Stardust.

I now move into the vastness stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

In which I accept the mystery.

A very interesting work day today. I should know every damn thing there is to know about writing a novel by now. I’ve read all the manuals and even sat at the feet of a master and listened in awe and wonder. I’ve read most of the great novels and watched for how the mechanics work. But it’s a long time since I wrote a fiction, and I’m rusty. It’s coming back, bit by bit, and I watch the returning memory with interest.

Today, I thought: a crucial change does not have to be a big thing.

There are themes which need developing and deepening and characters who need more nuance and complexity. It’s all a bit bland and straightforward at the moment. I need to put my twisty little firestarter hat on. I had been rather daunted by some of the changes that were required, until I reminded myself of the power of smallness. You really can transform a chapter by adding a couple of lines. A profound shift does not require five new ten-page scenes. A line here, a word there, and the thing suddenly shimmers off the page. If a scene falls flatly, plodding along without that mysterious galvanic element, you can merely cut a paragraph or two, add three lines of dialogue, throw in a dash of weather, give it a smell (smell is really important and often overlooked in novels) and – le voilà – GORDON’S ALIVE.

Obviously you have to read that last part in a Brian Blessed voice for it to make any sense.

Anyway, once I realised this, I dashed off with the smoothing iron and did all my work in about ten minutes so I now can sneakily treat myself to the 2.45 at Fontwell, which is very cheering.

There are days when I plug away, putting in hours and hours and achieving nothing. And then there are bright, light, dancing days, when I suddenly get the point, and do what needs to be done in double-quick time and sit back with a sense of flushed triumph. How did that happen? I ask myself.

Nobody knows. Writing, like the thoroughbred, contains an insoluble mystery. One can learn it and practice it and codify it and get better at it, but there is a part of it which bears no explanation. Why do the words suddenly fall into the head, as if they have been sent? Where do they come from? Why are there days when everything is rotten and gone to hell, and days when everything works like a magic trick?

Nobody knows.

I do not know why my red mare will trot around me in perfect circles, as collected as a dressage horse, attached to no rope, responding sweetly to the merest body language. I’ve studied herd behaviour and learnt profound methods from the Australian horseman whose wisdom I follow, but I still don’t really know why she will do that. It still feels like a mystery and miracle.

This morning, after a display on the ground good enough to win gold medals, she stood quietly as I got on, did her lateral flexion as sweetly as if she had been secretly taking a course in the night, and walked out into the Scottish fields, as contained and poised as an ambassadress. She did perfect transitions from voice only. Usually, I cheat a bit, giving her a little cue from seat or legs. Trust her, I thought. She knows. So I really did just do one click for trot, and said walk for walk, and did not move my body or my hands at all, and there was the pin-sharp response, as light as air, as accurate as geometry, as beautiful as dreams.

I don’t know when anything has made me so happy. It was a deep, spreading delight, a flinging disbelief, a wild joy. How do you thank a horse, I wondered, for such gifts? She got strokes and love and scratches on her withers and extra breakfast, but I’ll never really be able to thank her in a way she can understand.

Accept the mystery, I thought.

I thought: I really am turning into an old hippy at heart.

I am a rationalist, and I like reasons for things. I like digging out the bones and working things out and having some good logic on which to rest my feet. But in the two things I love the most, in writing and in horsing, there is an essential mystery and I must let that be. Perhaps it is in that mystery that the joy lies.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just time for one, no prizes for guessing what it is. I’ve been hopeless about pictures lately, but I’m busy and pressed and in the crowded days something always has to give, and at the moment it is the camera. Very sorry about that.

Why I love racing; or, the mystery of the thoroughbred.

One of the things I like about Facebook is that, rather oddly, it does carry a lot of wisdom on it. People find old sayings or famous quotations which speak to them, and paste them up, and since I need all the wisdom I can get, I feel rather grateful. One of the perennials is a variation on the theme of: the only way to be free and be happy is to stop caring what people think.

Any shrink will tell you this is true. People will think what they will; often, you cannot persuade them out of their staunch opinions. If they sincerely believe you are a lunatic, no amount of empirical proofs of sanity will convince them otherwise. The only answer is to make your peace with it, and carry on your merry way.
I know this to be true. I think I’ve even written a version of it myself. Follow your own goofy star, I say, every other day.

And yet, for all that, I occasionally find I want to explain myself. I am faintly aware that my intemperate passions and wild enthusiasms and dogged obsessions are slightly odd, or may be perceived so. What I should say is: let the perception stand. Instead, there is an absurd part of me which wants to say: no, but look, look, this is why.

I was thinking today about the horse thing. It’s not just the mare, who excelled herself in about eight different ways this morning, so that I spent about ten minutes stroking her neck and saying ‘Clever girl, clever girl,’ over and over. All summer, I’ve been immersed in the racing. I wake on big race mornings and think, like a child at Christmas – it’s Sky Lantern day, or Estimate day, or Dawn Approach day. Or, in the case of this morning: it’s Al Kazeem day. Nothing else matters. By the time of the big race, I am in a state of swamping nerves, my hands literally trembling, my breath shallow, my heart banging like a timpani drum.

It’s not just the mighty Group One horses who stir my blood. I fall in love with doughty handicappers, or little baby maidens, who are just learning their craft (there is something very touching about a talented two-year-old running rather green, looking around as if to say What the hell is this all about?), or the old-timers who won’t give up. I love the dogged stayers who go through the mud, and the fleet sprinters who skim over the firm going.

It’s the beauty, of course. The thoroughbred is one of the most aesthetically pleasing creatures in the world. I love it that they come in all shapes and sizes. There is a horse today of whom I am very fond, called Montiridge. He’s a big, burly fella, deep through the girth, muscled in the neck, all power. A couple of weeks ago, I won money on the lovely Tiger Cliff, a completely different type – lengthy and athletic, built more like an old-fashioned chaser than something which wins on the flat at York. Lethal Force, another favourite who runs today, is a neat, compact sort, with a big, intelligent eye and a handsome head, whilst the Queen’s great filly Estimate is a much more lightly-furnished type, with a delicate, narrow face and an enduring sweetness about her.

But also, it is the mystery. In perhaps no other spectator sport, in no other gambling medium, are the imponderables so imponderable. Yesterday, a filly called Filia Regina looked nailed on. She is bred in the purple, well-named since her sire is a king among horses, and she had absolutely cantered up last time out. She was long odds-on. She tamely dropped away to finish ninth, whilst a 20-1 shot took the prize. The stewards were so astonished that they called in the connections for a stern word. It was reported in the paper that the trainer ‘had no explanation’.

It might have been the ground. The weather had turned nasty in the north, and the going had gone from good to firm to good to soft in a heartbeat. Everyone is wildly discussing the ground today for the big race at Leopardstown. Declaration of War prefers it firm; no, no, has won on soft in earlier days. Al Kazeem needs give in the ground; but then he has won four times on firm. Despite this, his trainer, Roger Charlton, is reported as ‘praying for rain’. Racing people are not a godly lot as a rule. The churches where I grew up, at Lambourn and East Garston, were full only at Christmas. Yet in stables all over the country, people will be scanning the skies and sending up little prayers for rain or shine.

The ground does matter, despite the theory that a really good horse will go on anything. But it’s not the only thing. Filia Regina might just not have had a going day. They are like that, thoroughbreds. They can get out of bed the wrong side, just like humans. No one really knows why some of them are much better going right-handed than left-handed, why one horse will be brilliant at York but ordinary at Ascot. Horses that start their careers needing to be held up at the back will suddenly develop into front-runners. There is the inexplicable ‘bounce’ factor. There is also the arcane equine-human alchemy. No matter how talented the jockey, some horses react better for one human than another. Some prefer a quiet rider who just sits and lets them get on with it; some need to be galvanised and bustled along.

I don’t know why the mystery enchants me so much, but it does. I feel that horses live in a parallel universe to humans. The worlds overlap, but are also discrete. In a faintly preposterous way, I feel that they graciously allow people to share their world, even as the human brain will never fully understand it. They are essentially wild flight animals, all instinct and power and heart. They step, delicately, beautifully, generously, into the human sphere, and consent to stay for a while. To me, there is a profound magic in that. And perhaps we all need a little sprinkle of magic to go with our daily reality.
 
Just time for one picture today, since I must get my bets on.

Talking of mystery, nobody knows why this mare, whose grandsire won the Derby and the Triple Crown, who can trace her bottom line to all three foundation sires, ended up trailing round the back of moderate fields in her racing days. And nobody knows why, with all that famously hot thoroughbred blood in her, she will follow me round the field like a dozy old donkey:



Except, of course, that she has the sweetest heart of any horse I ever met. But that’s a whole other story.