Shared experience. Or, a still small moment of calm.

This morning, I woke to a low sky and a light, misty rain. It’s that kind of rain where there is just a sense of water in the air; less falling than swirling, almost like a flying dew.

The Horse Talker and I arrived at the paddock at the exact same moment. At the exact same moment, we saw the exact same thing. All three of the girls were lying down in the paddock, in a delightful collective doze. We made Did You See That faces at each other, and walked in cat-like silence through the gate so as not to disturb the glorious picture.

The little pony decided to get up, and performed some astonishing yoga stretches with her hind legs, which made us double up with laughter. Then we each went to our own horses and sat with them and stroked their dear faces and entered into the circle of calm which they had created.

It’s quite rare that we see them lying down. Autumn the Filly was flat on her side, completely flaked out. Red was resting on her belly, her long legs curled up under her, her chin resting dreamily on the grass. It’s also quite rare that a horse will stay down when a human approaches. Often they get up and shake themselves. Their flight instincts mean that they have to trust you a lot to stay in the vulnerable prone position. That is why it is always very touching when you see pictures of people lying with their equines.

They were both so still it was as if every atom in their bodies was at rest. They were in a low, humming dream state, every part of them existing in peace. The field was very quiet, apart from the lone cry of a circling buzzard. The misty rain had driven away all the flies and brought a sort of suspended animation with it, as if the world was on hold. Nothing existed but these beautiful creatures and these two grateful humans.

We laughed and smiled at each other and invented fanciful scenarios as to why they were so dozy. Rather madly, there is to be a techno concert on Saturday in the cut hayfield, and we decided that the girls had clearly been up all night practising their rave moves. No wonder they were so sleepy.

Eventually, Red got to her feet. Autumn was still dozing. The Horse Talker and I went up to the shed to make breakfast. I let Red out into the set-aside so she could do some free grazing. This bit of the field is where the good grass is, and there is no fence. She could, I suppose, gallop off to Tarland if she really wanted, but she doesn’t. She will usually come when I whistle, or if she is too busy eating, stand quietly when I come to collect her.

As we were mixing up the feeds, the Horse Talker and I suddenly heard a swish of grass and a dash of hooves, and Red arrived at a busy trot and poked her white face into the doorway, urgent enquiry in her eyes, as if to say ‘You are making breakfast and you did not tell me?’ She looked so comical that it made us laugh and laugh.

The whole thing was one of the most enchanted hours I’ve ever spent in my life. But what was particularly lovely about it is that it was shared. The Horse Talker and I are now custodians of that collective memory, and we shall be able to say to each other, when the hard snows come and we are trudging through the winter mud, or when we are having a bad day, or when we wake to a grumpy morning – ‘Do you remember that day?’

I am solitary by nature. I do a lot of things alone. I need quiet and peace; I like the space of my silent room. But sometimes, in life, it’s important to have a witness. I thought this as I came back to my desk to start work. I thought suddenly, that is what this blog is all about. I started it, ruthlessly, blatantly, because I thought I could go viral and everyone would buy my book and I should be rich and retire and buy a boat.

The internet gods laughed at that puny plan, but I continued doing it because I discovered I liked it for its own sake. I love the small, tight band of Dear Readers. I love that you remember the Duchess and the Pigeon, and that you have taken Mr Stanley to your hearts. I love the little messages which wing their way from as far as New Zealand and Sri Lanka and California.

People tend to be quite sneery about blogs and social networks. It’s all ghastly self-indulgence, absurd show-boating, awful narcissism. The tired old joke about Twitter is: who cares what you had for breakfast? (Although absolutely nobody I know tweets about bacon and eggs.)

In fact, although these grouchy criticisms have a tiny acorn of truth in them, I think there is something quite profound going on. I think it is to do with having a witness. I think, at its best, this new medium offers something wonderfully collective. Here are our small lives; they are seen.

Of course lives are seen by the real people in the real world; the family and friends and best beloveds. But there is nothing wrong with virtual seeing in the virtual world. It’s not all trick cyclists and Look Ma, no hands. It can be a simple, good-hearted offering of some of the lovely moments.

When the news is dark and the world seems crazed and the big things are so big and bad that the battered brain can hardly take them in, the small, ordinary pleasures in small, ordinary lives can be an anchor to sanity. As much as there is flimsy and nonsense and pointless shouting and idiot arguments in the virtual world, there is also a lot of kindness of strangers. There are shards of wisdom and moments of glad grace. You get a glimpse into lives of which you would otherwise know nothing. I think there is something rather marvellous in that.

 

Today’s pictures:

One from the morning field:

The day was too gloomy for pictures, so here are some of the Beloveds from the last few sunnier days:

The focus is hysterically wrong in this picture, but I love it, because it gives a sense of the happiness of the dear little band:

Free grazing. Two things make me smile: Stanley the Dog channelling his inner horse, and the most excellent colour coordination:

Perfectly synchronised eating:

Is it time for breakfast face:

And a few more of my Hebridean pictures:

I love this one because it could have been taken in 1953:

Happy holiday faces:

A quick thought

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I want to apologise for the blog being a little spotty over the last week or so. There have been deadlines to meet and miles to go before I sleep; and despite my enduring battle against the evils of perfectionism (there is a staunch section on this peril in Backwards, every word of which Sarah and I stand by) I still have a stupid reluctance to knock something off just for the sake of it and post it here. I want always to give you good thought, polished prose, or at the very least a diverting picture of a pig. All of which means that occasionally the week's content is a little more slender than I would like.

This week, I have one of my oldest and dearest friends and her two tiny children to stay, all the way from California. Hostessly duties, compulsive chatting, and the making of the soda bread for breakfast have kept me from giving my full attention to the blog, and I have ruthlessly deserted Twitter altogether. But here is one of the miracles of the blogosphere - and you know that is a subject to which I return over and over - is that while I have been only semi-present, you have magnificently filled the breach. I direct all my dear readers to the comments below the last two posts, where a great amount of stimulating opinion, fervent discussion and illuminating facts I did not know have been posted. It is as if you have been doing my work for me, filling in with the meaty stuff while I take a tiny sabbatical. So I thank you all, and especially send out thanks to exromana who always guides me into new areas about which I do not know enough.

When the blows come down

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It is with a heavy heart that I bid a fond, sad farewell to the lovely Cassandra Castle, who is leaving the blogosphere for a while. As she says, on the brilliant Jacob Wrestling blog, she has had some 'dogshite' news. Sometimes life gets too real for blogging, I suspect.

Simon Sherwood, the great, talented jockey who rode the great, talented Desert Orchid to nine straight victories in a row, once said of the old grey horse: 'All the fun I've had in racing, I owe it to him.' I feel that all the fun in blogging, I owe to Cassandra. When I came to this medium, the blogosphere was an unmapped desert to me, a metaphorical Qattara Depression. Backwards In High Heels had just come out, and I was determined to give it some kind of interweb presence. Must go viral, I said to myself, ten times a day, with no idea how, or even what that really meant (I had heard someone say it once and thought it sounded good). I had frantic Google alerts out on the book, my name, Sarah's name, not wanting to miss a single mention. And so, one day, into my inbox came a newsflash: someone called Cassandra Castle had bought the book and was talking about it on her blog.

Thus I found my way to Jacob Wrestling. There, I saw what a blog could be - charming, funny, whimsical, entertaining, soothing. Oh, I thought: this is how you do it. My terrors lessened; I decided that I could do this thing. It was also through that first visit that I found the wonderful LibertyLondonGirl, So Lovely, Belgian Waffle, Mrs Trefusis, Miss Whistle, Lucy Fishwife, Titian Red and many other delights. Through them, I learnt that the blogosphere is not an arid desert, but a blooming garden.

Cassandra's dogshite news has got me thinking about what you do when the bad news arrives. There has a little bit of it about lately in my own life. My oldest and dearest friend has a mother who has a hideous illness which there is nothing any of us can do a thing about; meanwhile, her husband has a mystery disease which the doctors cannot fathom, and leaves him in constant pain. My own dear mum has galloping osteoporosis (please, please eat your calcium daily to avoid this in later life) and bravely puts up with frequent fractures and difficulty breathing. When I call my friend, I say: 'Oh, how I wish there was something I could do.' She bashes on, stoical, brave, getting the children to school, keeping the family together. 'This is how it is, at our age, when the parents get old,' she says. I have a furious desire for a magic wand, to wave it all away. Someone else I adore had a bit of a medical emergency not long ago, and reacted to it with a raging determination to look on the bright side. 'You know,' he said, 'people are very good and kind. There is an awful lot of love out there.'

When Sarah and I wrote the chapter on grief in Backwards, we struggled more with it than any other subject. You risk falling into platitude or helplessness or Leonard Cohen gloom. After all, what is there really to say about sorrow? It is where words can lose their meaning. I did a first draft and sent it to her for approval. She rang up at once: 'Do you want the ladies to jump out of a high building?' she said, roaring with laughter. The line between Pollyanna and Eeyore is a fatally fine one.

There are some practical things that I have learnt, when faced with someone who is suffering. I believe in chicken soup, practical help, and never, ever using The Pity Voice. I believe, almost more than anything, in listening. My friend with the medical emergency said that he could not bear the drama queens, who wanted to make it their own three act play. 'I want to say: it's not all about you,' he said, quite crossly. He also craved authenticity above all things. 'I just want people to be their real selves,' he said.

But in the end, this is one area where I embrace platitude, head on. I spend my entire waking life attempting to avoid banality, running from cookie fortune slogans or cheap self-help jargon, but I do think that the only antidote to the bad news is Love. There, I said it. I know it's not very British; I know we are supposed to be living in cynical, selfish times; I know we really are not supposed to act as if we are on a confessional television show. But damn it, in extremis, love is the only answer. You can't wipe away the sorrows when they come, you can't even make them much better; you can't change the facts of the thing, but you can hurl the Love around. That's my theory, and I am sticking to it. I think it is what the human heart is for.

In which, once more, I wax a little sentimental about the blogosphere

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today, I was going to give you my very own recipe for spaghetti olio, aglio e peperoncino, but, my darlings, you are going to have to wait for that until tomorrow. Instead, I am going to write a little ode to the wonders of the blogosphere.

I do not wish to sound like one of those grumpy old geezers who are endlessly groaning about how everything was so much better in their day. And I hate the intellectually lazy habit of bashing the media (or the MSM, as I learn we bloggers must call it). But I have been lately struck by the almost indecent delight that the papers have been taking in The Bad News. Railing against bad news is a fast track to derision and rolling eyes; remember when poor Martin Lewis made his plea for some good news, and how everyone laughed and scoffed? No one now dares say stop, and so we exist on a crazed diet of economic crash, swine flu, political malfeasance, feral children and vapid celebrities, who are unpicking the very moral fibre of the country with their bare hands, thread by thread. You can say it has always been so; you can say it does not matter so very much. You can say the punters are just getting what they want. But it does have real consequences. Take crime, for example. Because of sensationalist headlines about knives and stabbing and no police on the streets, the public believes that we are living in a crime wave. The numbers, dry and unsensational, suggest that crime is decreasing at a steady rate; the curve runs down yearly. So there is a canyon between perception and reality, and since no one believes any more a word the government says, those in power have given up even trying to insist on the truth of the matter.

So it goes with the blogs. The general notion is put about that the bloggers are geeks and freaks and blatant self-regarders. Don't go there: it is where the nutters live. When I first started blogging, I was actually afraid. My terror existed on several levels. I feared that people whose opinions I valued would mark me down in the narcissist box. I had an inchoate fret that by going from the safety of the printed page, where I have lived for my whole professional life, to the unknown world of cyberspace, I would somehow be sacrificing my literary integrity. (I know, don't shriek, but we all have our little fantasies about ourselves; literary integrity is one of mine.) And I had a low-level fear that once I entered the blogosphere I would find myself lost in Crazytown without a map home.

Instead, as I have written before and I shall almost certainly write again, I find myself in a disarmingly wonderful new place. I use the word wonderful advisedly: every day, as I navigate the blogging ether, I am actually filled with wonder. Kevin Kline once said in The Big Chill something like - how much fun, friendship and good times can one man take? That is how I feel about the bloggers. I wish one of the bad news merchants would one day decide to write about the cleverness, funniness, occasional blatant brilliance and sheer mass of interesting information that is to be found out there in blogland.

I slept badly last night. My poor old mum is in the hospital; I know she will be fine, but I don't like to think of her in a strange, sterile room, away from home. I woke this morning feeling slightly lost and worried. I listlessly checked my Twitter feed, more out of habit than anything else. And there was a message from Libertylondongirl saying: read my blog. I went to her page to find she had given Backwards In High Heels a glorious, shameless plug. It was a little shaft of sunlight in a grey day. (Also, it is the kind of thing my mum would love; she does not quite understand the concept of blogging, although she listens very politely as I try to explain it to her, but she understands very well the concept of people saying nice things about the book, and diligently clips cuttings on the subject and sends them to me in case I might have missed them.) Praise from LLG is a high thing. She is a serious presence in the blogosphere. When the papers pause in their embrace of the bad news and find a moment to run lists of the hundred best blogs, she is always high up on the roll call. From the moment I entered this strange new place, she took time to welcome me in, show me around, and fire off little morale boosters. No one writes about that, but I discover, to my delight and surprise, that this is what bloggers do. I suppose 'Some bloggers really are rather kind' is not the catchiest of headlines. It's not front page news. But today, it is my front page.

The Magnificent Frank O'Hara

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Here, in the nuttiest of nutshells, is the miracle of the blogosphere. The wonderful Mrs Trefusis had a new post up, so I beetled over in my lunch hour to have a look. And there I found a ravishing poem, by a poet of whom I knew nothing. (And I call myself a writer?)

A short Google later, and I now know about Frank O'Hara, have read some of his glorious work, and have fallen entirely in love with him. If it weren't for the fascinating game of shuttlecock that is the practice of blogging (slightly forced analogy, but go with it; can't think of a better one just now) I might have gone to my grave without ever having heard of Frank O'Hara.

So now I feel: slightly better educated, generally entranced, and convinced that the sum total of human happiness has been added to. Which is a potent cocktail for an ordinary Friday lunchtime.