There’s something about mares. Or, one for the girls.

In the horse world, just as in the human one, there is prejudice against the female of the species. Mares are widely supposed to be hormonal, unpredictable, difficult and generally unreliable. My experience is that the complete opposite is true.

I’ve been having a ball with the girls over the last couple of days. On Sunday, a delightful filly called Miss Dashwood, trained by the most excellent James Fanshawe, roared from last to first in the Goodwood sunshine, producing a withering burst of speed in the final yards to catch the long-time leader. According to her yard, the next day when she was taken out for a gentle recuperative walk after her great efforts, she ‘looked very pleased with herself.’ I know that look. Then, yesterday, in the Amateur Derby, run at Epsom over the same distance as the actual Derby, Mr Patrick Mullins was up on another lovely, determined filly called Beacon Lady.

She had won her last two races, and bagging a three-timer is always difficult. Epsom is a famously treacherous course and she had a big field up against her, including a well-backed favourite.

Mullins gave her one of the kindest, cleverest, most sympathetic rides I’ve ever seen on a racecourse. He dropped her out the back door and gave her time and space to find her feet over the crazy cambers and turns. Admittedly, as I saw her five lengths behind the field, and about twenty off the leader, I said, out loud, to Stanley the Dog, ‘not even Dancing Brave could win from there.’ I was wrong, and canny Mr Mullins was right. He knew his girl. He nursed her into the race. (My fanciful brain decided her was surely crooning at her in his Irish accent, telling her what a fine lady she was.) And then, when she was at last vaguely in touch with her field, he took her wide, down the centre of the track, so she could have a good look at everything and not get stuck in traffic. Everything else was motoring, and yet he still did not ask her for her effort. He sat quite still, and kept her balanced, and let her deepen her stride.

Finally, finally, he said go, in the politest possible way, just shaking up the reins a little and crouching lower in the saddle. And perhaps because he had been so courteous and gentlemanly, the bold filly gave him everything she had, and flashed past the post a length in front. I don’t think her jockey even picked up his stick.

I had money on both fillies and I shouted them home.

Today, the Remarkable Trainer pitched up, back from holiday. Red the mare, seeing there was serious groundwork to be done, was at her most spirited, waltzing about and putting in a bronco buck and showing all her thoroughbred blood. For all that she spends most of her time like a dozy old donkey, occasionally she likes to test the boundaries, to remind us that she is descended from a Derby winner, to show that she is not to be taken for granted. At moments like that, a lot of people would shake their heads and say, darkly, ‘mare-ish’, and start digging out all the old stereotypes. I laughed my head off. The Remarkable Trainer said, ‘she’s just being a horse’. (I think sometimes people forget this about equines.)

Once she saw that this sort of Spanish Riding School of Vienna farrago was not going to fly, Red settled into her work. After a while, I got on, and the Remarkable Trainer suddenly got a rush of blood to the head and started dragging silver birch trees across the grass. ‘There,’ she said, looking at her handiwork. ‘Working Hunter fence.’ It was actually a proper jump, at least TWO FEET HIGH.

‘Bugger it,’ I said. ‘We’re going to jump it.’

So we did. I let Red find her own stride, and concentrated on sticking with her and not bothering her. She is still very, very new at this, and I wanted to give her confidence. At first, she was so amazed that she gave the thing about five feet of air; I could feel it whooshing underneath me, and whooped in astonishment and amazement. Then, she grew more sure-footed, and starting popping over like an old pro. Each time, she came back to a gentle halt, and turned her face back to me as if to say: did you see what I did?

At the time, it was just fun, something interesting and experimental to do. I like to amuse her, to keep her interested, not to let her get stale. It’s lovely, teaching her something new. It was only afterwards that I realised that I’d been blasting about a wide open green space on an ex-racing, ex-polo mare, who half an hour earlier had been bucking as if she were in the Calgary stampede. I’d been asking my posh old duchess, who has only just learnt what a jump is, to leap over a fence whilst wearing only a rope halter. She could have charged off into the blue yonder if she’d wanted to, but each time she came kindly back, despite all the excitement.

‘Bloody hell,’ I said to The Remarkable Trainer. ‘Do you realise what she just did?’

It’s not because I am clever or accomplished or a particularly good horsewoman. I am still tremendously rusty and have forgotten more than I probably ever knew. It’s because I trust her. It’s because I don’t believe any of that bullshit about mares. It’s because she fills my heart with gladness and she is as kind and brilliant and willing as any creature I ever met. Just like her two distant relations out there on the racecourse, she will give you everything if you ask politely. Sometimes she shakes her head and throws a little spirit into the mix, but she comes back at once, docile and biddable and absolutely honest. She is different each day, not because she is a slave to her hormones or suffers from the disadvantage of having ovaries, but because she is a sentient creature, and each day is new to her and will bring its own challenges, which she will meet in her own sweet way.

I suppose I’ve been thinking about this because one of the inexplicable UKIP fellows has been going on again about the frailties and incapabilities of women. (Apparently, women are better at ‘finding mustard in the pantry’ than driving cars.) And just now, I heard a woman in Pakistan interviewed on the radio say, without a trace of self-pity, that the fight for equality which happened in the West has not even started in her own country. She made it a simple statement of fact. I thought it was one of the saddest things I ever heard.

I’m a tremendous believer in the sisterhood. I think women are brilliant, not just because of all the things that they are brilliant at, but because most of them put up with this kind of thing with an extraordinary patience and grace. It goes on every day, even in the enlightened West. We ladies may have the vote and the right to own property and the freedom to do jobs, but the hum of low-level bigotry and tired assumptions infects society still. The women could be working to rule and setting their hair on fire and withholding their favours, and yet, mostly, they just get on with it. They laugh, sometimes a little tiredly, and don’t make a fuss. I have a bottomless admiration for that.

So I suppose when I get furious about the prejudice against mares, it’s a proxy for my crossness about the slurs that all females must put up with. When Miss Dashwood and Beacon Lady show such resolution and doughtiness and pure, thrilling speed, when my beloved Red soars over her birch trees, I think, nuttily, that they are striking a blow for females everywhere. I whoop in delirious triumph, because it is one for the girls.

 

Today’s pictures:

A very random selection, because I’ve been going back through the files and trying to winnow them. Despite my soaring adoration for my girl and my manly Stanley, I really probably don’t need three hundred photographs of them. Each. (Conservative estimate.)

HorseBack girls:

My mum’s new little chap:

MY chap:

With his big red friend:

Scotland:

Oh, that handsome face:

More lovely girls, human and equine:

I am not sure anyone ever made me so proud as this person does:

r

Hill:

The funny thing is that I was not going to do a blog today. I was just going to put up some pictures. I’m very tired and it’s been a long day. Then this all just fell out of my fingers. Brain to fogged to tell if ANY of it makes any sense, so please forgive.

Another idiotically long post; or, Oh no, what happened to my editing facility?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Now it’s personal. Yesterday was all very intellectual and theoretical. (I use the word intellectual not to sound like a swanky show-off, but in its strict sense of: the faculty of thinking, as opposed to feeling.) The Dear Readers rose to it magnificently, and left illuminating and thoughtful comments. I read them with acute pleasure.

But then, one of the most loyal of the Readers said, rather diffidently, that she had encountered prejudice because of her skin colour. And this is where it got strange. This is a blog, after all, not The Four Last Things. It is a small enterprise. In it, I encounter people I have never met, shall never meet, from all around the world. Perhaps because of its smallness, it has become a tight little community. I really look forward to hearing from the Readers I have come to know. I even know a little about their lives: one has just had a baby, one has got a new dog, one is going through a painful separation. So when I thought of my Dear Reader encountering bigotry, I went from brain to viscera in ten seconds. You fuckers, I thought. LEAVE THE READERS ALONE.

And here is the thing I did not say. This division of people into coloured camps is, as I described yesterday, pointless and useless. But it is also horrible. One can intellectualise it until every last cow comes home, but in real life it causes pain. Why would you want to do that? I always think of the death bed. I use it not as a morbid thing, but as a tool of perspective. My favourite riff at the moment is my little anti-diet tap dance. Oh, I say, when you are lying on your death bed, will you really think, well, thank God I never ate any carbohydrates?

When I heard about the Reader, and felt so furious, I thought, of the prejudiced: will they lie on their death beds, and think, thank God I was rude about people of a different colour? Will they congratulate themselves on a life that included thinking dark thoughts about people from Asia, or Latinos, or Jews, or whichever group they have marked as other? Will Rick Santorum look back over his allotted span and think: yeah, I really socked it to the poofs? (Probably not, since I don’t think poof is a word in the American demotic.)

Life is so damn short. I think of my dad every day, and his death reminds me, in the most immediate terms, that life flies by, and is gone. I don’t want to sound like Doris Day, but really, why would anyone want to fill it with hating, and on such ephemeral and nonsensical grounds?

Ah, that’s better. Just had to get that off my chest.

I went for a walk with The Pigeon, and calmed down a bit. I started to think about my own encounters with prejudice. I am a white, middle-class female, so they haven’t been that many. But I am a woman, and, as everyone knows, we pink fluffy ladies sometimes get put in our own box, on account of the fact we have ovaries.

This works on two levels. There is the general. There are all the assumptions floating about in the zeitgeist, like little particles of wrongness. Even now, in the glittering 21^st century, there is still a humming idea that what women are really good for is home and babies. Oh, and shoes, of course. We are all obsessed with shoes. Women will never rule the world, because our hormonal overload leads us to inexplicable mood swings. What if a nuclear crisis blew up when the Lady President had a bad case of PMT?

What fascinates me is that old prejudices still die hard, even in the face of empirical evidence. Take the women can’t drive meme. (If you live in Saudi Arabia, this is actually mandated by law, because the state is taking no chances.) If you look at the accident statistics, they are overwhelmingly dominated by young men. Insurance companies even used to give women lower rates, until some European court said that was sexist, and stopped it. Yet the notion that you have to have a penis to manoeuvre a car still persists.

Even such a brilliant and radical thinker as the late Christopher Hitchens once wrote a whole article about the ‘fact’ that women have no sense of humour. I don’t know if he was joking (he seemed deadly serious), or whether he had just drunk too much whisky that day, or whether he had had a fight with his wife, but the very fact that he could write such a thing, and that Vanity Fair could publish it with a straight face, is a terrible marker of how far we still have to go.

Then there is the personal. When I was at university, my moral tutor used to have me in for regular meetings, to make sure I was all right. It was a rather touching part of the system. Moral tutor did not mean he was checking my ethical levels, but simply looking after me; raising the eyes from the academic work for a moment, and measuring the ordinary life. He always used to ask whether I was having any trouble on account of being a girl. My college had only recently admitted women, and he was keenly aware of the old school dying hard. He seemed rather to long for horror stories, so he could go into battle, and always looked rather disappointed when I said no.

Over the road, at Oriel, they had their very first intake of women, against gnarled opposition from the old guard. The joke went about that they had only admitted Amazons, because if they had to have the monstrous regiment, they might as well get some rowing medals out of it. I don’t know if this was true, but I do remember Oriel women dominating the river that summer.

In my college, I detected no trace of resentment. I had lovely Dr Stuart, who called me Miss K and laughed at my jokes, and liked that I wrote my essays in coloured inks. I had a very grave Anglo-Saxon scholar, who mostly listened to Mahler. I had brilliant Dr Haigh, who cared about nothing except what I thought of the Tudors.

Even though I was already a feminist, I think I was a little spoilt by this. It did not occur to me that there might be things I could not do because I was female. That was all in the past. It was the eighties; we were post-Thatcher; women could do anything. It took me a while, out in the world, to catch the whiff of walls closing in and drawbridges being pulled up.

It was very subtle. It was that men, especially older ones, would be surprised if I spoke of serious things. They would look amazed if I knew about Turgenev, or the ERM, or the intricacies of the American political system. I think it did not help that I was running around at that stage with short peroxide hair; they took the blondeness as a flag for idiocy. Once I caught on, I rather liked playing a little game with them. I would let them make their assumptions; I would allow them to get into their stride. Then I would drop something about Oxford into the conversation and watch their frontal cortexes implode.

This was not nasty prejudice; no one has ever called me names. It was just an old, subliminal idea that women are somehow less than. It was the assumption that we are weaker, sillier, less informed, less capable than the male. Luckily, I am very cussed; it did not beat me down, but made me grit my teeth even more. Because I have been self-employed for the last twenty years, I never got the office prejudice. My friend S tells war stories of meetings where she said something, and everyone ignored it. Then a man would say the exact same thing and everyone would say, oh, yes, that’s a brilliant idea. My other friend S was once asked what she did. She said she was a wife and mother. The man she was talking to turned on his heel and walked away. (Sorry about too many italics, but really.)

My worst one is the breeding thing. I don’t want children; never have. To me, it is a perfectly ordinary decision, like knowing you don’t want to be concert pianist, or a welder, because that is not your talent. To others, with their ovary assumptions, it is a radical tear in the space time continuum. It is an inversion of the natural order. A gentleman actually once said to me: ‘You have a womb, you have to use it.’ I have had all the old tropes: ‘you’ll change your mind when you meet the right man’, and variations on that theme. It used to drive me to despair. I hated being seen as a freak. Now I am old and ornery. I think: everyone can just bugger off.

Still, my small experience is a mild one. No one has bashed me, or called me a bitch, or refused to promote me because I have lady parts. But there is a strange thing about being part of a group that is routinely derided. I have always taken the feminist idea of the sisterhood very personally. I think of John Donne, and believe that no woman is an island. When you disdain my sisters, you disdain me. I think this may fall into the category of: things which are slightly nuts, but incontrovertibly true.

Oh dear, I have now been deadly serious for two days in a row. This will not do at all. It is not the British Way. Tomorrow, I shall make ironical observations about the dog and the pig, and all manner of things shall be well.

 

And now for the pictures of the day.

It was a gloomy, murky sort of day, so I didn't take that many of the trees and hills:

Instead, I decided on a Pigeon photo essay. The pictures themselves are not that good, rather blurry and ill-composed. But they struck me as funny and sweet, and just the ticket on a gloomy Friday.

This is how she gallops off, when we go out. She canters this way and that, filled with eagerness, determined to sniff out mice and moles and voles:

Up goes the tail:

Sniff, sniff, sniff, eh Mr Gibbon?:

I'M ON THE WALL. I'M ON THE WALL:

And, by the way, I am bringing in this unfeasibly big stick:

You want me to pose with my Grace Kelly face on? Oh, all right:

Close-up of the hill, with its dusting of snow, from a slightly different angle than usual:

Have a happy Friday.

Judgement Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to call this piece ‘How we judge’; that was how it first came to me. Then I realised that there was no we about it; it is about how I judge. The WE is always fabulous, giving the illusion that every one of us is part of the collective unconscious, that the particular is, in fact, the universal. I am guilty of this in several discrete ways: I do it with women, Britons, writers. I like to think of myself as a student of human nature, but I have a fatal tendency to clump people into groups. ‘The French,’ I say, blithely, ‘the Italians, the Americans.’ ‘The politicians,’ I declare, without a second thought, ‘the BBC, the intellectuals.’ Often, I say: ‘The Women’. (Women always get a capital letter in my book.) I talk to Sarah down the telephone; I say: we must set The Women free. This is what Backwards is all about, in my mind. Sarah says, calmly: ‘You must never say that out loud, in public.’ All of which is a very long, tangential way of saying: there is no We here. This is all me, much as I might like to extrapolate until my ears fall off.

The thing of it is, I am a nice, ostentatiously educated, middle class liberal. I like to entertain the fantasy that I have no prejudice. I get furious and shouty when I encounter racism, homophobia, sexism, ageism, fattism; of course I do, what else would you expect? I spend a lot of my time pondering where bigotry comes from. I am excessively fond of imagining I am immune. And yet, and yet. I am suddenly, acutely conscious of how I make ruthless judgements, often based on thin evidence. This revelation did not come to me from reading Jung, or Kant, or TS Eliot. It was not the product of deep thought. I was watching one of the flashy American TV shows that I secretly like, and a character said: ‘That’s Bach. I love Bach’. He was a supporting character, thinly sketched. The writers had not necessarily made him loveable, or even three dimensional. On top of that, he was a Catholic priest, and as a feminist and an atheist, I should have some doubts about that. But the moment he said he loved Bach, I loved him. It was like coded shorthand, speaking to my deep heart.

But that is crazy, I thought, the moment I got the warm loving feeling. The Nazis loved Wagner. I am perfectly certain that sociopaths and bankers have been moved to tears by a Schubert quintet. It made me think how judgy I am, despite my fantasy that I am quite disinterested. It’s tribal, I think. It’s a lower order of assumption, not quite the irrational idea of putting people into groups because of their gender or skin colour or sexual orientation, but not so many millions of miles away. If someone knows The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, can tell me who Lady Brett Ashley is, has read the diaries of Chips Channon, watched Blue Peter in their youth, shamelessly adores the novels of Nancy Mitford, has Blonde on Blonde in their record collection, I am at once inclined towards them. If they think that the two greatest lines Bowie ever wrote are: ‘As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for your favourite party’, and ‘It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor’, then I am their friend forever. If a person uses the words ‘human condition’ in casual conversation, I shall want to listen to them until the end of time.

If I am being finally, brutally honest I think that women who are obsessed with shoes are letting the Sisterhood down. I am suspicious of men who indulge in pornography. When someone tells me that they believe in free markets and Milton Friedman I at once have the thought that they might regard the poor as undeserving and single mothers as a blight on society. I have a mild and inexplicable suspicion of double barrelled names and anyone who owns a yappy lapdog and people who buy their clothes from the Boden catalogue. I am very leery of the wildly rich. Any columnist who starts their piece with ‘Why oh Why?’ or ‘Am I alone in thinking?’ is an instant joke to me.

The horrible truth is it turns out that I might have just as many knee jerk reactions as the people I casually mark as ‘prejudiced’. I may keep my notions to myself, and present a lovely liberal exterior to the world, but that’s not good enough. I am going to go away and work on it. I am, for the moment, putting myself in the corner, until I can work out the difference between reasoned opinion and irrational judgement.