Election Day.

Up early, and out. I do some telephoning for my local candidate, asking people if they needed help getting to the polling station. I hate ringing up strangers and have to put on a very special low, grown-up voice to brush through it. It goes against everything that it means to be British. I think: I shall never, ever again be brusque with a cold-caller. (I have been known to do a horrid sort of passive aggression, sounding polite, but in fact being as mean as Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, at her most waspish. I am not proud of myself for this and resolve to stop it at once.)

I go to HorseBack and do my work there. It’s a small course this week, only four veterans, all of them dealing with a variety of mental and physical challenges. I like the small courses because I can get to know the men and women a bit, and have time to listen to their stories, so I can feel their triumphs as if they were my own. One veteran, who served as a nurse, was really properly frightened of the whole idea of horses, but today she screwed her courage to the sticking place and rode out on a sweet-natured bay Quarter Horse mare under the wide Scottish sky.

I’m so used to horses being home to me that I find it quite hard to put myself in the shoes of someone for whom they are completely alien. I realise how hard and strange it must be, to get up for the first time on a half-ton flight animal, and not know where to put your hands or your legs or how the steering works. And then they start to get it, and they feel the movement of the horse under them, and they ask the good question and get the good answer, and that is when the smiles break out like beacons.

I edit 9,000 words of book and try to think about the shape of the thing. There is a new scene I have to write and I can’t quite work out where to fit it in. Whenever I am alone, driving in the car, I run through the scene in my head, putting myself in as the main protagonist, trying to see what she sees, feel what she feels. I have to know her like I know myself.

I roast some beef, for strength. I need the iron. There shall be beef sandwiches for the next two days, because I’ll be too tired to cook after the election. I listen to the news on Radio Four and miss the political stuff. The BBC is not allowed to broadcast anything political until the polls close. It’s slightly absurd, but it’s rather honourable too. This is the quiet day which belongs to the voters. All the pundits and commentators and professors and psephological experts fall silent, as the ordinary people who are affected by the daily actions of government come out into the light to make their own decisions.

I vote.

I love voting. It stitches me into history, into my community, into the social contract of my country. I understand well the arguments against; I know the logic of the spoiled ballot or the furious abstention. I know that first past the post means that, in some places, there is no hope for your chosen party. My own vote will almost certainly not win. But it will be counted. I choose to vote because of the women of Saudi Arabia, because of the Pankhursts, because of poor, deluded Emily Davison, because as recently as 1928 females in this country were not allowed to vote, presumably because the effort would cause their tiny pink lady brains to explode and make a mess.

I brandish my precious card. There was a horrible moment a few days ago when I got a letter saying my identity could not be confirmed by any government data base. This led to a mild existential crisis, when I felt as if I had been designated a non-person. The presiding officer looks down at her list. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There you are.’ I smile all over my face. ‘I exist,’ I say, rather too loudly, joyful with reality. Two or three good voters give me a bit of a look.

I go into the booth, with its little stumpy pencil on a string. I read through all the candidates. I make sure I have them all right. I put in my cross, for an estimable gentleman who has done a lot for his community. I pause, taking in the moment.

All parties have their flaws, and all politicians are prone to frailties and foibles. Some of them are dull and some of them are idiots. Some of them are brilliant and some of them are mavericks and some of them just keep their heads down and get on with the job. Some adore their constituency work and make a real difference in the lives of real people; some climb the greasy pole. Some are articulate and some are taciturn. Some trim; some stick to their principles. Very much like the electorate, in fact. I gave up tribalism years ago, and now choose the candidate I think will do her or his very best. (I vote locally, but I also read all the national manifestos and act on the one I agree with the most.) I don’t expect miracles and I don’t expect all problems to be solved and I don’t expect revolutions. I have no sense of entitlement. Everyone is not going to get a pony. I hope, Whiggishly, that the cracks might be filled and progress might be made and mistakes might be rectified. I no longer have the soaring ideology of youth, but the pragmatic, slightly battered hope of age.

I think of Churchill, who said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. He also said, after he won the war and was promptly cast from office by a flintily unsentimental British public: ‘They have a perfect right to kick me out. That is democracy.
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I go out into the quiet village hall, with its polished wooden floor and its high roof. The light is streaming in through the windows. I fold my ballot paper and put it into the scratched black box. I smile blindingly at the presiding officer. I say: ‘Hurrah for democracy.’ She looks faintly surprised. I can almost see her thinking: ‘Just humour the old girl. We get all sorts in here.’

I’d love to go in and do it all over again. Vote early, vote often. No, no, I think, we are not in Tammany Hall. It’s a quiet village in the north-east of Scotland. It’s a vast constituency, running from the high hills at Braemar to the low port of Stonehaven, which was established as a fishing village in the Iron Age. Tomorrow, when the country wakes up to a new order, or a constitutional crisis, or a frenzy of horse-trading, these mountains and fields will still be here, the lambs will still be skipping over the green grass, the majestic Aberdeen Angus will still be standing tall and stately in their meadows. But today is election day, and it means something to me.

HorseBack UK, and a serious visitor. Or, in which I am not cynical about politics.

It was a red letter day at HorseBack UK. This is why I have not been able to sit down and write the blog until eight o’clock at night. I have been photographing and writing and taking notes and even talking to actual humans, the whole livelong day.

At nine this morning, I rushed into my mother’s house.

‘How do you address the Secretary of State for Scotland?’ I shouted.

She looked puzzled and mildly quizzical. It appeared she did not have that information.

I tore back home and took to the email. I sent a message to my friend the Political Operative. ‘I’m going to meet the Secretary of State for Scotland today and I suddenly have no idea what to call him. Old episodes of Yes Minister are playing in my head and I know I’m going to call him minister. Is this in fact correct? Or a massive Bateman cartoon? Should I just say Secretary of State? Oh, bugger. You’d think a politics geek like me would know.’

Then I realised that the Political Operative would have quite enough on his own plate, and would have no time to deal with a flake such as I. And anyway, I was late.

The point was: the Secretary of State for Scotland was coming to HorseBack UK.

And it was my job to record it. 

I arrived, in dancing, glancing Scottish sunshine, to find the whole place being polished. The yard was swept, the office organised, the muddy old trucks put away. All the western saddles were out, and Scott Meenagh, the Para with two prosthetic legs, was bringing in the horses.

I was in a state of dancing excitement. HorseBack is one of my high loves. What they do there is so remarkable that I want the whole world to know about it. I want to hang out more flags.

For them, this kind of thing is in a day’s work. But still, someone from the highest reaches of government coming to see the work is no small deal. As I understand it, the most important thing for them is putting all the pieces together. HorseBack has a lovely, simple idea at its heart: to help those wounded in the service of their country help themselves. But its effects and operations are very complex, and cover an astonishing range.

If the Secretary chose to involve himself, he could gather together the disparate ministries, from the Department of Defence to all the health and social services, and make a difference. This is politics at its most useful and best.

My plan was to stay in the background. I would be the silent scribbler, the velvet-footed snapper. I had my stout boots on; my notebook and camera were at the ready. But I was determined at least to sound proper when I was introduced. I would look the important gentleman in the eye and say, in the loud clear voice my mother taught me: ‘Secretary of State, how do you do?’

Of course, when he arrived, I completely lost my nerve.

‘Oh hello,’ I said, faltering, looking at my feet. ‘Sir, Secretary, Secretary of State.’ My voice tailed off into pathetic obscurity. Finer people than I bore him off, to see the show.

There was a most excellent, polished presentation, given by Jock Hutchison, who, with his wife Emma, came up with this whole miraculous idea. Jock is very, very good at this kind of thing. He manages to cram in a vast amount of information, go at a galloping speed, and even make a few jokes, to leaven the whole. What he is talking about is profoundly serious, but too much seriousness can make Ordinary Decent Britons uncomfortable, and he knows when to crack the atmosphere. Besides, he was a Royal Marine, and if there is one thing that people who serve know, it is dark humour.

Then Scott spoke. He is in the Paras, and he was blown up by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, and lost both his legs. He has had 22 operations in the last couple of years, something he states in a most matter-of-fact voice. He can tell the story from the inside.

He spoke of what happens when you serve, when you are blown sky-high, when you come back down to earth and want to know what it is you still can do, when there are parts of you missing. He talked of how HorseBack helped to give him back his mission. He described how it felt when he got on a horse. ‘Mobility with dignity,’ he said.

I watched the Secretary, as he listened to all this. He is a still, serious man. He did not exclaim or raise his eyebrows or do the pity face. He watched intently, with respect, and appeared to suck in the information. I got the impression that he was filing away all the relevant pieces in his good brain.

What was interesting, as we all filed out into the sunshine, is that at once he started asking the instrumental questions. Which departments should he speak to? What would be of the most help?

What fascinated me is that he got it straight away. He did not have to be told twice. Sure as an arrow, he homed in on the thing that makes HorseBack unique. It is that many of the people who work here have been in the theatre of war, and have the kind of life-changing injuries that the participants in the courses have suffered. Part of what makes it so effective is the camaraderie, the shared language, the sense of mutual experience. No one needs to explain themselves, here.

As Scott said, vividly, without rancour: someone in a suit with a PhD in psychology is all very well, but when they say ‘I know what you have been through’, they really don’t. The people at HorseBack know of what they speak, because they have lived it.

After that, there was a horse demonstration. The Rt Hon Michael Moore MP was very honest about knowing little about equines, but even he could not resist the gentle face of one of the dear American Quarter Horses. Scott’s fellow Rodney went straight up to the important government operative and stuck his nose out for love.

There was a lot of action. Our local MP, Sir Robert Smith, was also there, and I definitely had my Bateman moment with him, in spades. I saw a tall man get out of a car, and Jock was in a rush and said, ‘Tania, would you show him round?’

I said, with enquiring courtesy: ‘I don’t quite think I caught your name.’ When the honourable gentleman said it was Sir Robert Smith, I felt like sinking into the ground. To overcompensate, I started talking, at eighty miles an hour, about the glories of HorseBack, about their thrilling new ideas for the future, about how their work astonished me each time I saw it. I was so embarrassed about not recognising him that I went into clattering overdrive.

After the polite gentleman managed to extricate himself, I ran into the house, where I found Emma Hutchison. ‘I think I may have frightened Sir Robert Smith,’ I shouted. (I had certainly frightened myself.) Luckily, Emma was in the police and is unflappable. She went quietly out to give the Secretary of State’s special advisor a riding lesson.

Special advisors, or SPADS, are cannon fodder for the press, often portrayed as princes of darkness, working behind the scenes with Machiavellian fervour. This one was a smiling, charming fellow, so delighted by what he saw that all he wanted was to get on one of those Quarter Horses. So Emma made his wish come true, even though it was not on the itinerary.

I decided to stop alarming the politicians and fell into conversation with the Secretary’s press officer. He was lovely and easy and witty, and reminded me of the boys with whom I had been at university. He explained that he was in the civil service, and so not a political appointment. With my reactions on knee-jerk, I made three Sir Humphrey jokes in a row, but I think I got away with it. I admit that I may have made a mistake when I gave him a dissertation on the art of dry-stone-walling, but his polite smile did not falter.

Even though he, like me, was in the background, I wanted to know what he made of the whole thing. I wanted to know if anything surprised him about the place, or whether there was one element that struck him most.

‘It’s that it’s just here,’ he said. ‘You turn off the road, down the little muddy track, and it’s like finding a seam of gold. You come down a path and there it is, a life-saving operation.’

He paused. It was such a good and clever thing to say that I wanted to skip and wave my arms in the air, but I restrained myself.

He said: ‘The extraordinary thing to witness is the arc of change.’

I smiled. I’m always looking for the one short paragraph that goes to the heart of HorseBack. I’m always asking for the one sentence.

‘Arc of change,’ I said. ‘Seam of gold. I’ll take that.’

The Secretary of State was making his final swing. He spoke, very well and clearly, to the people from STV. He cleverly gave them a soundbite without it sounding like a soundbite.

I reflected on how politicians are so much better in life than on camera. In the world, watching Michael Moore give his piece, I was incredibly impressed. He switched from conversational to professional mode on a dime, and gave the journos what they wanted, Later, as I saw it on the news, his reality and humanity were flattened, a little. It was still good, but the forty-second clip had bleached the dimensions out of it.

It’s fashionable to lump all politicos into the same box. The careless meme goes that they are dull, they are hopeless, they are idiotically on-message; they are in it for themselves, they have no human heart. I’ve never believed this, but I understand why people think it. It is not just because I am a geek that I saw the goodness in this particular politician. It’s not just because I have given up tribalism, or that I am getting soft in my old age.

I have always thought that most people go into politics because they actually want to make a difference in the world; I think it’s too cheap and intellectually lazy to write off the entire political class. I’ve always fervently held the idea that one should disagree with a policy, a political ideology, a view of the role of the state, without resorting to wholesale ad hominem, or idiot generalisation.

I can only tell you what I saw. I saw a serious man, observing a serious operation, with a serious mind.

He did it with grace, efficiency, intelligence, and openness. His staff clearly liked and admired him. He was not tortured with jargon, or twisted with tactics. He raced to the heart of the matter. He wanted to know what he could do.

This is the good side of politics. It is not all good, or useful. There are disastrous policies, and rotten calculation, and a daily dose of the self-serving. There is not answering the damn question. But there is a good side, whatever the cynics say.

Today, in a rather extraordinary place, with a group of remarkable people, as the dear old Scottish sun glimmered and slid and beamed, I was lucky enough to see that.

 

Pictures of the day:

There is a little photo essay here, and I wish I still had the energy to do clever, discrete captions, but I’ve come to the end of my stamina now. Still, I think you can see that this was the very definition of a Good Day -

A big day. Or, in which I get serious about equal marriage.

Author’s note: warning for length. There is a lot to say about this matter, and I have only said half of it. This is as short as I could make it.

 

Today is a big day. The vote on equal marriage will be taken in the Commons. I am shouting and hoping and waving my hat in the air.

Those against it have been wheeling out the big guns, in the last few weeks. The arguments in opposition become more and more labyrinthine and tortuous, as if trying to cloak in intellectual respectability the suspicion that gay people are somehow other, somehow less than. They, say the dissidents, have civil partnership; surely that is enough? The clear implication is that full marriage is the gold standard, and must be kept for The Straights, who are better and proper and thus rewarded.

History, society and religion are cited, in support of the antis. All of these pillars are shaky ones, propping up arguments which are contradictory, threadbare and often riven with category errors.

Here are the big three:

1. Marriage is designed for the procreation and protection of children. The Gays cannot have children, so they cannot have marriage.

There are so many holes in this I do not know where to start. If this argument were to hold, the barren, the old and the bolshily child-free would be banned from marriage. Partnerships only for you, childless idiots.

It is also ahistorical. Over many different cultures and many different historical periods, marriage has been used in a bewildering variety of ways. The emphasis has varied from the political to the economic to the tribal.

Toddling infantas were betrothed to beardless princes, to seal mighty alliances or avert wars. The great families of Britain married each other to maintain their green acres and their social position. In the nineteenth century, with their fortunes depleted by intemperate card games and unwise investments, the aristos all rushed off to America and got the daughters of robber barons to keep up their tottering stately homes. Edith Wharton wrote The Buccaneers on the back of this trend; Blenheim Palace would not be standing today if it were not for bags of American cash.

The very existence of the dowry illuminates the economic aspects of marriage. Whether a lady came with a barouche and ten thousand a year, or two oxen and an ass, her economic value was carefully weighed.

As for the much-vaunted little ones, historically marriage was often not so much seen as an institution for the protection of children, but for the hard-nosed production of them, whether it was to carry on the family name, to till the fields and mind the crops, or to look after the parents in their old age.

In other words, it has always been a cultural construct, swaying with the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist. To present it as some universal fixed mark is disingenuous and empirically incorrect. You only have to read Jane Austen to see that.

2. Marriage is the union of a man and a woman. IT SAYS SO IN THE BIBLE.

The amount of people who have suddenly become biblical literalists is one of the most astonishing aspects of this whole argument. Is one to assume that they are going to recommend following the Bible’s instructions to stone adulterers to death, to kill anyone found working on the Sabbath, and to ban coats made of two different cloths? (If you are going to go the whole hog, you may also not breed together two different kinds of cattle, nor plant your fields with two different seeds. STOP IT NOW, you heathen cow-breeders.)

Religions redefine themselves the whole time. Our state religion was actually predicated on the redefinition of marriage, when Henry VIII broke with Rome because of an unstoppable yearning for Anne Boleyn. Divorced people, once cast into outer darkness by the Church of England, may have their second or even third marriages blessed in religious ceremonies. Slavery is now universally regarded as a Bad Thing. Yet it figures prominently in the Bible, with a set of detailed rules, such as this, from Exodus:

   ‘When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.  If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.  But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her.  And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.  If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife.’

Don’t even get me started on Leviticus.

3. Changing the nature of marriage will weaken this vital institution.

There is a rider to this, which is that it is not up to the government to rewrite the rules of marriage. Once again, I refer you to Henry VIII.

I genuinely do not understand this argument. The implication seems to be that the very moment the pesky gays are allowed to say I Do, the good straights will look again at their own unions and find them wanting. Their cherished ceremony will somehow seem shoddy and sullied, because homosexuals have been allowed into the club. This is not a very happy reflection on the state of marriage. It suggests that it is such a fragile flower that it is only worth something if it is confined to heterosexuals.

In reality, here is what will happen to heterosexual people. NOTHING. Their lives will go on exactly as before. If they have gay friends and family, they will have the keen pleasure of going to more joyful weddings. If they believe in equity, they will have the delight of knowing that their fellow humans are not being discriminated against. If they are in the curious position of having no non-heterosexual friends or relatives, their daily life will be completely unaffected. The paper their marriages are written on will not suddenly be torn up. Their commitment to each other and to the institution in which they believe will have no less validity.

 

That is all the negative stuff. Here is the positive. The sum total of human happiness will be added to, if the law is changed. No longer will a group of people be told that they are somehow lesser or other. It’s easy to get lost in the thickets of sexual preference. Take a step back, and you realise that people are people. They love, mourn, celebrate, hope, just the same.

The horrible idea of the ‘gay lifestyle’, so often cited by the antis, is a smokescreen which masks the universal heart. It’s not all show tunes and comfortable shoes and Heaven on a Saturday night, or whatever it is which the critics believe that they favour.

I talk about this a lot, when it comes to cultural divisions or national ones or gender ones, when it comes to putting different groups into tight little boxes. It is that there is much, much more that unites humanity than divides it. If you cut us, do we not bleed?

I really believe that most people, all over the world, want most of the same important things: to love well and be loved in return, to feel that their lives are of some usefulness, to do no harm, perhaps to add something to the increments of human happiness. Call me an old hippy if you like, but I think this is true.

To carve off a slice of the human family and say you are other, you may not have the thing we have, is, in my opinion, idiotic and wrong. It also has no utility: it does not make anyone more happy, it simply makes some people less happy. It does not live up to my William Morris rule: it is neither beautiful nor useful.

Some people ask me why I get so exercised about this. I was asked the other day. I replied, hotly, without even thinking: It is because I hate unfairness and I hate cruelty. Cruelty is a strong word. It came out of my mouth, unprompted. Perhaps it is too strong. But I would say, with my calmer head on, that to deny marriage to someone on the basis of sexuality is unfair and unkind, and I can see no good in that.

Love is love, is what I always come back to. What will change, if this new legislation is passed? There will be more fairness. There will be more celebrations of love and commitment. There will be more happy people. How can anyone be against that?

And now, obviously, I am going to go and put some flowers in my hair.

 

Today’s pictures:

The dreamy face of my lovely mare:

Mr Stanley with his big sticks:

The hill:

 

Here is someone making the argument with much more pith and grace than I:

By David Shankbone, under Wikimedia Commons.

And when I want to go straight to the heart of the matter, and it is all about the heart, I think these smiles say more than my words ever could:

By Bev Sykes, under Wikimedia Commons.

Unknown photographer, Wikimedia Commons.

Those last two tell different stories. The first is of a couple who have been waiting for over 30 years to marry. They live in Sacramento. At the moment, the right for same-sex couples to marry in California is up before the Supreme Court.

The second is of a couple in Canada, where equal marriage is legal. As far as I know, Canadian society has not fallen apart. I imagine they still have politeness, and hockey, and The Mounties. (You see there are absolutely NO cultural stereotypes on this blog, oh no.)

One more thing, and then I really will stop. When I first started writing about this, I called it gay marriage. I now call it equal marriage, not because I am some crazed politically-correct zealot, but because language matters, and that is what I believe it is.

The debate is starting now in the House. I cry, from the wilds of Scotland – come on, Honourable Members, do the right thing and vote Yes.

PS. So sorry, there really is one more thing. Since I stopped being tribal, I judge all politicians on individual issues rather than broad ideology or party. On this issue, I salute the Prime Minister. I suspect his stalwart support of equal marriage may be strategically astute in the long term, but it is causing him huge tactical headaches at the moment. It would have been easier for him if he had quietly dropped it, and avoided the howling fury of a lot of his party. I think he gets great credit for sticking to his guns.

The political and the personal

The Political.

The debate about obesity is back in the news. I seem to remember writing an article about this years ago for a political periodical, where I suggested that the government should subside watercress, or kale, or something. My theory was that crap, fattening foods are cheap and good, healthy foods are expensive, and so no one should be surprised that weight is a problem.

This morning, Diane Abbott was being very naughty on the Today Programme. Government must do something, she said, staunchly. But, said John Humphrys, most reasonably, you were in power for years and you never did anything.

Ah, said Diane, and this was the naughty bit, but you know very well that I was not in government.

This was an inside baseball joke because all politics geeks know that Abbott and the leadership were never exactly cosy.

She then refused to talk about what Labour had done or not done in the past, and criticised this government for doing nothing now. People need help, she said. It’s no good just telling poor people they are useless because they are overweight. (There is some evidence to suggest correlation between poverty and obesity.)

It made me think about personal responsibility and what the state should do. I’m an old lefty at heart, in that I really, really do believe in government. I know all its flaws, but I think there are people who need help in helping themselves, and that the free market is too red in tooth and claw to be left to its own devices.

I think government should not only do certain things, but that it can set a tone. Matthew Parris had a theory that Britain became a kinder place under Tony Blair, for all his faults; more open to and tolerant of immigrants and minorities.

I remember knowing that I could never vote for Margaret Thatcher or the Conservative party of the eighties and nineties, not because of economic policy or geo-political theory, but because of Clause 28. That tone was a bad and horrid tone.

It was the wording of it that really got me. It said that schools could not teach the ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ Someone sat down and drafted that clause. Someone wrote that sentence, and thought it was a good one. It is dripping with contempt and less than and general mean-mindedness.

A lot of people probably never knew what Clause 28 was, let alone what it actually said. They cared about jobs and pensions, and so they should. But I knew, and I cared, and it made the Tories impossible for me. Tone matters; leaders lead. That nasty little clause effectively said that it’s all right to look down your nose at someone because of whom they love.

So I think that what happens in Whitehall is very important in many different ways. But I’m not sure about the obesity thing. Is it really government’s job to put the nation on a diet? Isn’t that rather intrusive and patronising? Surely the decision to eat or not to eat is a very personal one indeed?

Although I do think it is a national scandal that a small bag of watercress, with all its iron and vitamin C, costs over a pound, whilst a tin of spaghetti hoops, groaning with hidden sugar and salt, is nineteen pence.

 

The personal.

The grumpiness has gone, and I have decided to enjoy the snow. It’s a still, calm, pretty day, which helps. As the blizzards have stopped, I took the rugs off Red and Myfanwy, so they could loaf about with the air in their coats. Despite the fact that it is still minus two, their clever internal thermostats are so efficient that they stayed beautifully warm.

The snow is still too deep to do actual work with them, so this morning, after feeding and watering, I just hung out with the herd for a bit. I go and stand with them, and one by one, they come for love. I scratch all their various sweet spots, and chat to them a bit, and feel their lovely velvety muzzles and smell their glorious clean scent.

It’s easy to take this for granted, to accept without question that they are just very nice, polite people, who are naturally relaxed and affectionate. But when Red first arrived, she did not want any of this. She stayed in the furthest corner of the field, waiting for me to go and fetch her. The moment I took her halter off, she disappeared. In a new place, with a new human, away from her old herd, she had no desire for contact. She was distant and uncertain.

The very fact that now she mooches by my side like an old donkey is a small miracle. She whickers when she sees me and comes straight along, hoping for love or food or both. She knows I am her person.

We got here through time and patience and thought. We took steps forward and steps back. Sometimes I really do think she is my best life lesson. She lifts my heart and opens my mind, and I don’t take that for granted for a single second.

 

Today’s pictures:

Mostly of snow trees:

The amazing thing about these is that they were all taken in colour, but the landscape is so monochrome at the moment that they almost look like black and white.

We have two new additions to the field, a lovely pair of robins, who are flirting about all over the place, and come and sing to us in the feed shed:

SNOW PONY:

Autumn the Filly, looking very pretty today:

And about twenty-seven pictures of Red, because she was very photogenic today, and at her very sweetest, so my heart is filled with her:

BLINKY EYES; just like the darling old Pigeon did them:

They say the two things to look for in a racehorse are a big eye and a big arse. Red qualifies on both counts:

I pressed some button on the camera when taking this Stanley action shot, and it came out with an odd neon effect, but I rather like it:

With his good boy serious sit and stay face:

Those EYES.

Hill, from two different angles: