Stoicism is not enough.

Stoicism, it turns out, can only get you so far.

I think: did I know this, and forget it? Did wish-thinking take over, so that I dreamt up a luring fantasy that I could just stoic my way out of it? Or did I remember very well, but think I’d give it shot anyway?

I’m not giving up on stoicism. I love it. I do not like the things which stand in opposition to it. I do not like the weeping and wailing and look-at-me-ing. I do not admire grandstanding and drama queening and that nasty strain of competitive grief which is played so ruthlessly by the narcissist. I do not like ululation and holding up the bleeding hands and the playing of the victim.

Everybody has sorrow. Everybody’s heart breaks. Everybody loses someone they love.

There are two voices in my head. (Who am I fooling? There are twenty-seven voices in my head. Sometimes it gets very crowded in there.) But these two voices are speaking the loudest, just now, and they are both saying the same thing.

One says: your mum died. This is the voice which understands well that is an ocean of loss, a great, unmapped expanse of water, almost impossible to navigate. That voice knows that the rogue waves will leave me storm-tossed, and hurl me, breathless and hopeless, to the beach, only to suck me out to sea again. This voice says there is no point trying to fight it or neaten it or pretend that it’s only an ordinary thing which happens to everyone. It does happen to everyone, but at the moment it is happening to me. This voice says, kindly, gently, that I must keep sailing on until that great tempest blows itself out.

The other voice says: your mum died. No need to make a fuss, says that voice, a steely note in it. (This is the same voice that says, when I dress up for a party, well, no-one is going to be looking at you.) Get on, says that voice, and for God’s sake don’t be a bore. Sing another song boys, says this voice, who has been listening to Leonard Cohen, this one has grown old and bitter. This voice is quite useful, in a way. It is the voice which gets me to HorseBack to do my work there, and gets me out to the field to check the water trough and put out the hay, and drives me to make breakfast every morning for my dear stepfather and make bright conversation about world events to cheer him up and keep his mind off it. (As if I could keep his mind off it.)

Another wiser, saner voice speaks now. That voice says: they are both right, and you have to find the balance between the two. Find the balance. Stoicism is not enough, although it can be good and useful and keep one existing in the world. The wild stormy griefs must be let out, from time to time. Probably best if one does that in a nice, quiet, private place, so as not to startle the horses, but they must be given their moment.

Let it out, keep it in. It’s like a push-me-pull-you. Wallowing is no good; self-indulgence is no good; but the thing is real and true and must be felt. Find the balance.

I write all this because I burst into tears in front of the poor stepfather this morning. For all that I believe my job is to cheer him up and be my best self for him, I could not help it. Out they came, the streaming tears. Then I put on my ridiculous hat and made a joke about it. ‘No wonder I am crying,’ I said, a bit watery, ‘when I have a hat like this. It is a truly tragic hat. But it does keep the rain off.’

(I feel there is a life lesson in this, although I can’t quite put my finger on it. It really is a tragic hat, but it really does keep the rain off.)

And we laughed, and I went home to do my work, and said that I would see him in the morning.

 

Today’s pictures:

The rain stopped this morning, and the sun shone, and my sweet girls went out into the set-aside to have a little graze. They are so happy and so muddy and so woolly and so absolutely themselves, rooted in this good Scottish earth, shimmering with goodness and authenticity. They are my best consolation, because they are so beautiful and true:

Horses and flowers.

Got the horses all rugged up yesterday for Storm Abigail, and then came down this morning to find this enchanting scene – sunshine and happy faces:

(We were very lucky with the storm. It roared in from the west, glanced at us for a moment, and then veered quickly north, to go and do its mischief in Orkney and Shetland. Poor things; they got the brunt of it.)

Then did the flowers for my mother’s wake. We are calling it a gathering, because wake is too gloomy. I’ve also cooked about eighty-seven cheese bloody puffs, along with salmon mousse, yellow pepper soup (to be had in shot glasses), smoked mackerel pâté, a spicy tomato salsa, and some feta cheese thing which will go on little rounds of baguette toast. I’m quite tired. But the flowers came out beautifully, and I’m pleased about that:

I keep meaning to say thank you thank you thank you, to all the Dear Readers who have left such enchanting messages. So many of you have visited this foreign country, and your words of generosity and understanding fly through the ether to lift my battered heart. The heart is very, very bashed. But it’s going to be sunny tomorrow, and we shall remember the old lady well, and on on on I bugger, because the only thing to do is to keep buggering on. It is the greatest catchphrase of this funny old island race, and I cling to it like a drowning woman in a stormy sea.

The crying stage.

I’m in the crying stage. I’ve been through shock, irrational fury, stoicism and looking on the bright side. Now every word, every memory, every small thing makes me cry.

This is good. The tears have to come out or they get stuck inside and turn angry and bitter.

The difficult part is not the tears, it is that this stage makes me feel as if I have been stripped of a layer of skin. I have absolutely no defences against the slings and arrows, and find normal conduct a strain, like walking uphill in a headwind. A well-meant suggestion feels like a shattering criticism of my entire self. The usual rough and tumble of other people living their usual lives makes me feel as if I have been hurled into a rioting crowd. A careless word or a sharp tone of voice are like red-hot brands on my paper-thin skin. An oversight feels like arrant rejection. A mild demand feels like a roaring sergeant-major is sending me up Everest without oxygen.

I don’t like wimpishness. I don’t like the stripped skin part because it reduces me to one of those weedy drama queens whose company is so exhausting. I don’t want to be that person. I want to butch up. But butchness will only return with time and I have to bloody well wait it out. I have to go slowly. This part cannot be rushed. This pisses me off quite a lot.

I suddenly think those clever Edwardians had it right when they went into black for six months after a death, and then lavender for the next six. It was a subtle, tacit sign to say Handle with Care. Many people are afraid of grief, and desperately want one to get back to normal. This is kind and faintly callous at the same time; it is very human and entirely understandable. The singed spirit does not want pity or even sympathy. The yearning heart does not need everyone to walk on eggshells. Solemn faces are not required. Jokes and laughter are essential. But gentleness and kindness and thought are needed and not everyone has those immediately to hand.

Some people are naturals with grief just like some people are natural with horses. I am passionately glad for those people. Oddly enough, today the best and most shimmering of them was the lady in the Co-op. Our Co-op is a small shop, and I know quite a lot of the people behind the till well. There is one I especially like and this morning she spoke the most beautiful and soothing words. They were so fluent, so authentic, so poetic that it was as if she had rehearsed them for this very moment. She had no fear and she had no pity. She had understanding, and a generosity of spirit which shone out of her like starlight.

Not everyone gets it. Why should they? But I cherish the ones who do.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just two today. They are of the person who gets it most of all. She is all gentleness and peace and understanding. She was as tender with me today as if I had been made of glass. Horses are famously telepathic and thoroughbreds especially so, because of their high sensitivity and intelligent. But this has taken it to a whole new level. I think she has been secretly watching Spinal Tap, and has decided to crank up her loveliness to eleven:

My mission, should I choose to accept it.

Well, the Be Happy For Mum plan didn’t go all that badly, in the end. I thought that it might be the most shaming disaster. I thought that everyone might shout through the ether Oh for goodness’ sake, just be bloody sad and get it over with. (I suspect that was a bit of Freudian projection, and in fact was the voice of my critical self, who is a terrible old vampish harridan and has always had too much gin.) In actual fact, on the Facebook, on the blog, kind people, some known well to me, some complete strangers, all rose up in glory and said generous and funny and wise things, which touched and amazed my bashed heart.

Here is what I learnt, because I must always learn something. All these years on, and I am still a girly swot at heart.

There is one place that the sadness really and truly does go completely away and that is on the back of my thoroughbred mare. I always knew that she did have super-powers. I just did not quite know how powerful they were. Being with her is cheering and soothing, but it’s on her back, when I feel her power under me and the peace that she carries in her flowing from her mighty body into my puny one, that everything falls into a stunning equilibrium. All the bad and sad things just fall away and I am free. I don’t know how this happens, but it does. She is a miracle horse and that’s the end of it.

The joys are there, if you look for them. They don’t banish the sorrow, but they go in tandem with them, like a pair of slightly grumpy and ill-matched carriage horses, the kind that the Queen would not use for state occasions. I’m going to go on driving my wonky carriage, and one day, those two ponies will learn to trot along together.

My stabs at normality are quite funny. I’m a little off kilter. Everything I say is a crotchet off-beat. My laughter is a bit too loud. My walk is a bit ragged. My clothes are frankly peculiar. My hair is a bit bonkers. My attempts to make sense don’t quite make sense.

Laughter still exists though, and it is as healing as tears. I have a new theory that grief is like a trapped energy and has to be let go, in great gusts. It needs to be released from the actual body. Shouty tears can do this, but so can shouty laughter. The Beloved Stepfather made me laugh at breakfast so much that I couldn’t speak for four minutes. It was one of those comical stories so recondite and absurd and almost tragic that only he and I (and my mother had she been here) could get it. That made it even more intense. Once he had told me the absurd thing, and I started laughing helplessly, he started laughing too, the first proper laugh he has done since it happened. It was naughty schoolboy laughter, because it was the kind of thing that was really quite sad in some ways, but we couldn’t help it, it tickled us to death. That laughter opened the door and let some of that captured energy out.

I have to keep reminding myself to let my shoulders go. I have another theory, you will be amazed to hear, that people trap their emotions in different parts of their bodies. Some people get headaches, or stomach cramps. I get the shoulders up around my ears. Every half an hour, I have to say: get those damn shoulders down.

Talking out loud is oddly helpful. I’ve always been prone to this, and it’s getting worse as I get older. Lately, I find myself in the Co-op saying, at shamingly high volume: ‘Now, what have I forgotten?’ Since Saturday, I have been walking round the house saying ‘Oh,’ and ‘Ah,’ and ‘Oof,’ and ‘What next?’ I say: ‘Oh, Mum,’ with a dying fall. I expect soon I shall move on to: ‘Steady the buffs.’

I like having a mission, and I’m going to keep on my mission of hunting for beauty, squinting for the good, searching for the consolations. My old friend The Horseman, who is a man of great matter-of-factness, not a sentimental bone in his body, but a man of oak, the sort of man on whom you can really rely when the chips are down, wrote me a brilliant, pithy message. It said: ‘Live hard in respect for those who can’t.’ That is my mission.

But, and here I think is the important thing, I’m not going to scold myself when I can’t do that. There will be days when it’s not possible. It’s a good goal, and a fine thought. I keep it in the front of my mind, like a shining amulet. The good old Horseman. He was there when my dad died, and when my dog died (he found me in streaming tears on his drive and staunchly faced them without fear) and now he has sent me a line to live by.

Rather to my astonishment, I have achieved quite a lot this week. I have written words, and done good work for HorseBack, and made soup, and worked my new mare, and ridden my old mare in glorious cowgirl canters on a loose rein, and even arranged some flowers. There are roses on my desk. There are never roses on my desk. They were on special offer and I thought, bugger it, I must have roses. They feel sweetly symbolic and I look at them now as I write and think: yes, yes, the small things. I live now in the world of the small things, so that the big thing does not overwhelm me, so that I do not drown.

 

Today’s pictures:

The roses:

I found this wonderful picture of my mother this morning. I remember that fur hat so well. I was very small when she had it, and I used to whip it off her head and hold it and stroke it as if it were a small bear. I can feel it now:

And this picture was in the same book. It is my sister, on her side-saddle champion. This says a lot about my mother. It was she who taught us to ride these ponies, who schooled them and groomed them and taught us sternly to look after them. If we were to have the great fortune to have such glorious animals, we had to be responsible for them. We were never allowed to come in at the end of the day until our ponies were happy and settled with their bran mashes. She would get up at three in the morning to drive us to distant shows – to the Three Counties, and Builth Wells, and Windsor, and Peterborough – and she would make us the best bacon sandwiches in the world to sustain us for the road:

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:

An ordinary day.

Last night, for no reason at all, I missed my father so much it felt as if someone had kicked me in the chest. The old gentleman is close by me every day, as I watch the racing and put on my idiotic accumulators, just as he taught me. Most of the time, I fold him into my heart and keep him there and think of him with smiles rather than tears. And then, out of a clear blue sky, came the sense of rupture and loss, all over again.

Today, I returned to cheerfulness and stoicism. It’s quite hard not to when you spend the morning with two men who have been blown up by improvised explosive devices and make jokes about it.

It was not a magical day. It was a muddling through day. The wind came in bitter and severe from the north, and a hard sleetish rain fell in squalls. My duchess was quite put out and gave in to uncharacteristic grumpiness. She was not the magical creature who lifts my heart to a higher plane today; she was a cross, muddy horse, wanting her hay. It was quite nice to be reminded that she has her moments of ordinariness. Otherwise she is very real danger of becoming too perfect, galloping into a mythical realm where puny mortals cannot follow.

I made a stew which was all right, but not delicious. I did some work which was perfectly fine, but not stellar. I had a couple of bets which went nowhere, although the lovely Wonderful Charm did do the business in the novice chase. I felt a bit cold and scratchy and hunched in the shoulders.

It was, in other words, an ordinary day. It was the very stuff of which human life is made. It can’t be all love and trees. Sometimes it is mud and weather. And that is quite perfectly fine.

 

Too dreich for the camera today, and Herself was far too ornery to put her photograph face on, so I remind myself of the moments of glory with this, taken by The Remarkable Trainer. That’s the happy face of my ex-racing, ex-polo mare, stretching out her dear neck, entirely at ease in her great thoroughbred body, in sunnier times. There are two things I do when I feel a bit gloomy. One is to watch re-runs of Kauto Star winning his fifth King George. One is to look at this glorious creature, and think how far we have come together. It’s not doing dressage or competing at Hickstead. It has required very little technical skill, only love and time. But that, right there, is all blue ribands to me.

Of work and time and great, great mares.

As I go up to HorseBack to do my morning stint, I get put up on a horse. If someone says to me ‘Would you want to ride?’ the only answer is yes. The horses need a last go over the obstacle course in the arena before the first participants arrive next week, and it also means that the HorseBack team who are studying for their UK Coaching Certificate can put in some teaching practice. I get to have fun and feel useful and learn more about the Western riding, which is starting to feel less strange to me now.

As I leave, I get a lovely invitation to lunch. Feeling like an idiot, I have to say no, because I am running back to my desk. The three current projects I am juggling must be juggled, and my time management has not yet caught up, even though I swear I am going to improve it every day. Lunch just now is a thing of moments; fuel from the fridge to get through the rest of the day. This is quite odd, for a greedy person like me, but a great relief for Red the Mare since it means I shall make a nice light weight on her back.

I was reading yesterday about someone going on the notorious 5-2 diet. I thought: I have a diet. It’s the No Diet Diet, which is good for me since I refuse to go on any weight-loss regime for political reasons. I think it would make the Pankhursts sad. The suffragettes did not chain themselves to railings so that I could hate my body. On the other hand, if you are riding a kind thoroughbred mare, it’s only polite not to be too heavy on her.

The No-Diet Diet consists of: taking on absurd amounts of work and being useless at managing your time, which means that you have no space to cook great lunches loaded with olive oil as was my old tradition. Now it’s a ham sandwich and a cup of green soup, which makes the banting effortless. I’m far too busy even to notice I am eating less than usual.

I would like though, when kind people say come and have lunch, to be able to smile and say yes, instead of shaking my head with a wild look of panic in my eyes. I am going to work on order and lists. I am going to make timetables and stick to them. I’ll get there in the end.

All focus today is to finish work in time to settle down and watch the mighty Hurricane Fly in the 5.30 at Punchestown. Yesterday, the great mare Quevega made me cry actual tears of joy and admiration with her dancing brilliance. I hope today my lovely Fly will do the same.

A snatch of poetry suddenly comes into my head. It is from George Whyte Melville, a horseman to his boots, who fought with the Turkish cavalry in the Crimea.

‘I have lived my life -I am nearly done –
I have played the game all round;
But I freely admit that the best of my fun
I owe it to horse and hound.
With a hopeful heart and a conscience clear,
I can laugh in your face, Black Care;
Though you're hovering near, there's not room for you here,
On the back of my good grey mare.’

Ah, I think, a hardened old fellow brought almost to sentimentality by the very thought of his darling girl. Mares do that I think, whether you see them on the racecourse, or mooch with them in the field. At Punchestown, Quevega looked so tiny and plain compared to the great shining strapping geldings she was up against. She has no flashy looks; like the equally brave and brilliant Dawn Run, she is a most ordinary bay mare. Nothing to look at, said the commentators. I don’t mean to be rude, one of them added. Yet it is true; she would never catch the eye in the paddock.

But oh, when she was let loose by Ruby Walsh in the glimmering Irish sun, she was a thing of singing beauty. Poetry in motion is a platitude now, rubbed thin with use, but it could have been minted for her.

As I stood with Red later, in the evening light, feeling her dear head resting on my shoulder, scratching her cheek and telling her the story of the race, I thought: there really is something about the ladies. The mares stop my heart like nothing else.

 

Today’s pictures:

Talking of ladies, here are some splendid ones. The sheep and lambs have come for their annual visit to the south meadow. It is a real sign of spring and makes me smile every time I see them:

Daffs:

Winnie, one of my favourite HorseBack UK mares, who is doing good work this week:

Grinning madly, getting better at the Western, on the supremely relaxed Apollo:

Mr Stanley, with a look which says: don’t mention squirrels unless you really mean it:

My lovely girl:

The hill: