A good day.

Sometimes, I fall into a defensive crouch. I put so much pressure on myself that I go into a kind of awful tunnel vision. It is dark in the tunnel, and the critical voices in my head like it in there and use it as a kind of echo chamber. Magical thinking, which I try to resist, lifts its head and senses its opportunity, and tells me that I shall never come to any good.

As I wrangle and struggle with my book, I see only the things which are not there. It will never be good enough, I am not good enough to make it good enough, the agent will know it is not good enough and will have to tell me so.

Then a shift in perspective comes, and I go back to the beginning, with clear eyes. Today, my eyes were clear. I started the editing all over again. I could see very well what needed to be done, and I did it. And I found, to my astonishment, that some of it was really not bad.

Just because I think it is good does not mean other people will too. Writing is a subjective business. One is always dependent on someone else’s opinion. There is no certainty, and this is part of what wears away at the troubled, questing, hopeful mind.

But today I know that all the work I have done is worth it, even if I do get rejected. That counts for something.

In the morning, before work, before thought, I ring The Beloved Cousin. At the very sound of her voice, I know that every single thing will be all right. She has that miraculous effect.

Friendship, I think, as I ride out later into the mild Scottish day, the air gentle against my face, never gets the press it deserves. It’s always romantic love which has the classic novels written about it, the songs, the poems, the plays, the films, the sonnets. But friend love, for me, is the one that saves your life, lifts your heart, restores your sanity, confirms your sense of self.

The Beloved Cousin understands every single word I say, laughs at my jokes, unpicks my troubles as if they were her own, makes me feel like a better human, remembers all the things I have forgotten, does not mind whether I am up, down or round the houses, expects me to be nothing but my own flawed, flaky self. She just gets it. (In this case, It is everything.)

As if determined to continue the love and loveliness, the red mare was at her absolute, shining, glittering crest and peak. She rode like a dream, was funny and dear, and showed off her dressage diva trot all the way down the lime avenue, with no reins and no stirrups. She seems to find it mildly amusing that I kick my feet out of the irons and wave my arms in the air, and boxes along in her best self-carriage whilst I laugh with delight.

And then there was the good work and I backed a ten-to-one winner at Goodwood as the ravishing Malabar, the only filly in the race, put the boys in their place, kicking away and streaking down the straight, her beautiful bay coat gleaming in the sun.

There are bad days, and good days. I like to record the good days, because when the shadows come, I find it soothing to look back and remember what the light is like. Today was all light.

A profound shift in perspective.

I write here a great deal about the Perspective Police. I invented the Perspective Police a few years ago, and was so proud of them that I even featured the entire brigade in Backwards. I love utility, and they are nothing if not utile. They are the ones who bash down the door when one is sliding into the slough of self-pity or melancholia, and remind one sternly of all the blessings and good fortunes. They are an excellent corrective and I am always glad when I hear them get their battering rams out.

Now that I volunteer at HorseBack UK, I get a visit from The Perspective Police pretty much every day. It’s as if they have moved from their headquarters in some distant place, and camped out in the garden.

But this morning, I heard something which went even beyond their remit. It was a story which ran so far past my imagination that I don’t have good words for it. I don’t really have any words for it, and words are my life and my love. All I thought, as I heard it, was that this should never, ever happen to a human being. It is too much for one heart and mind and body to bear.

And yet there was this gentleman, who, despite having been blown up three times, as he told me in a matter of fact voice, looked fit and strong and real. Part of the difficulty is the gap between his outward aspect and what has happened to him. I cannot tell you the details, but you may get some sense of it when I say that being blown up was the very least of it.

He tells his story with no mawkish self-regard, no grandstanding, no look at me. It just comes out, as we talk together in the shade of an ancient stand of oak trees, with the blue Scottish hills glimmering in the distance. His voice is quiet and even; he uses no long words, no cheap dramatics, no hyperbole. He is long past hyperbole.

One of the things I feel strongly, although I do not say this out loud, because I think it would sound stupid, is that I am overwhelmed by a keen sense of privilege that he would choose to tell it to me. It is the worst story I have ever heard, yet I am glad I know it.

I want to say something clever and wise, about all this. I want to slot it into some kind of good life lesson, weave it into a parable. I want to say something about collective psychology, and societal fears and guilts, about averting the eyes from the unimaginable, about the daily gift of being able to live a normal life, to sleep at night.

I want to say something about the unheralded gift of the things not seen. There are men and women out there who have witnessed things which no human eye should have to witness. And those pictures never go away, ever. They are seared into the brain, flashing and lurid and constant.

But my fingers stutter and stall over the keyboard, because it is here that language fails, and imagination fails, and even the human heart, in which I have such faith, fails. There is a ragged, humming disbelief that such people can go on putting one foot in front of the other, can get out of bed in the morning, can function at all in the world. And yet they do. They can stand, in a quiet corner of Scotland, and tell their story to an unknown woman, in words of such clarity and authenticity that it takes the breath away.

‘Sometimes it is easier to talk to a stranger,’ the gentleman says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I understand that.’

At least here is something I can understand.

‘Well, everyone has a story,’ he says, drily, wryly, looking out to those indigo mountains, which were here before he and I were ever dreamt of, and shall be here for thousands of years after we have gone.

Not everyone, I think, has a story like that.

My sense of perspective has undergone a profound shift. I feel it physically, in my body, as if the very atoms that make up my corporeal self are moving around, reconfiguring themselves.

I shall carry his story with me now. It is stitched into my heart.

I shall think of that quiet gentleman. I shall think of his dignity and fortitude.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, I shall remember.

 

Today’s pictures:

Afterwards, I went and stood with this person for a long time. She is very happy today, and she has taken on her calmest aspect, as if some deep stillness is at work in her. It is a profound, spreading authenticity, as if she is at one with her world, as if she is her most real, horsey self. It is another of those things which is hard to put into words, but it communicates itself like smoke across the species divide. It goes from one equine spirit to one human one, and brings back a sense of the simple fact of existence, of living and breathing and being alive in this precise moment. It anchors me back to the very earth on which I stand:

That is her daily gift, which she gives with simple generosity. When people ask -why the horse? – that is why.

And then I looked at these:

And I stared at the hill:

And I cannot tell you what I felt.

What a difference a day makes. Or, fantasy and reality. Or, I am a bit of an idiot.

Almost every human has a neat little box-set of fantasies about themselves. I would guess that many, many humans think they have good taste, and can dance. (This is usually not true.)

I was thinking about this because I believe that I wrote something on this blog, not many days ago, along the lines of: I am usually wary of writing about myself.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, HA, must have gone the hollow, knowing laughter of the Dear Readers. How politely you restrained yourself from pointing out that this was a frankly peculiar and empirically inaccurate statement.

I have several fantasies about myself. One is that I can secretly sing. I sort of know this is not true, but I almost believe it, all the same. Occasionally, if the key is right and the light is coming from the correct direction, I can carry a tune, but that’s not the same thing at all.

I think I am not competitive. Anyone who has seen me play any kind of game knows this is arrant nonsense. When I am driving south, I even compete pointlessly against myself: best time from Hamilton to Tebay, quickest fling over the Cairn 'O Mount; I set my watch and grit my teeth. Still, I persist in the delusion.

I like to pretend that I am a kind, tolerant person, who does not stoop to ad hominem and restrains the inner bitch. I’d probably get a half pants on fire for that one. I attempt kindness, and believe in it; I embrace keenly the idea of tolerance. But sometimes, oh, oh, that inner bitch comes out and does the tango. Then I can only resort to the enduring line from Some Like it Hot: ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ It’s a fairly feeble excuse.

I think I am perfectly marvellous at perspective. You know how I bash on about the perspective police. I can call the buggers in, but my ability to spiral into the pit of despair over the smallest slight, to conclude that I am utterly useless after a minuscule setback is currently at Olympic level.

I could go on. You get the drift.

I was wondering why I nurtured the fantasy that I don’t write about myself all the time, on this blog. I think it is because I really do dislike solipsism; I find those endless columns in the first person quite tiring, unless they are very funny indeed; I can’t bear those people who bring every single subject back to their own experience. One of the saddest things at any social gathering is talking to a person who does not ask you a single question. (I end up treating this as some kind of anthropological survey, in order to keep death by dullness at bay.)

But the truth is that this is all about me. Even when I pretend that I am tackling some great objective subject, it is still from my own discrete point of view.

I suppose it is allowed, because the whole point of a personal blog is that it is, of course, personal. As I always say, no one is forced to read the thing. But it does seem rather indulgent, and I feel a bit green about the gills as I must admit to myself that it is mostly unfettered solipsism.

I should now counter this horrid tendency at once by tackling a Great Question of the Day. Surely I must have something interesting to add about the tightening of the polls in Ohio, or the scandal at the poor old BBC, or the shouting over the badger cull.

It turns out, not. Not today.

Today, I learnt yet another of those small life lessons that I seem to be accumulating like lifebelts. It is not a specially clever lesson, but it feels like a potent one to me, so I am going to risk the farther shores of self-indulgence and share it with the group.

It is: just because one thing went wrong, it does not mean everything is crap.

You see the profundity.

My ride with my mare yesterday really was awful. I felt furious with myself, with her, with the whole damn thing. I thought I was an idiot even to have bought a horse. I truly believed that our relationship, which I had cherished so, and invested so much in, lay smashed on the floor like so much broken china. I am a forty-five-year old professional female, and it reduced me to childish tears.

When I went up this morning, I was determined to make things better, but I was not sure how. I had so much raging angst and disappointment that I could hardly look at her. It had all gone to hell, and there was nothing to be rescued from the ashes.

Then, all the elements configured themselves in my favour. It was the most ravishing, misty morning. The sun was muddling through the mist, diffusing a holy blue light over the hills. The mare was sweet and calm. We did a new kind of work on the ground; she was responsive and willing. I felt some of the fury and shame shift.

With some trepidation, I got on. Baby steps, I told myself. And: fuck ‘em all if they can’t take a joke. And: no one is watching and judging.

She was immaculate. Not a shiver of resistance, no head-tossing, no baulking, no mulishness. She went straight and true, calm as a Carmelite, happy as a nut. Yesterday, every inch of her body was saying no; today, every atom said yes.

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was that I tried something new. Perhaps it was that I switched my mindset a little. I wondered if I had been spoiling and babying her, even though officially I frown on this. I thought it was time to assert myself, not in a bullying shouty way, but in a determined, steady way.

Perhaps it was just chance or fate or some unknown thing. The mystery of the thoroughbred is something to which I return again and again in these pages.

Everything was repaired, just like that. Love and confidence flooded back. She stood with me afterwards with her head on my shoulder and we watched the yellow sun chase away the early shadows.

The pony came over and rubbed her dear little forehead against my arm and whickered. The filly ambled over for some of the affection. Everyone was very still and very happy.

My little herd, I thought; best thing I ever did. The ruins transfigured themselves into a shining citadel. All my idiotic fears dissipated; reality returned. It was just one thing. I must, must, must remember this. I don’t know why I find it so easy to forget.

Then I went home, did many words of work, attended to most of the things that needed attention, had a sweet time with the Pigeon, drank some strong coffee, had a bet on the 3.05 at Newmarket, and told myself, for the hundred and twentieth time this year, that I really must try not to be quite such an idiot.

 

Today’s pictures:

The misty morning, as I came out of my front door:

And up at Red’s View, varying degrees of mist, as the light started to break through:

Autumn the Filly:

Red inspecting the blue mist whilst Myfanwy the Pony has a little rest:

M the P in the mist:

Minnie the Moocher:

Here is how this goes:

Oh, there you are.

I am making my approach.

With my very, very good face on.

And the dial set to Adorable.

SO YOU WILL GIVE ME LOVE AND TREATS.

Actually, it only goes like that in my mind. In her horsey mind, who knows?

The Pigeon always looks very pretty against the fallen leaves, although she has her resigned how long do I have to sit here before you throw the ball face on:

REALLY? That long?

The hill:

In which I regain perspective

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

So sorry about yesterday. I mislaid it. Occasionally I lose entire days; it’s as if they have fallen down the back of the sofa.

Time no longer has its usual temporal aspect but seems composed of a series of inexplicable jerks. I start a sentence at five past ten, and half an hour later is it time for tea. I squint out of the window, where the sky is an uninformative dirty white, looking for a tear in the space-time continuum.

I am also afflicted by alternating moments of forgetfulness and whimsy. I think longingly of my university days, when I had to write so many essays and read so many primary sources that my brain was as fit as a butcher’s dog. Now it creaks and groans under sustained effort, like an ancient schooner in a high sea.

The mare though, was an absolute angel this morning. Yesterday, she was not in the mood at all, rolling her eyes at me in schoolgirl defiance. Today, she was like one of those videos that people put on the internet to show natural horsemanship at its crest and peak. It was as if she took a course in the night, secretly. She did not crowd me, locked on to my shoulder like a dream, stopped when I said stop, stood for ten minutes when told to stand as I wandered off to test her. Sometimes, when she does things this well, it makes me laugh out loud.

Then I come back to the book and all is adrenaline and jangle.

Why are books sometimes so hard? Well, it’s mostly redundancy. I might spend a couple of weeks researching an aspect of the subject. I make notes, I think about it, eventually I write it. Then I get to the Dead Darlings stage, and it must be murdered. It might be buggery bollocks, or it might be perfectly fine, but events have overtaken it. I have another, better section on a similar theme, or something has happened out in the world which makes it seem dated, or there just isn’t room. I’ve already done about 20,000 words too many, and I’m still going.

I have to have a tiny wail at this stage of the process, mostly because I need to explain why the current state of blogging is so shockingly poor. And, because I am prone to occasional wailing generally.

But the perspective police are on the march. I listen to the news from Syria, the only thing dark and dramatic enough to burst my current news bubble. I think: there are children being slaughtered in the streets. By contrast, I am having am mild mental wrangle. The only thing I have at risk is my amour-propre: I may write a not good enough book and critics will call it by its name. That is the worst that may happen. It is not life and death. It is not being shot to death in the street by militia goons. So, I step back from complaint and remember my great good fortune and regain the perspective.

On a basic human level, there is one thing I really do not understand. Assad once seemed like a fairly ordinary man. He was an ophthalmologist from the Edgware Road, for God’s sake. Now he is acting like the most unrestrained and barbarous dictator. What he is doing to his people is monstrous. I hate the lazy, melodramatic use of the word evil,  but it fits here: what he is doing is evil. 

What I don’t get is how it can be worth it. How can you steep yourself so far in blood, kill women and children in the streets, murder or lock up any opposition, lose a any sense of morality or remorse, just for an empty title and a limousine? Sure, you are president, but of a small country with high unemployment, diminishing oil, and hopelessly corrupt public services. You are internationally reviled and ostracised. Is the lure of such tarnished power really worth all that killing? I genuinely do not understand the psychology. The cost is so disproportionate to the reward. I mean, he does not look like a homicidal maniac, so presumably he must be calculating some kind of cost and reward; he is not foaming at the mouth mad. That is what I do not get. It seems that Assad has sold his soul for a mess of pottage, and his poor country is paying the brutal, unimaginable price.

 

Pictures of the day. It seems a bit odd to have flowers after that last thought, but I suppose they know nothing of dictatorships; they just grow in the good earth:

 

The rain has come back, as you can see, and the Pigeon is adorably wet:

Red, in close-up:

Where the hill should be:

In which perspective is again elusive

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The overreaction theme continues. Yesterday I bust a tyre. I was driving like a maniac over potholes and I trashed my front wheel. It was completely and utterly my fault. You should have heard the riot act I read myself in my own head. Twenty-seven kinds of idiot. And do you know why I was driving fast? Not because I had to get somewhere or had an appointment to fill, oh no. It was because one of my crazed prejudices is that only fussy old ladies drive slowly over potholes. It’s the kind of attitude you might find in a nineteen year old boy, not a woman of a certain age. In fact, I now realise, grown up and sensible people drive slowly over potholes. Because then they don’t have to chuck away perfectly good tyres with vast amounts of tread left on them.

The tyre thing went from minor inconvenience to end of the world. It loomed so large I could hardly sleep. Of course, the problem is that I have never learnt to change a wheel. This is a most shameful confession, and I do not know how I have been able to call myself a feminist all these years. A great wall of self-recrimination rose in my addled head. As a result of this dereliction, I would have to ask someone. I hate doing this for two reasons. One is it confirms all kinds of female stereotypes. Two is that I don’t like asking for help generally; it is one of my psychological flaws. I equate it with weakness, or something nutty like that. It is old magical thinking which I can’t quite wish away.

In the end, it was a bit of a life lesson, and I am mad for life lessons just now. The tremendous smiling neighbour, the man who knows how to get things done, for whom practical matters are meat and drink, not only offered to change the tyre, but made not one reference, not by the flicker of an eye or the slide of the voice, to ditzy females who know not one lug nut from another.

He even laughed at my jokes whilst he did it. (I was making a lot of jokes as blatant displacement activity. And to cover up the fact that I felt like ten kinds of fool.) And here is the thing: he seemed pleased to be able to do me a good turn.

Perhaps it does not mean that I am hopeless and pointless and feckless, that I do not know how to change my own wheel. (Obviously I shall now learn, because it’s too silly not to.) I could decide to regard it as a perfect opportunity for the kind neighbour to show the crest and peak of his kindness, and make me very, very happy.

I lavished him with thanks and admiration; most sincere, since I admire people who are good at the practical things for which I have no skill. I always think that asking people for favours is the most arrant imposition and bore. In fact, it may be the complete opposite. They get to feel valued and useful and good at something. It ends with all smiles. Everyone wins. Well, that is my new fledgling theory, and I think I am sticking to it.

Up at the field, in a borrowed car, I rub the mare in the special spot behind her ears that she loves, and watch her close her eyes in pleasure. She rests her head against me, and breathes slowly through her nostrils. The love rises and blooms. She does not care that I know nothing of mechanics. She has no judgement on what I can or cannot do. I bring her carrots and sing her songs and rub her sweet spots and give her love. In return, she gives me her trust. It’s a bargain of such purity that it takes my breath away.

 

Today's pictures – The sun actually shone, so here are views and lovely, gleaming horses:

Oh, and sudden, random, running hen:

The ladyship, taking her ease:

Off she goes:

With her small friend:

From the sidelines, the Pigeon observes. She is still not quite sold on the whole huge red dog thing. Red lowers her head and sniffs the Pidge, and breathes gently on her, and the Pigeon is torn between thinking this quite interesting and charming, and saying – get this great thing off me. I can see her flicking back and forth in her old mind. I find the best answer is extra biscuits, which seems to go down pretty well:

The hill, rather blurry behind the horse chestnut, which is really putting out its leaves now: