A small and possibly not very coherent thought.

I’ve been under the weather all week, having had a relapse after my false perk over the weekend. Every ounce of weedy energy was directed at smashing my first deadline, which I triumphantly hit at 1.38pm, just in time to collapse in a heap and watch the first day of the Leger meeting. The main deadline is still two weeks away, so I shall have to butch up and bash on, but at least I was able to deliver on what I promised today.

The poor blog, shamefully neglected, sits in the corner, hoping someone might throw it a bone. But my brain has returned to its fugue state after putting on a thousand words this morning, and can summon no good prose.

I do have a thought, though. A thought for the day is better than a poke in the eye with a dull stick.

It is this.

Never, ever underestimate the power of the smallest act of kindness.

I know that people do talk about this. It is in quite a lot of books. It is supposed to be one of the secrets of well-being, performing small acts of kindness. It can sound wise, or it can sound corny as hell, depending on the state of your inner sceptic. It can sound a bit pointless.

Someone I do not know at all, a gentle stranger on my Twitter feed, took the time to make one of those small kind acts this afternoon. It was a gesture which spoke of great thoughtfulness, even though the thing itself was little and fleeting. But it took my battered old heart and expanded it like a glorious balloon.

It was an oddly pure thing. There was no side to it, no point to prove, no flag to fly. It was what it was: an offering of sheer pleasure. It made me smile and smile.

You know I always bang on about the small things, in so many different contexts. Sometimes I wonder whether I am talking arrant nonsense.

But there was the mighty power of the very, very small thing.

Take the time, I tell myself; think the thought. Do the small thing. Offer the offering.

All those tiny grains of sand add up to a mighty dune.

A little tangent for a Friday afternoon.

A lot of wisdom and kindness from the Dear Readers this week. One of my favourite Twitter gentlemen, a fellow racing fanatic, asked me yesterday how I do a blog every day. (Well, not quite every day, but pretty close.) I replied that I could only thank my weirdly obsessive nature.

I like doing it. It is not for money or fame or the ghastly idea of building the brand, which it seems everyone must do now. It is a marking of the days, a recording of my beloved Small Things, a small existential stamping. Yes, yes; here I was.

And yet, there is an oddness too. I feel a very faint bat’s squeak of obligation. This is nuts, of course, but sometimes I do not fight my nuttier imperatives. This audience has settled into a small and exceptionally select band. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me when I see a comment from some of the old faithfuls, who have been with me since the beginning. I also glean particular joy from the international correspondents. You come here, and give me the gift of your time. I feel that in return, I must give you something, as many days as I can. I sometimes feel bizarrely guilty when I go missing in action, even though there is usually the most excellent excuse of life getting in the way.

That really is quite strange. My finger hovers over the delete button. The truth is that today I am tired from a long week and I was not going to write anything, just give you some nice Stanley the Dog pictures. On some days I have a tale to tell; on others, the brain is filled with mud, and I can feel my synapses snapping off, one by recalcitrant one, and there is no story. I am like that today, but I wanted to thank for the kind comments of the week and before I knew it, I was off on this peculiar tangent. (I am fatally addicted to tangents.)

The finger hovers, and then stops. I’ll let it run. I feel a curious liberation in sometimes giving space to my less explicable thoughts. Why not? I write often that I believe people should have the moxie to follow their own goofy star. Perhaps I should put my money where my mouth is and reveal my own profound goofiness. The entire humming theme of Backwards was that the hunt for perfection is a snare and a curse. So in some ways, offering such imperfection feels like putting down a marker. Sometimes I like to tell you the good parts of my day, but I resist the shiny magazine trend for offering gleaming, seamless lives, with all the contradictions and muddliness and small moments of failure airbrushed out. (I think that was why it seemed important to tell you of my shaming crash onto my arse yesterday, and not just confine myself to the glory jumping.)

Shame thrives in secrecy. It lives and feeds in the dark. The moment one admits the flaws, the failings, the idiot notions, the moments of sheer folly, the crashings down to earth (literal and metaphorical, in my case) they lose their power.

And that, my darlings, is my winding and tangential Thought for the Day.

If you can call it a thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are a selection from the week.

We haven’t had any garden pictures for a while:

The lovely colours of some of the HorseBack herd:

This splendid gentleman arrived in the feed shed this morning:

Stanley the Dog:

Can you hurry up with the tea?:

Thanks, it was delicious:

King of the Absolutely Enormous Stick:

The very dear Myfanwy the Pony:

Excellent yoga stretches:

Can’t resist one more of me and my darling duchess:

The hill:

In which I face facts; or, every day can’t be Doris Day

They say that your horse is a reflection of you. This is not completely true, but it is quite true. My mare at the moment mostly appears wonderfully calm and happy. She moves slowly and gracefully over the ice field, her head low, her step quiet and careful. She does not get het up at feeding time. She is gentle with Autumn the Filly and Myfanwy the Pony.

Today, I took her for a walk round the paddock and she was immaculate. Taking your horse for a walk sounds completely nuts, but it’s one of the things I love doing. It reminds her that I am her Dear Leader, makes her mind my stride, keeps us in harmony. It’s the dottiest, simplest thing, but she enjoys it, and it makes me smile.

All the same, she has a very faint anxiety line over her eyes.

I’ve noticed this for a few days and I did not want to think about it. At first, I believed that this was because I could not bear my dear girl to have any cloud on her horizon. In fact, she is a horse, and a sensitive one, it is stupid to think that into her life no rain shall fall. She is also the lead mare, so she has responsibilities to mind.

I think I did not want to think about it because it is a reflection of my own state of mind.

I’m pretty good, on the surface. I go to breakfast with The Mother and Stepfather and make jokes and talk politics and racing. I do my work. I bond with Stanley the Lurcher. I miss my old dog, but that’s to be expected. I’m getting used to it. I enjoy things; I follow the racing, and smile when my bets come in. (Another very pleasing Twiston-Davies special this afternoon.) I do the blog and take pictures and feel grateful for the beauty of this place.

But at the same time, there is a tight, humming tension in me. It’s not just that I am up against a hard deadline. I’m not sure quite what it is. I’m always rushing everywhere, feeling distrait and behind. I’m lashing myself to do more, write better, get organised. The critical voices are shouting loudly in my ears.

Perhaps this is just life. Perhaps I feel it because I am a little battered by the sadness of the Pigeon. You can’t just ignore the loss of such a companion. Perhaps it is just the time of year.

I always know something is wrong when I get stupidly upset by absurd things. After all that mad writing yesterday, I went to look at my numbers. I never do this, because I write the blog for love, not fame, and as long as one Dear Reader is made happy that is enough for me. I don’t want one of those huge public blogs; the pressure of that would undo the point of the whole thing. It is an amateur enterprise, in the true sense of the word, and that is what gives it its sweetness.

But yesterday I was suddenly furious, as I looked at the mostly flat line of the graph, bumping along the bottom. Is that the best you can do? yelled the critical voices. What pathetic, paltry numbers those are, they crowed. It took me 24 long hours to talk myself down off the ceiling.

I think it is because I have suffered a pretty major setback. I’m pretending it’s all fine, because I’m so bloody brilliant at dealing with failure, but I think its spectre is haunting me, and I have to look the damn thing in the face and deal with it. Oh, it’s so dull. Sometimes I long to brush things under the carpet and make believe that they never happened. This is not, it turns out, an effective technique. I must be brave, and see the whites of its eyes.

Thinking of all this, I took the evening feed very slowly today. Instead of hurrying and worrying, I mooched about with the horses, and spent a long time just being with my mare, letting the glorious scent of her into my nostrils, feeling the soft teddy bear fur on her neck, gentling her and chatting to her. I stopped fretting about the ice and the weather forecast and the fact that our work is interrupted because of the elements. I just let it all be.

She went drowsy and still, and the small lines over her eyes smoothed out, and she made little sighing noises which almost broke my heart.

There it is, I thought. How many damn times do I have to say it? Every day can’t be Doris Day. I am not impervious to the slings and arrows, nor was meant to be. And that is my very, very small Thought for the Day.

 

Today’s pictures are not awfully good, but I show them to you in my new spirit of imperfection:

The gloaming:

Myfanwy doing comedy face:

Red, mooching:

Stanley, waiting politely to be taken for a walk:

Blurry blue hill:

PS. I had a nice time on Pinterest today. I’m still not quite sure entirely what the point of it is, but it turns out there are lots of nice horse people on there, so I found lovely pictures of Nijinsky and Northern Dancer, Red’s illustrious grandsire and great-grandsire, so you can imagine how happy I was. My page is here, should you be interested:

http://pinterest.com/kindersley/

Small things

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have now started today’s blog three times.

I was going to write about death. (I know you are devastated that I decided against that.)

Then I was going to take a swing at evolutionary biology, and whether humans are genetically wired to incline towards pessimism and paranoia. The thinking behind this goes: it was the ancestors who were convinced the woolly mammoth was after them, and were certain they could hear it coming, who survived, and passed on their slightly gloomy but effective genes. The blithe, bonny ones, who were too busy gazing at the sky to hear the mammoth, or who were so optimistic that they were convinced the mammoth really wanted to be their friend, got eaten.

I simplify horribly, of course, and I have no idea whether ancient humans were in fact eaten that much by mammoths, but take it as an illustrative metaphor. Besides, I like writing the words ‘woolly mammoth’.

Then I decided that was too complicated and would need further thought, so I thought I might write about soup. I was going to give you a recipe for yellow split pea. But that seemed suddenly rather paltry, so I stopped.

Perhaps, I thought, I should write about the small things.

I said yesterday that I am starting to have the suspicion that the answers to the big life questions might lie in the very small things. I’m not sure I quite phrased this quite correctly. It is a new theory, and I have not yet shined it up.

I thought of the small things as I went to the flower shop and bought my mother a fold of hyacinths, newly arrived from Holland. (I would like to know what it is about the Dutch which makes them the queens of the floral, but that really is another question.) It suddenly seemed symbolic, almost an act of defiance. The economy continues to teeter and shiver; Greece is still in all kinds of trouble; even mighty Germany is shrinking, like something out of the Wizard of Oz. I should be economising and counting every penny.

But it seemed like an act of faith, a marker of optimism, that for ten of my Scottish pounds I could buy my mum a glorious fold of spring flowers. They do nothing, they fix nothing, they explain nothing. They are exactly what they are: aesthetic, frivolous, pointless. I can almost see the strict and the sensible wagging their fingers at such reckless extravagance. Yet ten pounds for naked pleasure seemed like a good bargain, in dark days.

Then I went home and stared at the snowdrops for a bit. They nodded their heads, shyly. They cannot explain fiscal policy or guess whether Iran will get the bomb. They have no clue as to the meaning of life. They just exist. They grow bravely out of the cold ground and delight the eye.

New clumps of mauve and purple crocuses are appearing, almost minute by minute. They too have no purpose except sheer loveliness.

Then I threw the stick for The Pigeon. In my small garden, brown with winter, invaded by moles, there was a sudden explosion of joy. An old dog went from mooching about with no apparent purpose, to bunched, muscular determination.

It’s almost as if her entire confirmation changes; her body tightens, her head lifts, her ears go up, her eyes open wide. She grows a little taller; everything about her is suddenly on the vertical. She bounces up and down on the turf.

She stares, with laser focus, on my hand, dodging a little from side to side, trying to anticipate which way I am going to throw. Every faculty is sharp and quivering. When the throw comes, she is after the projectile like a shark. I’m not sure I ever saw a breathing creature want a thing quite so much.

Every day, this simple, tiny, entirely unimportant thing makes me laugh. It also impresses me. I have a great deal of respect for the athletic abilities of my canine. I’m not sure I do anything as well as she chases a stick.

So, I come to the small things. I’m struggling a bit at the moment. I’m struggling with my work, I’m struggling with intermittent insomnia, I’m struggling with mortality. (I actually said, to a complete stranger, not long ago, as my opening conversational gambit: ‘I’m having a bit of trouble with the whole life and death thing. How about you?’ I think he was expecting me to ask what he did, or what he thought about property prices, but he dealt with it manfully, although I saw the fleeting glint of fear in his eyes. It was such a very unBritish question.)

This is nothing more than the human condition. It’s what everyone struggles with. I don’t like to talk of it too much; I certainly cannot complain of it. It’s just that I really, really would like to know the meaning of life, and I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the fact that I may never work it out.

That’s why I stare at snowdrops. That is why I delight in my dog and her stick. That is why I carefully make good soup. I know that it is not so much that the answer to everything lies in these small things, but that perhaps in appreciation of them lies the greater point.

You see what I mean about it being a half-baked theory?

And even as I write all this, I think: oh, come along. Just get on with it. Perhaps one does not need to know the point. But curiosity is my besetting sin. And when I am not making soup, I do really quite enjoy a little wrestle with an ontological problem. Some people enjoy crochet, or chess; I like wondering what it’s all about. Everybody needs a hobby, after all.

 

And now for the pictures of the day.

The gentle hellebores are out:

Newest clump of crocuses:

Snowdrops in the wild garden:

And now for an unfeasible amount of dog pictures. I give you due warning.

Ready for stick:

Yes, I am ready:

After a certain amount of throwing, she lies down and demolishes the stick. Those of you concerned for canine digestive tracts, do not fret. She does not eat the thing, she neatly chews it up and spits it out, so she is left with a small pile of wood. I have no idea why she thinks this is fun, but she does. She looks very like her sister here, who enjoyed the same thing:

See how cleverly she holds the thing in her paws:

I became slightly obsessed by the paws:

Then back to throwing again. Come on, come on:

You really can't fool me; I am watching closely:

If I should take too long about it, she sits down and puts on her goofy face. I can't really get enough of the goofy face. It cracks me up, every time:

Right. That really is quite enough. Those people who think blogging is ephemeral or self-indulgent have no idea what they are talking about. Eight dog pictures is merely public service. Where would the sum total of human happiness be without that Pigeon?

Rather out of focus hill. But the colours are pretty today: