Who look as if they might go hurdling,’ I say.

Almost under her breath, almost wistful, my mother says: ‘The most beautiful of them all was Frankel.’

We remember Frankel, as if we are paying homage, which in a way we are.

‘They have a presence,’ I say. ‘Those great ones.’

‘Nijinsky had it,’ says my mother. ‘You could feel it the moment you stepped onto the course. Although he wasn’t much fun to see in the pre-parade ring.’

‘Because he got so lathered up?’ I ask.

‘Oh,’ says my mother, indulgently,as if describing a naughty schoolboy, ‘he got himself in such a state. But it never seemed to make any difference. He just went and won anyway.’

‘Michael Scudamore,’ says my mother, reverting to our point of origin, ‘made a dynasty. Imagine that. His grandson is riding now.’

‘Tom Scu,’ I say. ‘He’s a lovely jockey. And a gentleman too.’

We contemplate the Scudamores, the nicest of them all, a family which knows horses like sailors know the sea. I think of the brothers, who only this week carried the coffins of their grandfather and grandmother into a Norman church. The old lady died, and her husband followed her three days later.

What loss they must be feeling: two blows coming so close together, two mighty oaks felled. I look out at the sunshine. It was sunny like this when my father died, that impossible, improbable sun which is not supposed to shine on dear old Blighty, not on these islands of mist and rain. The Scudamores must have that same feeling of unreality that I remember so well. They must be looking out into the blinding light and waiting for the world to make sense again.

 

Today’s pictures:

The red mare is having a well-deserved day off. Today, she just gets to be a horse, out in the long grass, with her dear friend for company and the sun on her back:

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:

Remembering the great old gentleman. Or, the internet is surprising.

Crazy, long day, so packed with work that I thought my ears would fall off. My time management continued poor, especially as I thought that industrial amounts of caffeine might help. All that happened was that I grew slightly manic and my fingers were too trembly to type accurately.

I’m too tired to write of my day, which was interesting, and shall record it tomorrow. But one incredibly touching thing happened, and I want to tell you the story of that before I fall off my chair.

There is a tremendous organisation called The Amateur Jockeys’ Association. My father was its president for many, many years. It runs a very good Twitter feed, and I have become friendly with @amajox because they often say lovely things about my dad, and remember him well. It’s one of those interesting relationships that builds up through the ether, between people who have never clapped eyes on each other. We even make little jokes at each other, getting especially excited whenever a female jockey rides a great race, as rather a lot of them have lately. The hashtag #girlsontop gets deployed, with lots of exclamation marks and happy smiles.

Anyway, today, at dear old Plumpton racecourse, one of my father’s favourites, the 3.40 was for the Gay Kindersley Memorial Salver. To mark the occasion, The Amateur Jockeys’ Association tweeted a wonderful photograph of my dad jumping a fence, with a most characteristic gritted-teeth expression. I know that face so well that it made me laugh and it made me cry. It was the face he made when he knew he was getting away with it, because he had almost certainly been roistering about the night before. (As well as being very courageous, he was very, very naughty.)

I took the picture and put it up on Facebook, and people who knew and loved him left sweet comments.

This is what the internet can do. In between crazed sessions of work, I could take five minutes and look at the picture, and look at the remarks underneath, and think of my darling old dad, and smile. I liked thinking of those days when he rode with wild corinthians who threw their hearts over fences. I liked remembering his tremendous physical bravery. He never thought twice when he got on a horse: he just pointed it at the nearest fence and went hell for leather. I’m much more cautious. I’ve ridden work, but never faced five feet of birch at thirty miles an hour. He set a high bar.

He was loved in racing because he was bold and he was a true horseman and he did not swagger. The jokes he made were most often directed against himself. If you really, really wanted to make him laugh, so his shoulders would hop up and down and tears would fall down his cheeks, you only had to tease him about one of his own personal foibles. He did not judge. He took people exactly as they were. He asked merely that they not be dullards. (He had no time for the puffed-up or the pompous either.) He was an outstanding character in a world of characters. He was so completely and utterly himself, and that self was so idiosyncratic and without rules and generous of spirit that people used to smile involuntarily whenever he walked into a room. That is a lovely gift. I never met anyone quite like him.

I think the real reason that I got the red mare, and the real reason I write of her so often, is that she makes me feel close to the old gentleman. I miss him keenly. But today, it was the funny old internet which made me feel close to him, and lifted my heart. That is not necessarily what it was designed for. It is not what it is most used for. But alongside the rants and the trolls and the cute kittens and the inexplicable conspiracy theories, there exists, on the wide prairies of the web, something very human and very good and very true.

 

This was the picture:

Three things I especially love about it, apart from my fa’s expression – the magnificent britches, the kind, honest face of the horse, with ears pricked, and that wonderful old-school position. That’s what they used to do in the fifties, sit back and slip the reins.

A great old gentleman

Quite often, sadly often, I write here: one of the great old gentlemen has gone. Today, it is one of my great old gentlemen.

My very dear godfather has died. He was eighty-nine, and had been in rotten health for years, but he kept buggering on in the most doughty and astonishing fashion. I had come to think he would live forever, as each new diagnosis was somehow survived.

He was one of the tremendous generation that fought in the war. He served with the Welsh Guards, and would sometimes say to me startling things like: ‘Well, after the war I went back and blew up bridges and things. Great fun.’

I had no idea about the blowing up of bridges, and he did not elaborate. I thought it must have been some hush-hush sabotage job, and I wish now I had asked. I wish so many things. I had been meaning and meaning to ring, but kept putting it off. He was so tired and ill and I thought I did not want to bother the poor old gentleman. Now I think: you fool, you should just have picked up that damn telephone. Now it is too late. I remember that regret with my father too, although the last time I had tried to call him he could not speak because he was watching the 3.30 at Kempton. This still makes me laugh.

The dear old godfather was loyal and funny and true. We used to write each other long letters and whenever I was in London he would take me out to lunch and talk in a very loud voice about kings and dukes, to the slight astonishment of the other patrons. He adored kings and dukes, and queens too. He liked dead, historical ones, about whom he wrote, and alive, actual ones, with whom he sometimes dined. He was a glorious, calamitous snob, carrying a very unfashionable delight in lineage. If he asked me to a party he was giving, he would tell me who else was coming, giving them all their full titles. He loved achievement too: this one won that prize for fiction, he would tell me, or that one won the Military Cross. And yet his snobbishness was not a horrid thing. He liked poshness as people like football or art, but he loved those of us who were not duchesses too.

His friendship with my father always astonished me. He had known Dad since my fa was a schoolboy; the godfather taught at the school my father attended. He then met my mother quite separately and was delighted when they married. He came to the house often, and I have an enduring childhood memory of him sitting in the sun, in a deck chair, wearing his immaculate panama hat with its Welsh Guards band. His love for my mother was perfectly explicable – she was elegant and graceful and a perfect hostess and looked like Grace Kelly. But Dad was a roisterer and boisterer, a singer of songs, a crazy rider of chasers, a drinker, a gambler, a teller of bawdy tales. The respectable, academic godfather seemed a most unlikely person to take to such a man. Yet they adored each other. They were good companions for many years – the wild, larger-than-life horseman, and the small, precise historian. I think what it really was was that my father made the godfather laugh and laugh, in a way, perhaps, that the duchesses did not, quite.

He was a very splendid old gentleman, funny himself, in a wry, intellectual way. He was kind and generous and thoughtful. He encouraged me in my writing, even though my early, appalling novels must have made him wince a little. ‘I never knew people drank so much coffee,’ was all he said, of those terrible first books, in which my characters did spend an awful lot of time in espresso bars. He was quietly proud of his own work, but never grew puffed up when his historical biographies were awarded prizes. He loved his Welsh Guards with a passion, but apart from the thing about the bridges, did not speak of his war fighting. I wish I had asked more about that too. What courage he must have had then; I think of it now. I saw it in his later years, as he stoically faced one illness after another. ‘How are you?’ I would say. ‘Oh, you know,’ he would reply. ‘Still here.’

For all my regrets, I am glad that not many months ago, I did write him a letter telling him what a marvellous godfather he had always been, and how much I loved and appreciated him. He did not do shows of emotion; as it was with so many of that mighty generation, understatement was his hallmark. But I wrote anyway, even though he would have thought the words a little excessive, because I wanted him to know.

I wanted to mark the passing of this remarkable man, but as always, I feel that these paltry scratches on the page do not quite capture him, or do him justice. I miss the good old men and wish they were not going. I shall miss this one sorely. I hear his voice in my head as I write. He would laugh, and tell me not to grow melancholy, but to keep buggering on, just as he did. And so I shall, in his honour.

 

I usually do not put up other people’s pictures, being keenly aware of copyright. I hope that, on this occasion, Eric Roberts, who took this lovely and very characteristic photograph, will forgive me.

As is so often the case, this was not what I meant to write at all.

Ah, I was going to go back to the most excellent discussion on anger, but time has beaten me. Time is beating me quite a lot lately, but I don’t mind this too much. There is a goodness in having many things to do. Imagine a life in which the hours stretched out like acres, with nothing to fill them.

The good part of this week was that things got done. I read interesting books. I wrote 6179 words. I fulfilled my responsibilities at HorseBack. I spent time with my family. I walked the dog, and the horse too. (We rode a little this week, but she has a slight muscle strain in her off hind, probably from scooting about in the muddy field, and so we are gently walking it off. Since I adore walking her in hand, and she loves it too, this is not much hardship.) I cooked a good casserole and even managed some rudimentary domestic tasks. The blog stuttered and tottered a little, as it got squeezed into the smallest available space, but at least it still exists, chugging along on three wheels, held together with binder twine. I even backed a couple of winners, and had a very nice treble.

I thought quite a lot of my late father. I shall never stop missing him, but I have a sense that some corner in the road has been turned. One of the paradoxes I found about losing a parent was that even though it is the most normal and expected of things, it turned normality on its head. The world became oddly strange to me, without him in it. Although an old man dying could not be more natural, everything felt shocking and unreal and unnatural. I think that this was where the mare came in, anchoring me in the earth, in the animal, in the fundamental. Horses are all about the fundamental, in a practical as well as philosophical sense.

I found it hard to get back to ordinary routines. For a very long time after my dad died, so long that I was ashamed of it, I found my sleep patterns disrupted and small usual tasks difficult. I could write a book. I could school a horse. I could make conversation and crack jokes. But I battled to eat or sleep at regular hours. I kept missing lunch, or staying up all night working. For a short, rather terrifying time, I became afraid of the dark. I also feared silence, and sometimes went to sleep with the wireless on, so that I would surf in and out of forgotten dreams to the sounds of the World Service.

I hoped, secretly, that this was a thing, something common and known, and not just me going nuts in the head. I assumed it was the mortality attack. It’s not just losing a person, missing a beloved human, remembering well a formative influence, it’s a crash course in the reality which until then had been more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. Of course I knew about mortality, but I had not yet been beaten round the head with it.

I felt slightly stupid that I was not dealing with it better. Oddly, I did the grieving part pretty well. I did not stuff it down or deny it or belittle it. I cling always to stoicism, since I find those people who turn every set-back into a three-act opera tiring. But I knew the thing must be marked. It was in the mazy paths of readjusting to this new reality that I lost my bearings.

For whatever reason, perhaps just time doing its clever thing, the routines have at last reasserted themselves. Despite the fact that at half past midnight last night I was in a field, with a horse, staring at the moon and the stars in case the Aurora Borealis should pass by, most of the time I now go to bed at a reasonable hour. The domestic tasks do not seem to baffle me in quite the way they did. A small sense of agency and a glimmer of organisation return, lifting their heads like snowdrops seeking spring. I feel passionately grateful for this change, and tread delicately on the new, firmer ground.

How funny this medium is. As I started to write, the burden of my song was that I had no time to say what I wanted to say. Then I said something quite else, which I had not intended at all. In the spirit of this blog, which is all about authenticity and what the hell and buggering on and seeing what comes, I shall let it stand. I suspect that the Dear Readers know some of this only too well. I suspect, I hope, that I am not alone.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are not from today. Today, the murk and gloom returned. But earlier in the week, oh what light we had:

In which I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. But it was a very, very good day.

Author’s note: I got carried away with this one. It is long, baggy and tangential. The point gets lost somewhere in the sixth paragraph, and is never retrieved. But if you are willing to bash on, and dig with a spoon, there are some moments of loveliness.

 

I was thinking, this morning, about taking the good bits and leaving the rest. I like to pretend I know all about human complexity and the flaws and frailties flesh is heir to. I can get a bit swanky about how I do not put people into boxes. But still, I sometimes get pulled into the quicksand of the single label. This person is good, that one is bad; this one is a dullard, this one is quite coruscating; this one is a melancholic, that one is a sunny optimist.

The fact is that humans can be all these things, on the very same day. We are all on a veering, curving spectrum. (And you know how rarely I use the Universal We. But in this case I think it is called for.)

I was reminded the other day of something a wise person said to me. Or perhaps I mean a wise thing a person said. It was: ‘it is easy to behave well when you are happy.’ Often if someone is mean or unfair or sharp, it has nothing to do with you. I am always in danger of taking things personally, and off goes the three act drama, with me as the operatic star. Usually, in these cases, it is nothing to do with me and everything to do with the other person. They are wrangling with existential angst, or fretting about a beloved, or have suddenly lost their moments of glad grace. They don’t necessarily mean to, but they may take it out on the person nearest to them.

My old dad, whom I miss every day, was a man of labyrinthine complexity. He was adored throughout the racing world. He was the sweetest and funniest and most charming and eccentric gentleman. He could light up a room just by walking into it, even though he did not stride in like a colossus, but shuffled through the door with his shoulders hunched from all the operations he had to stop them falling out of their sockets in a tight finish, and his back slightly bent from the times he broke it. He would twinkle his eyes through his great spectacles and somehow everyone would feel better.

On a horse, he was brave as a lion. But he was also fabulously irresponsible, occasionally unreliable, and very, very naughty. He drank too much and gambled too much and chased far too many women. He loved his children but never particularly felt that he should do anything for us. In way, this was very liberating. There was no burden of expectation. He never told us how to live our lives, or read us lectures. I think I sometimes did wish for a regular, respectable dad, but in the end I realised that what I got was much, much better. He taught me the best lesson I ever learnt, by simple example. That is: to judge people exactly as you find them, not through the prism of class or money or colour or creed or sexuality. If someone could make my dad laugh, he did not give a bugger what car they drove or what school they went to.

Now, as I remember him and carry him with me, I leave the bad parts and contemplate only the good.

I was thinking particularly of him because a rather astounding thing happened a few days ago. A cousin of mine became a colonel. As I do my work with HorseBack, I always think: well, I know horses, but I don’t know the services. That is the new part which I am mapping. I don’t come from a military family, I tell people. Yet, all the time, there was this brave fighting relation, doing tours in Afghan, and now, being promoted to a rank which makes me take my hat off. The first thing I wrote, to the cousin and his sister, when I heard the news, was how much the auld fella would have laughed. It’s true. I am in awe and wonder, incredibly impressed by such dizzy heights. A colonel in the Household Cavalry is a mountain top which I can hardly imagine. But Dad would have roared with laughter. He would have been proud, of course, but he would have found it inexpressibly comical that someone in his family would do such a grown-up job. (He did his own national service in a cavalry regiment, joining the Hussars I am perfectly certain in the expectation that he could pitch up with his horse. I think he got a bit of a shock when he arrived at Salisbury Plain to find only tanks.) The lovely cousin and his proud sister wrote back to say that they were raising a glass to the old man.

So many good parts, I think. Who cares about the less good. Emphasise the positive, I think, and eliminate the negative and latch onto the affirmative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between.

People are always going to behave in ways that one might not choose. They may think thoughts that one would prefer they did not think. They will not always react in the hoped-for manner. They may baffle and confound. But I start to think that if you search for the good parts, the rest won’t matter so much.

The red mare is, in the magical part of my mind, the exception to the rule and perfect in every way. Of course this is not in fact true. She has her grouches and her small moments of stubbornness and her grumpy mornings. There are very few humans I secretly believe close to perfect, but one of them is my friend The World Traveller, who lives up the road and is my relation by marriage. This morning, she came to ride the mare for the first time. She is a tremendous horsewoman, but has been too busy bringing up four small children to think of things equine. I suddenly decided, on a whim: I have this great horse, and the WT is a great rider, and I am going to bring them together.

It was quite frightening, sending Red off into the unknown. What if disaster struck? What if my profound faith in this mighty mare is misplaced?

I need not have worried. Back they both came, after a morning out in the fields, wreathed in smiles. The World Traveller (given her blog name because she once rode across half of Asia on horses and camels) is not, of course, perfect. She has told me of her flaws, although I never quite believe her. But she is one of the sunniest, kindest, most generous-hearted people I know, and being able to put her up on my equally big-hearted mare made me happier than I can say.

This blog did have a serious point when I started it. I think it was about complexity. Now, as I wander towards the end, I realise that I have galloped off on my usual tangents, and I have absolutely no idea what it was that was so important I had to write it down for you.

Perhaps it was a rumination on my daily fight against perfection, against black and white, against false expectations, against cramming people into boxes.

I am galvanised and filled with energy today. After the World Traveller got off the red mare, I got on, and went out riding with a friend who had arrived unexpectedly on his Quarter Horse. Red got rather excited about the arrival of a handsome gelding on the property and flirted with him shamelessly, sticking out her nose and fluttering her eyelashes.

Away in the fields, she suddenly realised she had a fit horse, on its toes, to run against. My dozy old donkey remembered her racing past. I felt the competitive spirit rushing through her. All right, I said, you can go if you want. I gave her her head. And then she recalled that she was a dowager duchess, and settled back to her stately canter as the other fella tore off up the hill, and we rolled along on a loose rein, with me laughing my head off. Red’s loveliness is so intense that a smile is not enough; the joy comes out of me in great whoops of hilarity.

It was another of our greatest rides. There were the hills, open before us; there was the clean Scottish air on our faces. Under me, was a horse who is all kindness and generosity and sweetness. She could have been infected by the high spirits of the new equine who had pitched up in her territory. She could have pulled and pranced and forgotten herself. She could have charged off into the blue horizon. Even the best schooled horse can do this in such a situation. But she chose not to. She had a ball, but her steadiness never left her.

And that is why I am wild with joy and pride, and unable to stop typing, and that is how I ended up with a long, tangled, not-making-much-sense post, because at times like this I want to tell you everything, and I have no editing facility.

But perhaps, if my subject was partly the danger of expecting the perfect, that is just as it should be. I would love to give you tight, finely-honed prose every day. But some days, it is going to be woolly and wandering, and maybe that is the whole point.

 

Just time for two pictures:

The unexpected visitor, with whom we rode:

And one of my best ever sights – the return of the travellers, beaming with delight. I don’t know which of them looks happier: