Standing still.

Really good horse people have a profound stillness to them. Some of them even speak slowly. It is as if the very atoms of their body are configured peacefully, as if they are utterly at home with themselves. This transmits itself to the horse, and it means safety. I’m not sure that horses love in the way that humans think of the word, but it is true that they feel enduring attachments, and I think they do this to the ones who make them feel safe.

I am not at all still at the moment. I am stretched and twanging like an elastic band. I am racing up against deadlines. I have done something catastrophically stupid which must be fixed, and I’m not yet quite sure how to fix it. (All my dander and gritted teeth are going to be needed, and a lot of moral fibre to fight off crashing shame for my own idiocy.)

I have a tendency to spin my wheels when I am panicking like this. I rush around and seem to be performing a great deal of activity very fast, but when I look back at the end of the day, I’m not sure how much I have actually achieved. All the tension and lashing seem to be more sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s as if I am trying to prove something, hanging out more flags of sheer motion. LOOK AT ME, DOING STUFF.

I am trying to teach myself, at the age of forty-six, to go slowly, to get things done quietly, as I believe this will be more efficient. My irrational mind is yelling: no no no, go faster, FLAP YOUR ARMS ABOUT. So everyone can SEE, it adds, slyly. (The irrational voice is both irrational and very, very naughty.)

I am even making asinine false economies like not riding the mare. I can’t ride when the world is so oppressed. No, no, sorry; what I mean is, I can’t ride when every second is precious, when I could be bashing away at the keyboard and fixing the catastrophic stupidity.

The Remarkable Trainer will keep Red ticking over. She seems resigned to my mad flap rushing in and rushing out. But when I go down to the field to tell the RT this, there is, at last, a moment of stillness. I screech up in the car, hurl myself across the ground, breathless, to tell her that I cannot stay. Red the Mare is tied up at the gate, getting the mud brushed off her. She has been wallowing like a hippo since the rain came and looks more like a happy carthorse than the duchess she is. I always tell myself that I must leave my troubles at the gate, because tightness and tension are the first things that a horse picks up on. It is not for them to soothe us humans; it is our job to make them feel steady and safe. I feel this very, very strongly.

But today, I am breaking all my good rules. Every inch of my body is jangling. Red blinks at me with her slow eye. Something has happened to this horse. Every so often, she makes a giant leap forwards. She did one, with no drama or fanfare, about four weeks ago. She has gone into another zone. She is so secure and comfortable in her skin, so at home in the world, so confident in her idiotic human that even when that human forgets all the rules, Red has the resources to deal with it.

As I write that, I think: that is the very essence of love. Even if love is an anthropomorphic word, that is what it is. She has got to the stage where she can forgive me, where she can overlook the moments which are not of glad grace, where she remembers the good stuff and can smile at the fleeting failures and hopelessnesses.

Her stillness seeps into me like osmosis. I feel calm roll down on me like a wave. I stand against her great big powerful body, the beautiful thoroughbred body with the blood of mighty champions in it. She has in her pedigree a sonorous roll call of the greats: Nijinsky, Northern Dancer, Hyperion, Gainsborough, St Simon, Voltigeur. And yet, there she stands, peace coming out of her like new air, so strong that it infects even my harried self. I feel it in my stomach and remember that I too am in the world, rooted in the muddy earth, and that storming about like a deranged dervish will not achieve anything.

So we stand there for a while. I lean on her, as if her good body and my crazed body can become one. I run my hands all over her. I rest my cheek on her dear back. I talk to her. She blinks her eye again. In ten minutes, she does not move an inch. She is as present and real and true as any living thing I ever saw.

I have no adjectives to express what this ten minutes feels like. And adjectives are my damn business.

I wrote 1400 words today. I did all my HorseBack stuff. I am about to tackle the new secret project.

If someone were to ask me what was the most important thing I did today,  I would answer in a heartbeat. I would say: I stood still with my horse.

 

Today’s pictures:

From the archive. (No time for camera today; are you mad?)

Can you see the peace?

It emanates from her in waves:

The funny thing is that when I got a thoroughbred, out of racing and polo, I liked the idea of giving myself a challenge. I thought I’d have to get bloody good at riding again, and crazy fit, and bring all my muscles up to peak strength to deal with all that power and spirit. Turns out what I ended up with instead was a little Zen mistress. That is the Law of Unintended Consequences, at its finest.

I don’t have adjectives, but when I’m with her in those precious moments of utter contentment and silent communication, I feel a bit like this:

Or this:

I know. I’m now so nuts in the head I think I am a river and a hill.

Perhaps I really should stop now.

AAAARRRGGGHHH; or, in which I think my head is about to explode

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There will be a regular blog later, when I have gathered up the pieces of my cerebellum which have just splattered around the room. If you do not want to get very, very cross, please do not watch this video:


Rachel Maddow: You cant hire workers to make what you cant sell:

In which it all kicks off

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

(Warning: this post has not been edited for length.)

The election has now gone into twenty different kinds of crazy. I woke up to Chris Huhne shouting at John Humphrys on The Today Programme. Everybody knows that only Mr Humphrys is allowed to shout.

Actually, he was being at his most calm and moderate this morning. He made the perfectly reasonable point that it was slightly curious for Nick Clegg to present himself as the shining figure of the new politics, almost an anti-politics character, when he has worked as a bureaucrat in Brussels, was picked by Lord Brittan on Lord Carrington's recommendation, and then did a little light lobbying on the side.

'SMEARS,' Mr Huhne yelled.

It was all damn rotten SMEARING, and the BBC had been at it for years, and he would see that lily-livered Mr Humphrys round the back of the bike shed if it was the last thing he did. I paraphrase, obviously.

In vain did John Humphrys point out that there was nothing wrong with Brussels or lobbying; it was just that it did not really seem like novel politics, or the act of an outsider.

Those were 'REAL JOBS' howled Mr Huhne.

This in itself was curious, since the only inference one could draw was that he regarded being a politician as not a real job. In which case, why would he or his leader choose such a non-job in the first place?

'AID PROGRAMMES,' he kept repeating. 'TALKING TO CHINA. CHINA!!!'

I could see the aid programme thing; obviously halos must be burnished to keep them in spit-spot condition. I was less certain about the talking to the Chinese thing. Was it supposed to suggest that Mr Clegg was a tremendous citizen of the world? There was the tiniest, merest whiff of a very old idea indeed: brilliant Mr Clegg could stand up to the wiliest of Orientals. I think that must be just me reading between too many lines; surely no Liberal Democrat would ever think in such outdated stereotypes? I should never let such a common thought or mean cross my mind. It's just that the Lib Dems, being big on human rights, are generally not great supporters of the Chinese, so I can't quite understand why Mr Clegg talking to them would be considered such a marvellous thing.

There was a bit more harrumphing, a little light fisticuffs, Mr Huhne resolutely refused to address the question, and then they all went out for lashings of ginger beer. Or something.

I am still mystified as to why Mr Huhne chose this morning to unleash his dark side.

Talking of dark sides, the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Mandelson of Foy, marched into The World at One and told Martha Kearney with a straight face that the Tories were manipulating the press to spread SMEARS (there goes that word again) about the poor hapless Liberal Democrat leader. Because everyone knows that Lord Mandelson of Foy never manipulated the press in his life. Not he. To her luminous credit, Martha Kearney also kept a straight face as his lordship told her how 'disgusting' he found the entire affair.

As the clip clop of high horses was heard around the BBC, The Daily Mail had found a tall pony of its very own to gallop about on. Apparently Nick Clegg had made a NAZI SLUR against the great island of Britain. This was tremendous news. The blogosphere duly exploded with delight. On closer examination, it turned out that Mr Clegg had written an article for The Guardian which was less fascist propaganda and more well-meaning moral relativism, but I suppose that does not make such a catchy headline.

Over at The New Improved Indy, shenanigans were taking place at the daily editorial meeting, when James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks burst in and began berating Simon Kelner, apparently because he had implied something disobliging about Mr Murdoch senior. Euphemism of the day goes to an unnamed witness, who described Mrs Brooks as being 'in full gesticulating mode'.

On hearing of this on The Daily Politics, The Guardian's Nick Watt revealed that he had once been in a lift with Rupert Murdoch and that he was 'very grumpy'. I nominate this for runaway scoop of the day. (It was actually terribly funny, and reduced everyone on the set to schoolyard giggles.)

On Twitter, half the nation was having a huge amount of fun with a #nickcleggsfault hashtag. (Currently number one trending topic.) My favourite examples:

I burnt the toast and set off the fire alarm. It's #nickcleggsfault.

I have nothing to wear. It's #nickcleggsfault.

Nick Clegg lived in the same town as a seriously ill man and never visited him, though he knows he has a spare kidney. #nickcleggsfault

And, in my very favourite shock development, Saint Nick's surname has morphed into a new word. Charles Nevin at The Independent this morning wrote of a 'breezy, cleggy optimism'. It's a fabulous neologism. It will of course be open to shifts in meaning. At the moment, it may be used as an adjective to suggest new, insurgent, unexpected, the implausible growing plausible. If the Lib Dem bubble bursts, 'cleggy' may come to mean short-lived, flash in the pan, not quite everything it promised. Should the hung parliament scenario play out so that Gordon Brown stays in Number Ten with a Lib-Lab pact, so that Nick Clegg's promise of a vote for change means a vote for exactly the damn same, 'cleggy' will be the quickest way of indicating the law of unintended consequences at work. Happy linguistic geeks shall be watching this space.

So come on, my darlings, who said politics wasn't interesting?

PS This is too perfect. I thought I might just google 'cleggy' to see if anything came up. Apparently it is already a word. According to The Urban Dictionary it is street slang for either a lifeless hobo who is immature and an idiot; or a blatantly boneheaded move; or, an incredible human being, a perfect specimen, the ultimate, sublime.

Those Lib Dems, I thought, there really is more to them than meets the eye. They have clearly infiltrated The Urban Dictionary and inserted that last entry. But no. I look more closely. The definition was posted in 2005. Although, that was when Nick Clegg first entered parliament, so perhaps some very far-sighted person was looking ahead. Funny business? I am saying nothing.

After all that, you really do deserve a lovely picture of the day, so I give you this animal enchantment:

(Uncredited, via Pixdaus.)

And to my international readers, who perhaps do not indulge in a close reading of British politics: I really do apologise if you have no idea what I am on about. If it's any consolation, I have very little idea of what I am on about either.