A radical thought.

This morning, in the bath, I had a radical thought. What if I was happy, for my mother’s sake?

Here is the ludicrous thing about death. A person you love dies. You cry a lot. You feel wretched. Your throat aches with unexpressed words, trapped memories, tangled regrets. You wash your hair twice because you have no idea whether you did it the first time. You have a bit of trouble behaving in a rational manner in the Co-op. You have no idea what you are supposed to do next. You go to bed at seven because you are so tired you don’t know what your name is. You keep getting wild flashes of the person, some happy, some sad, all lacerating. You have to tell people, which can go either way. You are out of step with the rest of the world, even though, paradoxically, death is the one certainty which knits all human hearts together. You make stupid amounts of soup, so that your kitchen becomes like some kind of industrial production line. You are a little lost, entirely bashed, and very, very sad.

No person you have ever loved would want you to feel any of those feelings.

I don’t have a heaven or an afterlife, although I am occasionally tempted by reincarnation and I do make jokes about the ghostly sound of my father’s laughter from the Great Betting Shop in the Sky. But if there existed a cloud on which my mother was now sitting, she would not be looking down and shouting, ‘Oh, bloody hell, go on, more weeping.’ I really don’t think that is what she would be saying.

I talk a lot about grief marking the space left behind, honouring the dead, but now I’m not sure. I know it has to be done, and you have to get the damn thing out or it will twist itself up and trap you into fatal tendencies like not eating or not sleeping or shouting at random people.

But what is it for?

Not the dead person, who wants only your well-being. I adore my nieces. If I said one word which caused them dismay, let alone pain, I would castigate myself for days. If, when I died, they felt horrid grief and if I had any consciousness left to see that horrid grief, I would be furious with myself. (Perhaps no cloud must be a good thing then, so the poor Dear Departeds, many of whom were rather jolly themselves and loved a party, don’t have to look down and see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

None of it makes any sense. Humans – poets and novelists and playwrights and philosophers and shrinks – try to make sense of it because it so universally is. Even the most devout, who really do believe in choirs of angels and a Better Place, cry like anything when the beloveds go.

If I were the dead, I should be so cross. Have a lovely time, I should be bawling, from my wobbly cloud; have some gin, ride a horse, have a huge punt on the 3.30 at Fakenham; go dancing with your best friend; walk in the rain; read some Scott Fitzgerald; eat a peach. Make more soup if you must, I would be yelling, but perhaps some without tears in it.

So, here is my radical thought. Today, I’m going to be happy for my mum.

It won’t work all day, because I’m not buggery Superwoman, but I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to dig out the little happy moments like a truffle hound. Instead of looking at Stanley and thinking, miserably, Oh, you loved her so much, I shall think of how happy his eager face is and how he is living entirely in the moment. It is a very good moment, because some of the rats have come back to the feed shed, so he is once more in his Steve McQueen Great Escape incarnation, and nothing makes him happier than tunnelling under the feed shed.

He did lay by her side every morning for the last few weeks, as if he knew she was failing, but that does not have to be a sad thing but a happy thing, a really wonderful thing which should make me smile with delight at his fine, devoted, doggy heart.

I’m going to ride my horse for her, because she was proud of what I did with that mare. I’m not going to look at the new mare as I did last night and say Oh, how I wish she had met you. I’m going to laugh like a drain at the thought that although my mother adored thoroughbreds, she did not in fact want me to get another one. (‘What is this Scout?’ Said in a Lady Bracknell voice.) She really longed for me to buy a little Welsh pony for the great-nephews and great-nieces. ‘A little Section A. Just imagine.’

I’m going to write the most absurd gratitude list in the world. (In this spirit, I felt grateful this morning as I came down from my bedroom, because there were actual stairs, to get me from one floor to the other. There are people who don’t have stairs.) For one day, I’m going to peer through the literal and metaphorical dreich and see the damn beauty. I’m going to do it for Mum.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one. This is the one I’m carrying in my head. My mother liked small, elegant, polite dogs. She had unbelievably chic whippets when I was a child, as dapper and dashing as old school Russian aristocrats. Stanley is the most muttish of lurchers – to go with his greyhound half there is anything from Staffie to Lab to Boxer to Australian Cattle Dog. He is antic, unpredictable and very busy. He likes leaping about. He can open every single door on the compound. (He once opened my car door when it was locked, and also amuses himself by turning on the hazard lights and switching on Radio Four when he is bored.) You would think my mother would be horrified. But they fell in love with each other on sight, and nothing after that could come between them.

That is a happy thought. This is a happy dog.

Not not not the screw top.

Cremation people: I am sure you are good and thoughtful and kind to children and animals, but who had the meeting where it was decided that the default urn would have a screw top? No human should end up with a screw top.

And logistics people: who invented the form which asks Did the Deceased die from violence?

What the buggery bollocks were you all thinking?

I’m in the irrational anger stage. You may be able to tell.

I loathe the horrid questions and decisions and things to be done. My mother has gone. Her mortal remains mean nothing to me. She is locked now in my heart, and, in time, I shall commit her to the mountains, to Glen Muick, which is my cathedral. I’ll give her back to the earth and the land and the hills and the sky. That is my own private memorial. We shall also have a little family ceremony. But the forms, the questions, the decisions and indecisions mean nothing to me.

The poor undertaker came today, and had to try and understand when I said something of this to him. He had no language in which to reply. I could see his ordered brain searching around for an answer and coming up with: No Correct Response. He is trained in the ways of formality. There can be no you or me, only yourself and myself. I had stumped in from the horses in filthy muddy gumboots and taken them off at the door. He was immaculately dressed. I sat in front of him in odd socks, with my most battered hat on because I was having a rotten hair day.

Even my sister was slightly surprised by this. ‘What is with the hat?’ she said, before she could help herself.

‘I’m having a bad hair day,’ I said. ‘Even a bad hat is better than bad hair.’

The poor, poor undertaker. I don’t think they trained him, at undertaker school, to deal with a crazy woman in no shoes and a bonkers hat who does not care what it says on the nameplate of the coffin.

Then I went and watched a Marine work a thoroughbred, and sanity returned. The Marines really, really know about death. Especially when they have been blown up twice in Afghan. He had all the language I needed, the directness, the authenticity, the keen emotional intelligence, the absolute lack of fear in the face of mortality. For half an hour, I was soothed. I could speak words that made sense, and know I was not frightening anyone. It takes more than a distracted woman in a lunatic hat to strike fear into the heart of a hoofing Royal.

I made my sister Irish stew and we spoke of life and death and love and pain.

More kind words flew in, from all corners of the internet – email messages from old friends, lovely comments on the blog, sweet flutters of generosity on the Facebook.

On my Twitter feed, there is a young boy who recently did a charity walk for the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. I’d found him on my timeline and sent him many messages of congratulation and encouragement because I found what he was doing so inspiring. It was one of those rather touching, fleeting meetings of strangers, in the ether. This young man took the time to send words of kindness and condolence. I think he is ten. He may be eleven. Imagine doing that, at such an age.

The irrational anger will come. It’s a bit of a bastard, but death makes me cross. I have to let that one roll through me, until it is out the other side. To counter it, and balance it, I must pay attention to all the good things, however small. The stalwart friend who held my horse for the farrier this morning because I was late and had to dash off; that fine Marine; that dear young stranger on Twitter; the good companions, the ones who have been with me for over thirty years, who write to make sure I know they are thinking of me. The people who say: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do that.’ (Almost the sweetest words in the English language at times like this.)

Put in the plus column the cooking gene, so that my kitchen is now filled with soup – beetroot soup, and cauliflower soup, and my own mysterious green soup. All the people who really get it. The people who are not scared of death and strong emotion, and can be easy with those hard masters. The good Scottish weather, forecast to be dour and cloudy, which changed its mind and sent me some gentle sun. The lovely mares, in their secret field. The thoughtful neighbour, who took the time to drop in a card. All the good things. There are so many good things.

I can’t quite forgive the screw top. I expect I shall learn to let it go. I don’t care about the name plate on the coffin, but I shall do some ravishing flowers, because I do funeral flowers like nobody’s business. The flowers should not really matter either, but they do. I’ll send the old lady off with the best damn arrangement. She shall not be insulted with maidenhair fern. I find a furious consolation in that thought.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are of the simple, beautiful things to which I cling:

The rain.

Today, I went out in the rain. I stood in the rain, I walked in the rain, I talked in the rain, I rode in the rain.

A friend cast her eyes up to the dreich. The sky was the colour of lost hope. ‘You are going to ride in this?’

I smiled.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am going to ride in this.’

Normally, when people are surprised by something I do (which is quite often), I offer an explanation. I usually want people to know why I think things and why I do things and what I feel about things. That, perhaps, is why I still write this blog. I don’t really know why I want people to understand; I don’t know whether it is a good or a bad thing. Today, I felt no need for understanding. I was going to ride in this, and that was all she wrote.

If you ride in the rain and walk in the rain and if you have a proper hat for the rain, the rain changes. It no longer becomes a gloomy, paralysing thing. It is a ravishing, soft, reviving thing. It is what makes the grass grow. It is what allowed the trees under which the mare and I pass to survive for hundreds of years. I don’t know who planted the beeches, still bright green in the doleful light, and I don’t know when those glorious seeds went into the ground. Those trees can live for a thousand years. That’s what the rain does.

The mare, who is tougher than she looks, walked through the rain with the gentle aplomb of a duchess. It was a friendly ride. We are friends, I thought. Today, we were of one mind and one body. All was well between us.

Then I went to my work at HorseBack and met some people who have injuries to the body, to the brain, to the spirit. It is a group that had come from Catterick, a new set of people I had not met before. I asked the group leader about his men and women. ‘That one,’ he said, looking at a pale gentleman with a kind face, ‘just saw too many dead bodies.’

I am carrying sorrow at the moment. It is the perfectly respectable, expected, appropriate sorrow that comes to all humans in their middle age. It has a reason. It is not a mood, or a self-indulgence. It is a response.

It lives in me like a low weight. It is a permanent ache. I know it well and, rather to my amazement, I know what to do with it. It has to be wrapped up and stored safely inside. It cannot be fought or dispelled or ignored or driven off. It has to be kept and faced and even spoken to. I speak to my sorrow, as if it is a small, frightened animal. The ache stops twice, on this rainy morning: when I am on my mare, and when I am taking photographs of the people who have seen too many dead bodies.

It has so many paradoxes that I find it interesting. It is a weight, but it has a hollowness too, an unbearable lightness of being. It hurts, but it is also cleansing, as if it has the spirit of fire in it, that comes and burns away all the shabby detritus of life. It makes me think of what is important. It is flaying, yet it makes me strong. It turns out that I am doing sorrow well, to my absurd and secret pride. I speak of it straight, if someone asks. I make jokes. In sadness, I get a gold star in irony. How odd that is.

I’ve had practice, and I believe in practice. This feeling trots beside me like an old hound, known, familiar. Oh, there you are, says the mind, faintly resigned; I remember you.

I expect I won’t always do it well. I’ll have off days and cross days and days when I get tired of the thing and try to run away. Today, I am walking in the rain, in the most ridiculous of my many hats.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack this morning:

The duchess and Stanley the Manly, on Sunday, when it was sunny:

The big question I cannot answer; the small things I understand.

A sharp frost, the first of the autumn, was followed by wild sunshine and brilliant blue skies. I rode my mare early and then she and her friend, the little Paint filly, were loaded into the trailer and taken to the vet to have their teeth done. Going to the vet sounds a workaday chore, but here it involves driving up a long slope and looking out over one of the prettiest views for twenty miles. The valley opens like a book and the line of high wooded hills rolls away to the horizon. I always mean to take my camera and I always forget.

The mares were immaculate and the teeth were done and we put them back into their quiet field and then I raced to my desk and wrote 2089 words and did my HorseBack work. I had a heartening message from the wife of one of our veterans and she allowed me to reproduce it on the Facebook page. (For any new readers, HorseBack UK is a charity which uses horses to help veterans with life-changing injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I write their Facebook page for them. It’s the first voluntary job I’ve ever done, and it brings me weekly joy.)

I think quite a lot about the wives and husbands, the children and parents, the ones in the background, quietly getting on with it, bravely facing their new reality. For all that we concentrate on the veterans themselves, it is never just one person who comes back changed from a hot war. The ripples spread outwards, from a dark pool. This morning, it gave me more satisfaction than I can say to give those families a voice.

Across the Atlantic, another horror is spreading, another shooting, another pointless set of deaths. There are new families who will never be the same, who have to look their own hideous reality in the eye and somehow take its measure. I don’t know how they do it; I don’t know how those smashed hearts go on beating.

I don’t write much here about the big world happenings. I used to, in the beginning, because I am interested in geo-politics and the news. I have twenty-seven opinions on every current event. I’m not sure whether it is my age, or whether it is the internet and the rolling twenty-four hour news which never sleeps, the websites, the vocal commentariat, the Twitter feeders, but it appears, to my bashed old mind, that the world is growing more inexplicable and sometimes mad. Children should not be dying weekly in the greatest superpower the world has ever seen. (Forty-five school shootings this year alone. Forty-five. If that had happened in Britain, people would be marching in the streets; teachers would go on strike; politicians would resign; Whitehall would be thronged with protest banners; the BBC would talk of nothing else.) America, it seems, can do everything except stop its own citizens from being gunned down. It is a place which fascinates me. It is a land of great gifts, rich culture, dazzling talents, astonishing achievements, glittering hopes and dreams. It gave us jazz and put a man on the moon. It has more Nobel Prizes than the next ten countries combined. And yet, for all its brilliance, it cannot do this one thing. It cannot keep its people safe.

A huge question like that – why? why? – defeats me. The madness and the pointlessness, the sorrow and the pity, beat me, in the end, which is why the blog turned back to the small, ordinary things. The known things, the consoling things, the things the bruised heart and the battered mind can take in and understand: these are the things of which I write.

So, as this shattering news broke over a wounded people, I gentled my horse, and watched my dog race over the ground softened with dew, and looked at the hills, and did something for the veterans, and wrote a book, and made some strong coffee and clung on, by my fingernails. As life gets bigger, the small things grow more important, in a wry paradox. If I can hold on to the small things, the turning earth shall not tip me off.

 

Today’s pictures:

The dear departed.

Another of the great old gentlemen has gone.

My father had three sisters, all very glorious and splendid in their different ways. One of them was married to this kind, funny, generous man who has just left us.

He was old and he was ill. He was, I suspect, like my father, ready to go. He had run his race. There should be something fitting and right about these splendid old men going gently into the good night. And yet there is a tearing sense of loss and rupture. The world is not quite the world without them in it. The consolation that they are at peace is a thin gruel. He was one of those ones that filled a room, lit up people’s faces, made everything seem lighter and brighter. I had not seen him for some years but his memory burns bright, filled with fondness and warmth.

Now, when one of the old gentlemen goes, it is as if they are all going, all over again. The loss of the father, the godfather, the relation by marriage, the titan of my childhood – all is felt again, as fresh and urgent as if it has just happened. The heart aches and the throat closes up and the mind races furiously around, trying to find a good sense, a hymn of acceptance, a place to rest. No, no, no, says the racing mind, not that grand generation, which we shall never see again.

They were different from us, mightier in many ways, their virtues written in bold type. My lot, my boys, have talents that the old school perhaps did not – they are more attuned to domestic life, more fluent in expressing emotion, less afraid of plunging into what were not once considered the manly arts. They know how to rock a baby to sleep and cook a lunch and do the school run. (Although I still have at least one dear friend who, for all his modernity, looks at me sternly and says: ‘I don’t do feelings.’ And I tease him by talking about deep emotions and watch, laughing, as he desperately tries not to panic.)

But my father’s generation, the ones born in the war, had a dash, an élan, a scatter of magic about them. They were paradoxes: they had a certain reckless swagger, and yet they were masters of stoicism. I do like someone who can stare a serious feeling in the eye and get its measure, but I adore the flinty Blitz spirit of Getting On With It. Those old gentlemen Got On With It.

He was a lovely man. I think of his children, his wife, his many friends, confounded by loss. He will leave a space that cannot be filled. He will be remembered well.

As I rode this morning, in the bright Scottish sunshine, not long after hearing the brave voice of my aunt on the telephone, I thought of the old gentleman and committed him to the hills and the trees and the sky, as I always do. I give them back to the earth, these Dear Departed. I said, out loud, looking up at the wooded slope to the north: ‘I hope you have mountains and rivers, where you are.’

Then, as if sensing that I needed something marvellous, something fine and true, the mare gave me her most flying, floating canter. It was as light as air, as soft as love. It had all her grand thoroughbred spirit in it, all her athleticism and strength and power. But it was done with one hand on the reins, hardly the touch of a finger, so there was that impossible combination of the wildness of her ancestral voices and the control of her calm mind. It was so exhilarating that I whooped into the clear air, overcome with joy.

The joy released the sorrow, and I walked her back blinded by tears. I could not see where I was going, so I let go of the reins and let her guide me home to the gate. She knew where she was going.

I got off and rubbed her sweet forehead in gratitude. ‘Thank you,’ I said, aloud. She nodded, peaceful and unafraid. Sudden human cloudbursts do not alarm her. She, too, has the wonderful ability to Get On With It. The glorious old gentleman would have liked her, I think. They had something in common.

 

Today’s pictures:

In memory of Kauto Star. With love and thanks.

Kauto Star is dead.

Those are four heavy words to write. I never even met the bold beauty, yet, as so many people in racing did, I loved him as if he were my own. There are mighty horses that come along once in a generation, that have a sprinkle of stardust about them, that gallop straight to the heart. Kauto Star was such a horse.

For years, I tried to work out what it was about him that was so thrilling, so visceral, so lovable. I think it was because he had it all. He had dash and power, a supreme natural talent, and, in the early days, a rather terrifying and exhilarating recklessness. He sometimes seemed to be having a little joke with the crowd, ploughing through the last fence, miraculously finding a fifth leg, before picking himself up and storming to the line. He had a lilting exuberance, a dancing stride, a joy in him, as if he really loved his job.

But he had dour courage as well. I’ve seen him win on the bridle, as he liked, leaving good horses floundering in his wake, and I’ve seen him put his head down and scrap through the mud and the rain, straining every sinew to get his nose in front, his will to win gleaming through the gloom and the murk. He could shine like the sun, and he could fight like a tiger.

His partnership with Ruby Walsh was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in racing. They had a harmony and communion and understanding which is rare and glorious. They knew each other and they liked each other. ‘Ah,’ said Ruby, that hardened professional, on live television, to an audience of millions, ‘I love him.’

He was the beating heart of Ditcheat, ridden every day by his devoted Clifford Baker, loved and cherished and honed by a remarkable team, who kept him sound and kept him fresh and kept him loving his job. To bring any horse back, season after season, with all the physical and mental demands on those fragile legs and those sensitive thoroughbred minds, is something. To keep them winning at the highest level is an achievement beyond compare. Paul Nicholls deserves every single superlative in the book.

Kauto Star was as handsome and filled with charisma as an old school film star, and like any great presence, he knew how to please a crowd. He did it in so many different ways, whether it was becoming the first horse to regain a Gold Cup, or dancing to his fourth King George victory by an imperious distance (which means so many lengths that the officials could not be bothered to count), or, in perhaps his most moving and stirring moment, coming back when everyone had written the old boy off to win his fourth Betfair Chase at Haydock. There really was not a dry eye in the house on that grey afternoon.

He had that extra indefinable something which the great ones have, what my mother calls the look of eagles. Arkle had it, and Frankel had it, and Desert Orchid had it. Horses are flight animals, easily alarmed by noise, but when Ruby Walsh would canter Kauto down in front of the stands after a majestic victory, with shouts and cheers ringing out into the winter air, the bonny champion would lift his head and turn his intelligent eye on the roaring thousands as if knowing that it was all for him. Pride is a human word, but I think he felt it.

Very few horses go beyond the racing world. But Kauto Star, with one of those mighty, streaming leaps, the ones when he took off outside the wings and landed as far out the other side, jumped from the back pages to the national headlines. For years, he was the perfect Christmas present, soaring round Kempton as if it were his spiritual home. His relentless, rhythmic gallop rattled into the minds and hearts of many people who hardly knew one end of a horse from another. But they knew brilliance and beauty when they saw it; they knew class and guts and glory. He was a supreme athlete, but he was also a great character, his bright, white face recognisable and beloved the length and breadth of these islands.

Like any storied character, he had his troubles, but he always came back. There seemed something indestructible about him. There were no doubters he could not defy, no fence he could not jump, no record he could not smash, no peak he could not scale.

It turns out, after all, that he was destructible. One freak field accident, and a superlative equine hero is brought to dust.

It was a privilege to have seen him. He gave me more joy than I can express. I loved him with that pure love I always feel in the presence of greatness. It is all sunshine in Scotland today, but it feels as if a light has gone out.

He has gone to run another race, somewhere we cannot follow him. I hope he has springy green turf under his feet and the wind in his mane and the echo of those adoring crowds in his dear old ears, as he passes his final winning post.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one photograph today. I cannot show you a picture of Kauto, because I am strict about copyright. You can find wonderful shots of him all over the internet, many of them taken by the exceptional Edward Whitaker. Here is a picture of my blue hills instead. These hills are my cathedral. Whenever anyone I love dies, I commit them to the hills. The Scottish mountains were here for millions of years before I was thought of, and shall stand for millions of years after I have gone. I find a curious consolation in that, and a sense of peace and perspective.

PS. As I finished writing this, and was about to press publish, I had to go back to the internet, just to check. My magical mind was saying: it must be a mistake. The big fella cannot possibly be gone. But he is, and so I make my farewell. He will live on in my heart, and in those precious memories which no amount of time can erase.

Ordinariness.

A long time ago, I wanted to write a book called something like: The Ordinary Griefs. I was interested in how people dealt with all the expected sorrows of life, mostly the old best beloveds dying. The extreme griefs, the headline griefs, what I call the rip up your life griefs were beyond my remit. I could not imagine, and still cannot, how a human carries on after a child dies, or their entire village is wiped out by a natural disaster, or their country becomes a war zone. I have no idea how the women of the Congo continue to put one foot in front of the other. What I wanted to examine was how people faced the everyday sadnesses, which chip away at the vulnerable heart.

I never wrote that book, in the end perhaps because it was too ordinary. In the end, perhaps, because the only answer is that you keep buggering on, and one really can’t make a whole book out of that. Some days one buggers better than others. Occasionally, the demons wrestle you to the floor, but you do not speak of that, especially if you are British. Even now, with the internet age and reality television, the default mode of the Ordinary Decent Britain is a sort of resigned and humorous stoicism. Worse things happen at sea.

My mother is in the hospital. It is not a grave ailment, but she is having a horrible time. I tell myself not to fret. The redoubtable stepfather travels in and out of Aberdeen, carrying on, making no fuss. I cook him breakfast. ‘You will need an egg,’ I say, seriously, ‘for strength.’ Then we discuss tribalism, and its discontents. We love a bit of geo-politics with our eggs.

I ride my horse and do my work and eat some fish for my brain.

My childish mind shouts: I want my mum to be better. My adult mind says, calmly: come along, better do the washing up and then take the dog for a walk.


Today’s pictures are two little photo essays, one of a happy horse, and one of a happy dog, who has a handsome new boyfriend:

























As I finish this, an email pings into my inbox, with an update from a fellow blogger. I have met her in real life, and we are connected through mutual friends, but she is truly a blogging friend, a kindred spirit I met through this funny new medium. She has heartbreak because a gentleman she thought might be The One turned out not to be. (Reading between the lines, I suspect he has not quite behaved like a gentleman either.)

There is an ordinary grief for you. Every day, all over the world, people leave, and there is only a blank space where all the hopes and dreams were. Every day, women like my friend do exactly what she is doing which is: admit the pain, and bash on through it. Every day, there are good women downing a stiff gin, swearing a bit, reading themselves lectures on their own folly (it is always our own female fault, in the irrational mind), picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and starting all over again.

My friend is doing this in a gloriously British way, with understatement and quiet courage. In fact, she is half Norwegian and lives in America and is really an International Woman of Mystery. But the good old British phlegm is there, even as she writes ravishing heartbroken prose, shining like a beacon, calling to me like across the ocean like a homing pigeon.

A moment.

The older I get, the more I think that life is made of moments. Of course there are great life arcs and plans and goals and sweeps. Humans may lift their eyes to the peaks, and not just stare doggedly at the foothills. But perhaps the paradox is that it is in the foothills where one may find the peaks.

Today, there was a moment.

It sleeted in the early morning, and I woke to a sky the colour of doleful rhinos. It will be a practical day, I thought: get the mare fed and check the rugs and carry the hay. Too horrid for anything else.

Then, little by little the sky began to clear.

Perhaps I’ll just take her round the block, in hand, I thought. I’ve been riding a lot lately, and she adores going for a mooch on the end of her rope, and it is one of the things that we do together that I love the most.

Then the sky cleared a little more.

Perhaps I can even take off the rug, I thought.

I wondered if I should ride, after all. The weather was turning fast. But I had this gentle idea of a walk in my head, and I honoured it.

As we walked away from the field, my sister appeared. The sun, as if from nowhere, shone down on us with vivid conviction.

I knew the sister was busy. I looked at her. ‘Just round the block?’ I said.

So we walked and talked. We talked about everything: life, death, family, love, fear, regret. I had the lovely sister on one side and the lovely mare on the other, and the Scottish hills and the blue sky beyond.

My sister has just lost a friend. She was a friend of all of ours. I remember her from my childhood. She was Italian and she was the most cosmopolitan, glamorous creature I had ever seen. She was always laughing and saying outrageous things. She became my sister’s bosom companion and they spoke of everything. We watched her bring up three impossibly tall, gentle, clever boys. And then she died. The funeral was last week.

That is why we spoke of life and death.

I said: ‘I think that when you get to our age, one death is all deaths. I think it makes us grieve Dad all over again.’

We contemplated this.

I said: ‘We will get through the sadness together.’

I meant all the sadness. The middle of life is when you know that sadnesses will come, not in single spies but in battalions. The only thing you can do is work out some kind of way of dealing with them, so that you are not drowning but waving. At the moment, my main plan is: love, and sticking together. My sister and I shall stick together. The whole family will stick together. I love my family very much today.

The moment came at the end of this long walk and this long conversation.

The three of us were standing, in the sunshine, getting ready to part. The sister and I were finishing our talking. She is leaving tomorrow, so we did a farewell hug. The mare, her sweet head low and relaxed, her eyes soft, her big body gentle and at home in the world, turned to the sister. She gave her velvet muzzle, and the sister stroked it. The mare was very, very still. She was offering something.

I have a secret theory that the kind ones, with the big hearts, can sense human sorrow. A simple moment of sympathy ran between the human and the horse. I watched it, and I felt more touched and proud of my thoroughbred girl than if we had done twenty flying changes. There was something so authentic and generous in that moment that it brought tears to my eyes.

As I walked Red back to the field and gave her her breakfast, as I watched her go politely to her place and stand, waiting for me to put the bowl down in the yellow grass, whinnying a little in anticipation, I thought for the hundredth time what a miracle mare she is. A flinging pied wagtail, the first of the spring, suddenly flew in over our heads and settled on the ground, preening itself in the sun. There was another moment.

Write it down, write it down, shouted the voice in my head. The moments must be recorded. The small moments – of love, of joy, of reality, of honesty, of being alive – are what make me human and actual and true. If I can stack up enough of them, then perhaps there will always be a light, on the darkest day.

I think: I never really know what this blog is for. I think: perhaps it is for this. It is the place where the moments can be stored. It is the crock of gold. It is, as I so often say, because Yeats lives in my head like a singing thing, so that I can take down that book, and slowly read.

 

Today’s pictures:

There was no camera with us on our walk this morning, but this is what we look like – deep in conversation and thought, with the sympathetic wonder-mare by our side:

And from today:

And speaking of generosity and authenticity – oh, oh, the Dear Readers. What enchanting things you said yesterday. I smiled and smiled and smiled. Kindness of strangers; little arrows of sweetness from one unknown heart to another. That is what the internet is for. It never ceases to amaze me. Thank you.

A good man

The sun is dazzling over Scotland this morning. I sit inside, and write an obituary.

It is such a strange thing to have to do. I have never done it before. It’s one of the hardest bits of writing I’ve ever tackled, because one must do justice to greatness, pay right tribute, think of the feelings of all the friends and family.

What I really wanted to say was: another of The Good Men has gone.

Paul Burns was a much-loved member of the HorseBack UK family, and he had died after an accident. It was sudden and unexpected and seemed quite impossible; he was one of the most vivid men I ever met. Because I do the HorseBack Facebook page, I wrote something for him, feeling as always in the face of inexplicable loss the paltriness of mere words.

The news came at 9.51pm last night. There was that moment of black, blank shock. I could feel my brain saying: this does not compute. I could practically sense the neurones and synapses frazzling and twisting. I think about death every bloody day; I am in the middle of a mortality storm. But not this; not this man. I thought, furiously: this man had no bloody legs but he was more alive than anyone I ever met. The fact of him not existing in the world any more did not make the smallest piece of sense.

After a moment, I started thinking of it in writing, as I always do. Write it down, write it down, goes the voice in my head. At once, I heard the sentence: I lost a friend tonight. This was curious, because I did not know him all that well; I had only met him this year. I knew very little of his life. But I worked with him and always looked forward to his visits. I really liked him. He made me laugh. He interested me. I admired him. He was thoughtful and gentle and courageous and kind. He was one of those rare people who have the ability to make everything seem a little brighter, a little better, a little more possible.

I cried for the loss and the irony. There was a soldier who survived being blown up by an IRA bomb. That was how he lost his legs. And he dies in an ordinary accident. It seemed too pointless and cruel. He had so much to give. He inspired everyone who met him.

I did the thing I did after Dad. I had to get out and walk. It was almost ten but still light as day. I walked down to the field, over the burn, where a low mist was hovering, like something out of a film. I cried out loud, as the dog walked by my side. I had to get to my horse.

I got to the paddock, and whistled. All three horses turned, looked, raised their heads, and then cantered towards me in slow motion. I’m not sure I ever saw anything like it. It was a damn film. I went to Red and leaned on her. I actually said, out loud: ‘I know I am never supposed to bring you my stuff, but tonight I can’t help it.’ She breathed and nodded. ‘A good man died,’ I said.

And here was the perfect thing. She suddenly decided she did not want to be in a Disney movie. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps she really does not like it when I cry. Perhaps she had a fly. There was noise coming from the west, a dog barking, someone shouting; perhaps she had been disturbed by that. But she did not drop her head on my chest as she so often does. She threw it up in the air and rolled her eye at me, and swished her tail, and walked away. There was not a drop of sentiment in her. She does not speak English; she did know I was speaking of the good man, even though the last time I saw him he had admired her and stroked her nose and called her beautiful. She is a horse; she was just doing the things that horses do. It made me laugh, and shook me out of the emotional quicksand.

As this was happening, the dog went and had a damn good roll in some shit. That made me laugh even more. I thought: Paul knew horses and he knew dogs, and I suspect this moment would have made him laugh too. It was so much bathos. It was the exact right thing.

I walked away, shaking my head ruefully. And then I heard a rustle behind me, and the mare had dropped her head and forgotten her bad temper, and was following me. I stopped, to see if we just happened to be going in the same direction. I thought maybe she would just wander on past, oblivious to the sadness. But she stopped beside me and gave me her head, and forgot her grump and leaned her face into me and breathed through her velvet nostrils. I laughed again, a little ragged. I said, again out loud: ‘Thank you for that.’

We stood together for a moment and then I let her go. My problems are not her problems. And anyway, this thing is not my problem. It is a bigger sorrow. There will be family and old friends who will be missing this good man with a tearing grief.

I crossed back over the burn. The mist was rising. Two bats swooped out of the dusk. I passed the last place I saw Paul, only two weeks ago; he had been standing in the sunshine, just opposite my house. He was waving goodbye to the amazing young people of Banchory Academy, after their five days crossing Scotland together. He was so moved by them, had become so attached to them, so admired them, that there were tears in his eyes. He looked down, gave a twisted smile, as if mocking himself a little for letting emotion get the better of him.

He said, and I remember this like it was yesterday: ‘It’s so hard to say goodbye.’

Going to extremes.

I try to do work, but my mind keeps going back to Woolwich. It shocks and horrifies in so many ways that the brain feels battered, trying to take it all in. It is, most of all, so un-British. A man ranting on a city street, his hands shining with blood, fanatical hatred in his eyes, his familiar London accent at odds with the extremist platitudes falling from his mouth is not what one expects, in this country.

We are not the nation of warm beer and cricket and maiden ladies cycling to church which John Major once nostalgically conjured up. I’m not sure Britain ever was that, even in the lost age to which Major was clearly harking. Blighty is, however, a battered old warrior, who has been round the block more than once. Extremes have not flourished here, in recent history.

It might have been a wild, untamed place, centuries ago, when the Marcher Lords went untrammelled and kings and their favourites were murdered in unspeakable ways. There were crazed extremes when the country divided into Roundhead and Cavalier. But when Europe was torn with internecine strife in the 19^th century, Britain did not join that particular party. There was no 1815, no 1848; no barricades in the streets of London as there were in Paris or Vienna. (Admittedly, the British did protest for specific reasons: they rioted over the unjust Corn Laws, and marched for the Chartists. But these were movements of quite a different kidney.)

Later, in the twentieth century, when the Fascist and Communist movements roiled Europe and Russia, the equivalents of right and left here petered out into damp squibs. The Blackshirts could gain little purchase. The Communist Party of Great Britain was characterised through much of its history by squabbling and swerves in policy, before it finally disbanded.

In its recent history, Britain really does seem to exemplify the middling sort. In contemporary life, there is absolutely nothing to compare to the God, Gays and Guns wing of the Republican party in America. No member of the House of Lords would ever take to the floor to insist that the world was created six thousand years ago and that this should be taught in schools, as has been expressed by august senators. (This is not swishy one-upmanship; Blighty has other weaknesses to American strengths.)

There is, even now, in the sometimes intemperate age of the internet, a sense of restraint, pragmatism, stoicism. The best way to be beloved in Britain is not to be passionate about any cause (this is considered a little too much and dicing with dullness) but to be ironical and self-deprecating. Humorous self-deprecation may be the defining characteristic of ordinary decent Britons. Even in usual conversation, the centre holds; the Goldilocks principle applies. The classic British rejoinder to the polite question of How are you? is Not too bad, thank you.

So what happened yesterday had layers of ramifications to its shock. It was not just an horrific murder in itself; it was The Extreme, walking and talking on a London street. And then, out on the internet, other extremes began to join in. Send them all home (who? where?); time for Britain to grow a backbone; Enoch Powell was right. This last one made me genuinely puzzled. ‘But,’ I said to my mother, ‘the Tiber is clearly not foaming with blood.’ Some of the comments were so vile I do not have the heart to write them down here.

The English Defence League and their cohorts began to join in. There was a strong flavour of Take Our Country Back. From whom was not explicitly stated; the foreign, the other, the in any way different, I could only assume. The irony was that the killer who spoke to the camera was a Briton, born in Romford, whilst the incredibly brave woman who talked calmly to him, as he held his bloody knife, who tried to distract his attention away from vulnerable mothers and children, was not British at all. Are we supposed to send this extraordinary person back too?

Just as I began to despair, to believe that my reading of the British character was all wrong, that perhaps it was the nuts and lunatics and extremes who now held sway, the gentle voice of reason began to assert. People called for calm, begged not to meet hatred with hatred. One man who lived in the neighbourhood said he was just going to get on with his ordinary life, because that was the British way.

It is hard to remain reasonable in the face of such visceral horror. I suppose it is human, in some ways, to want to find a scapegoat, demonise The Other, identify a neat, convenient group to blame. But extrapolation is a dangerous and misleading game. One Muslim does not mean all Muslims. By this warped logic, one might as well say that since 93% of the prison population is male, all men are criminals.

There is also the almost congenital inability to process risk. When something like this happens, there is always a shout for hard-line tactics, the cry to ramp up the war on the terrorists. But in the cool halls of statistics, where fact lives, you are six times more likely to die in your bath than be killed by a fanatical fundamentalist. (Latest figures: annual deaths in bathtubs – 29; averaged annual deaths over the last ten years by terror attacks – 5. Those numbers are from England and Wales; there do not seem to be national figures.) Are we to insist that everyone take showers? That is before one even goes into the big numbers, the ones that run into annual thousands – road deaths, suicides, poisoning, falls.

I think the thing that makes me saddest is that in amidst all the noise, the central tragedy gets lost. There was a brave man who gave honourable service to his country who is no more. He will have family and friends and comrades who mourn him. The ragged shouting voices do not honour their grief or his passing, but merely try to hijack a human loss for their own, frightened purposes.

 

Just one picture today, of these Scottish hills, which always act as consolation for me when the inexplicable happens:

Love, mostly.

Sometimes, when I am going about my day, a line will come into my head. That’s the blog, I will think. There it is.

Today, my line was:

My father died singing.

It’s not quite true. He died in his sleep. But just before he said he would have a little rest, he sang a song to the nice Australian nurse he liked. He was always a great singer of songs; it is one of the enduring memories of my childhood. He was quite famous for singing songs. When I was very small he used to bash away on the tea chest and lift his face to the sky and sing The Outlaw Rapparee and I’m off to Dublin in the green, in the green. He was once chucked out of The Mirabelle, a very tony sort of restaurant, for singing rebel songs after too much brandy, and upsetting the august patrons.

Anyway, the nurse was called Dahlia, and he made up, on the spot, a little song about Dahlia from Australia, and sang it to her, and then he went to sleep and did not wake.

Suddenly, violently, this morning, I felt very proud of him for that.

I also felt passionately grateful to that kind woman. She must have smiled at the old fellow, and let him flirt with her, and laughed at his roguish jokes. I wonder whether, in some strange, unspoken way, she gave him permission to go. He had sung his last song, and had a good audience for it, and now it was time to bring the curtain down.

I miss him very much.

I miss my Pigeon, too. Mr Stanley is a fine, antic sort of chap, and filled with comedic quirks and intelligence and interest. He is a good companion, and we grow fonder of each other every day. I like the absolute difference between him and my old girl. He is hard and lean and questing; he is a man of action. He is firmly rooted in the world, and is sometimes more interested in it than in people. She was still and soft and contemplative. She was all about the love; that was the engine that drove her. As long as she had me, she did not really care about anything else. She was the gentlest creature I ever met.

I was thinking of her because I found a little vignette on Facebook this morning, from a vet who had to put down an old Irish wolfhound. Its owners brought their six year old son with them for the event, thinking it would be good for him to understand what was happening to the beloved dog. After it was over, they all discussed the sadness of dogs having such short lives, compared to humans. The little boy spoke.

He said: 'People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life - like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right? Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don't have to stay as long.'

Bloody hell, I thought. I have spent forty-five years trying to work out what it’s all about. And there, in a sentence, is the wisdom of the ages. I was thinking only this morning as I had my bath that the big philosophy is all very well, but that perhaps the real truths lie in the small things. (You know that I am currently obsessed with the importance of the small things.) I admit, I never really got on with philosophy. I had to do the political philosophers at university, and I never quite forgave Rousseau for tying me in knots over the Theory of the General Will. A few years ago I tried to sit down and read Spinoza’s Ethics, and it nearly killed me. Still, I understand that it is important that there are people out there thinking the Big Thoughts. And one must not be reductive. Life cannot be shrunk to a Hallmark card.

But still, if one were searching for a quick philosophy of life, a Coles Notes of existence, one could do worse than loving everyone all the time and being nice. Imagine knowing that, at the age of six. I hope no one ever talks the small fella out of that lovely belief; I hope no one takes him and makes him sceptical and cynical.

Curiously, this morning, as I was missing that bone-deep sweetness of my old Pidge, Red the Mare decided to channel some profound gentleness of her own. Almost every day, as I work with her, I think of the prejudices people have against thoroughbreds, and racehorses, and chestnut mares. It makes me laugh, as she leans her head on my chest and dozes off. It is as if she has a life mission to smash stereotypes, and since I hate stereotyping like the very devil, it gives me a wild, flinging pleasure.

She has high blood in her, and when she is on the alert, she draws herself up to her full size, every inch of muscle and sinew taut and strong, all her fine ancestry singing its ancient song. But on days like today, when she is low and relaxed, everything in her is still. We work together so seamlessly that it does not feel like work at all, but as if we are doing a stately pas-de-deux. My step is her step.

At the end, very kindly and gently, she gives me her head, and I scratch her cheek in the place she loves, and we stand together, horse and human in a muddy Scottish field, tied by an invisible cord that runs from one heart to another.

Sometimes, when I think of the Dear Departeds, my heart feels like an old jalopy, dented and holed and tied together by binder twine. When I have moments like that with my horse, it is as if she gives the heart back to me, all strong and complete and new, and ready for anything. When people wonder about the whole horse thing, and why it enchants me so much, that is why. It is the most extraordinary gift.

 

Today’s pictures:

Too dreich again for the camera. It is half a degree, and the sky is low and dark, and the snow is coming down from the hills. Not quite here yet, but threatening. So here is a little selection from the archive:

The heroine of today’s blog:

Note the lower lip. It’s her barometer. Honestly, on some days, my sole goal is to get that lower lip to wibble. Then I know she is happy, and my work is done:

Some stone and lichen. Because there must always be stone and lichen:

Stanley the Dog, showing his glorious athleticism:

Ears akimbo as we do sit and stay:

Autumn the Filly:

Myfanwy doing THE BLINKY EYES:

Hill, on a rather lovelier day than today:

And here, from the much older archive, is the glorious old lady. After she died, I mostly put up pictures of her smiling, because I wanted to remember the laughing days. But sometimes, when I was making her post for pictures, she would affect her softest most wistful face, like this:

Sleeping:

As Nancy Mitford used to say: do admit.

And two of my favourites of my funny old Fa: