In which I get back my mojo.

Today, I talked to an equine dentist and two shrinks. I was in heaven.

I love people who are clever and thoughtful and I love people who are good at their jobs. These three were at the crest and peak of both these scales. They were funny too, and told me stories, and took me to places I had never been. The dentist had worked in Kentucky and at the Keenland sales. He told me a grand tale about being asked to get a scruffy mare ready for one sale, at which the doubtful owner thought she might fetch nine grand, if he was lucky. She had good bloodlines and would go for a brood mare, but she did not look much. My dentist had six hours to get her ready. By the time she walked into the ring, she was gleaming with so much health and shine that the bidding shot up to seventy-five thousand dollars and stayed there. The stories of the Scottish horseman who could work miracles ran round the sales like fire, and suddenly tycoons were approaching him, offering silly money and visas and a car if he could do the same for their horses.

‘But I had a fiancée,’ said the dentist, smiling. ‘So I went home.’

The shrinks are trauma specialists, so we talked about the wilder shores of human experience, and how the mind deals with that. It’s one of the subjects that interests me most. I yelped and slapped my leg and at one point actually jumped up and down, I was so interested and delighted. I sometimes wonder what it must feel like to be self-contained. (I shall never know.)

In the quiet of the mare’s field, the swifts have arrived. I saw them for the first time today, swooping low over her dear back, with their quick grace. I felt as happy as if someone had sent them to me specially, as a present.

I have my mojo back. It went away and I was sadly dashed. I don’t really know what it was all about, although I’m trying to work it out. Life, I expect. I’ve had a bit of a psychological revelation, one of those things I should have worked out twenty years ago but didn’t. It’s a slight shift in reality and I’m just getting used to it and working out the ramifications and talking it through with the mare, who is an excellent listener. Stanley the Dog does not care, because he has tunnels to dig and rats to catch and is far too busy to plumb the mysteries of the human spirit. But the mare, who loves standing still and loves the sound of the human voice, will let me chat for hours. So we shall figure it out.

 

Today’s pictures:

The dentist, with dear Polly the Cob. It’s quite a lot to ask of a horse, to have that great bit of kit in their mouth, but she was very good and brave. People always talk about the hoof – without the hoof, you have nothing – but the teeth are as important. Good equine dentistry is worth more than emeralds:

Spring has sprung at last. This is the view from HorseBack, looking south over the Dee valley. Look at the blossom:

But at home, the doughty old oaks, as old as time, still refuse to put out one single leaf:

A small ambition.

I met some absolutely fascinating people today. One of the great things about my work for HorseBack is that I encounter people I would never otherwise come across. My horizons are widened and I am offered glimpses into worlds I might not know about. But most often, these meetings are just sheer pleasure.

They were the kind of people where all it took was one smile, one shake of the hand, one ‘how do you do?’ and we were off to the races. I joke about not getting out much, but I really don’t get out much. My social skills can grow dank and rusty. I am capable, in the wrong company, of being struck with catastrophic shyness, so that I can only speak in halting platitudes. If I get the right people, however, there is no stopping me. With these ones, there were quickly jokes, galloping conversation, happy laughter, even a bit of teasing, which normally takes long-term intimacy to achieve.

What was it, I wondered, which made them so charming and easy? What was it in them that drew out my very best self and allowed it to dance?

We did not have that much in common. I keep horses; they keep Aberdeen Angus. I write books; they make whisky. I am a racing geek; their faces were blank when I mentioned Nigel Twiston-Davies. We were different ages, and from different backgrounds.

There was a glimmer of shared cultural references, a nice reading between the lines, at once getting the joke, not having to explain anything. But it ran much deeper than that.

They were, I think, two exceptionally nice people who were very comfortable in their own skins. They were radiators. (Two types of human, my wise old friend The Designer used to say: drainers and radiators.) They were enthusiasts. They saw at once the positive. They were And people rather than But people.

I think a lot about being comfortable in your skin. It’s a gaol one tries to achieve with horses. If you train a horse well and give it good leadership, it has an ease in itself which means that disaster is much less likely to strike. A horse who is confident in the world is much less prone to bolt or buck or rear or panic. Humans who are comfortable are a pleasure to be around, because they don’t need to prove anything. They allow space for others, seeing no necessity to colonise everything themselves and plant defensive flags. They don’t have to show off or hog the conversation or put anyone down. They can understand arguments which are not their own, and do not take needless offense. They can laugh at themselves, and bring out the laughter in others.

I think this ease, this sense of proper self, is a good goal, because of the lovely ripple effects. People talk a lot about how to be happy, and I’m not against that, although I think happiness is a nebulous thing which can have twenty different interpretations. I read a really peculiar article by a ‘happiness expert’ yesterday. This professor of joy wrote proudly: ‘I have never read a novel in my life. There are only so many hours in the day and I have decided to fill them with activities rather than made-up stories’. Each to each and all that, but it seemed to me quite radically odd to dismiss War and Peace and Middlemarch and Persuasion as pointless made-up stories. I am still wondering whether the whole piece was a spoof. Perhaps in very, very small letters at the end it really said: ‘as told to Craig Brown’.

So, the pursuit of happiness comes with complications and problems of definition. But being comfortable in your skin is a solid, known feeling; it endures. It has nothing to do with mood or outside influences or changes in circumstance. One may be sad, and still comfortable in one’s skin. I’m not sure if one can learn it, or get it from a book, or achieve it through striving, but it is rather my ambition. When I see it, in its pomp, as I did this morning, I watch with awe and wonder the sheer pleasure that it brings. I spent forty minutes with two complete strangers, and I drove away feeling better about everything.

 

Today’s pictures:

This person is entirely at ease with herself at the moment. She is woolly and muddy and scruffy, absolutely a horse, happy that the rain has stopped and we are working again, back in our routine. She gave me a free-school this morning of such poise and grace that I kept her going and going, just so I could watch the beauty:

I bang on a lot about the red mare and the love. The love is of course the overwhelming thing. I swear my heart has grown bigger since I’ve had her. Every day, I feel huge, huge love, that never diminishes or grows ordinary. But she also gives me daily aesthetics. Even as scruffy and covered in mud as she is, she is still a creature of glorious muscles and athleticism and moving parts. When she does her collected dressage trot at liberty, as she did this morning, I really do catch my breath, it is such a thing to see. Everyone needs beauty in their lives, and she gives me that gift daily, on top of everything else.

Absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

Author’s note – warning for incoherence.

Sometimes I sit down and let my fingers run over the keyboard and something comes out and I’m not at all sure what it is or whether it makes any sense. I’d love to posh it up and call it stream of consciousness, but I can’t. Never mind. It’s Friday. You can always scroll down and find a nice picture of an eternal hill.

Here it is, the absurd old bulletin, for better or worse:

 

I know it may seem that my head is almost exclusively full of horses, but I do think a lot about humans too.

I like humans. It might seem an odd thing to say, but not everyone does. Some people have little faith in human nature and are always braced for the worst. I am not saying they are wrong. They may be empirically correct. I may be naive. I choose to expect the best. I must admit, I do always get a little shock when I find someone is charmless or dull or narcissistic or venal. I mostly expect humans to be kind and interesting. A distant voice from my childhood calls: it’s so much nicer to be nice. This sounds fabulously platitudinous, but is in fact true. If you are smiling and polite, people will generally smile back. Courtesy is the sister of empathy. Any moral considerations aside, niceness, such a humble, overlooked virtue, has the wonderful advantage of utility: it eases one’s passage through life.

I admit to some wish thinking in all this. But I do maintain that most people are mostly good, otherwise the whole world would exist in a state of feral lawlessness. No police on earth could contain a raging humanity.

I was contemplating all this because, for some reason, a list of attributes was running through my head. I was thinking of complexity and contradiction. Someone who can, in one moment, be bold and strong and fine, can, the very next, crack into hopelessness. Brilliantly clever people may have moments of profound stupidity. The cheerful can tumble into elephant traps of melancholy.

This week, I was thinking, people have been: funny, good, courageous, intensely irritating, self-effacing, thoughtful, generous, overbearing, wise, pompous, self-regarding, interesting, kind, and selfish.

There they all are, the human adjectives, jostling up against each other, changing like the weather. How lovely it would be to behave well all the time, and listen to the voices of one’s better angels, and be rational and reasonable and sane. I think it’s important to try. (You know I love a trier.) But everyone will sometimes stumble and fall. Part of the reason that I do think about horses so much, and write about them, and love them, and feel grateful for them, is that they have so much authenticity. It is contagious. When I am with Red, I glimpse my best self. You have to rise to a horse. It does not understand justifications and excuses. It takes you as you are, in that moment, and reflects that back to you. Equines are like looking glasses of the soul.

What horses crave are the quiet virtues: patience, thought, care, slowness, gentleness, steadiness, reliability. They do not require brilliance or wit or a Nobel Prize-winning cerebral cortex. They disdain flash. They want to know, most of all, that they can trust you, and that you will keep them safe. Red needs to be sure that I shall keep her from mountain lions. It has become one of the most important things in my life that I can be that person. It’s a lovely, daily challenge.

Today’s pictures:

My favourite hill, Morven:

The mighty man that is Stan:

The brave daffodils, buggering on even though today we are having sudden blizzards:

About four miles north-west from my house, the colours are singing:

The little Paint and the red mare, having a pick out in the set-aside. They are convinced that they are finding spring grass:

Herself. Can you not sense the goodness and trueness shining out of her like starlight? Sometimes it is so powerful I can feel it like a moving thing, as if it is an actual force, out there in the world:

The dark night of the soul

WARNING: written after low-grade virus and disturbed sleep patterns. Very real danger that it makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

 

I have spent two days lying crossly in bed whilst a low-level virus rampaged around my battered body. Apparently, there are at least four bugs at large in the village – a vomiting bug, a bog-standard cold, a sort of heady, achy flu-like virus, and a more general stomach/head/everything thing. I had the nausea with a general feeling of having walked into a heavy brick wall, whilst being kicked by the familiar, furious Shetland pony.

I slept for pretty much thirty-six hours straight, and then, after all that sleeping had messed about with my internal clock, last night found myself wide awake at four am, cataloguing every single thing that was wrong with me and my life.

I never quite know why the black hours of the night bring about this melancholy inventory. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, in The Crack-Up, ‘in a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning’, and he should know. Perhaps it is the sense of isolation, as one lies wakeful and restless whilst the rest of the world seems asleep and oblivious. The smallest things loom large, the tiniest glitch sputters into crazed unmanageability, and all the ghastly flaws troop out like some twisted Rocky Horror Show tribute act.

By four-thirty am, I had decided that:

My new book would be a catastrophic failure and everyone would laugh and scoff and point and I should have to go back to the wilderness years where I belonged.

I was no good at riding, nor ever should be.

My HorseBack work was shoddy and pathetic.

My inability to keep my office tidy or to open my post in a timely manner or to reply to outstanding emails was shocking and derelict and beyond belief in a female of advancing years.

And that, of course, I should die alone, unmourned and unmissed, and good riddance.

So that was a jolly half hour.

Then I read myself a lecture on not being so self-indulgent and stupid and went to sleep.

When I woke, rather jet-lagged, but with the viral load miraculously gone, the world seemed possible and ordinary again.

Yes, I would die, as everyone shall, but there’s no point dwelling on it. My office is a bit of a muddle and I am rather dilatory at admin, but this does not mean I am going out and conning old ladies out of their savings or writing cruel leader articles in The Daily Mail. (Leave poor old Mr Mili Senior alone, I cry.) The riding is fine. Red the Mare is happy as a nut and welcomed me back to the field after two days away with intense sweetness. Everyone at HorseBack seemed pleased to see me. It’s not the best Facebook page anyone ever wrote, and the numbers go up as well as down, but it’s something for a cause in which I believe and I shall get better at it.

The book is, as all books are, a crap shoot, and I can only do my word counts and think hard and bend my will to the task and do my best. If it fails, it fails. It won’t kill me. I’ve failed before. I’m still bruised from a career setback which was beyond my control. This is part of the human zoo; it is not the dear old Whig view of history, where the lovely curve of progress soars upwards in an irrepressible arc of glory. It is what happens. It is not the End of Everything.

What I did get a sense of, in that umbrous, searching half hour, was what real depression must feel like. In my ordinary weeks and months, I get intense sorrow, flashes of profound melancholy, sometimes a feeling of hanging on by my fingertips. I suspect this is standard issue. I do not barrel through life, unheeding and impervious, as I fondly imagine some sanguine people do, although I wonder if they only exist in my imagination. I think too much and fret too much and am too much struck by the sorrow and the pity, the unfairnesses and griefs to which so many of the six billion souls on this blue planet are heir.

The way I think of it is that you are doing all right if there are joys to match the melancholies. If you can watch the turning of the leaves or feel your heart flip when a certain red mare whickers in low delight or go crazy when a dear old familiar wins the 3.30 at Newmarket or laugh like a drain because a canine does nutty things with his ears: then, then – you are all right.

The true depressive loses joy. I know a few. I know someone who, on occasion, cannot physically leave her room for up to two weeks at a time. I know someone who once stared blindly at one of the most majestic glens in the whole of Scotland and turned to me with blank eyes and said: ‘I cannot see the beauty.’ I think: that is when the real dark night of the soul becomes immovable, when you cannot see the beauty. As long as the beauty can be seen, there is hope.

As I write this, I feel the usual frisson of terror that I have admitted weakness. There is a huge part of me which wants to do unicycle tricks for you. Bugger mortality and fear of failure and moments of crushing shame – surely what you really should have is trees and love and Stanley the Dog doing amusing things with sticks. (And today, he really did do very amusing things with sticks indeed.) But when I am at my most poncy, I like to think that the Human Condition is my special subject, and this is human condition, with bells and knobs and all manner of things on.

I write it partly because I like authenticity, and I like admission. I write it partly because I hope someone out there might sigh and sigh and say: me too. (The soothing balm of shared experience is one of the things I love most on the internet.) I write it to remind myself how lucky I am, because I get these crushers once in a while, in the night, when I am ill and assailed with weakness, but I do not have to drag through that black curtain every day, as some people do.

I write it because it is true.

And also – and this really is my final thought – I write it because this blog is a small place. When I started, I wanted to go viral. I wanted love and acclaim and applause and numbers. I never got them. At first, I was hurt and affronted by this. I made the huge mistake of taking it personally. Now, paradoxically, it is what saves me. Because this is a place of a few, select Dear Readers, I may feel safe, and admit all the absurdities, almost sure that nobody will laugh and point.

Oh, oh, and one more final final point, because I’m still feeling a bit peculiar and I clearly have no control over my fingers. I suddenly think: I’ve got it wrong about the laughing and pointing. People may easily laugh and point; they always have and they always shall. They may mock and raise their eyebrows and judge. It’s almost impossible not to judge. I try not to do it; I try to remember that line at the beginning of Gatsby; but judging is as human as gossip or bad jokes.

The secret is, I think, to get it into its correct category. (You know how I hate a category error.) And the correct category is that the pointing is almost always about the pointer, and not the pointee. Or, in more technical terms: it’s their stuff.

And now I really am going to stop.

 

Some quick pictures for you before I collapse in a heap:

Comical things with sticks:

These are not very good photographs. Stan the Man was moving too fast for efficient focus. But I wanted you to get a sense of the comedy, and the joy, and the beauty, and, even through the blurriness, I think you can:

Most beautiful and beloved face, taken a few days ago:

Where the hill should be. This was taken before lunchtime today, so you can see the autumn days are growing dark and dramatic:

In which I have far too many things to say and am not sure I manage to say any of them

There are days when I don’t know what to write. Must give them SOMETHING, yells the sergeant-major part of the brain, crossly. But there is nothing, my hopeless, plaintive self replies.

Then there are days when I have forty-seven things to write and do not know where to start. This is one of those days.

I think about blogging often; I am interested in the novel medium as it shakes itself and spreads its wings. I wonder: what is it? A diary, a record, a twisty little firestarter (let’s have a heated debate), a communal space, a stage for opinion, or a showcase for prose? Everyone has to have their horridly named Unique Selling Point. Mine is, or should be, that I can, when the light is coming from the right direction, conjure a decent sentence. I do not have a particularly fascinating life or do anything remarkable; I am not in the loop, or in possession of a talent to philosophise. But the thing I should be able to give you is some reasonable writing, to brighten a dark day.

That’s why I get so cross when I have the dead prose days, and the words fall lifeless onto the page.

Today, I go back to an old idea; that it should be a conversation. Bugger the prose. I actually thought, this morning, after breakfast: oh, I really want to talk to the Dear Readers. This is quite peculiar and quite lovely at the same time. It brings me back to my favourite and unexpected element of the whole shooting match, which is the kindness of strangers. That kindness has been in shining evidence over the last days.

But then, of course, I sit down to write and there are the forty-seven things all jostling about in my brain and I do not know where to start.

My theme, because I must have a theme, is the light and shade again; the good and bad, existing alongside each other; the hope and hopelessness.

It was a lovely, light, mild morning. The Sister and I went together to the horses. She is recovering from a horrid operation, and must move slowly, like an old lady.

We take the mare out for a walk and a pick of the good grass outside her paddock. We all go very gently. The mare inspects her new environment, having a quick check for mountain lions, and then falls to grazing. I lean on her shoulder, and The Sister and I talk; of life, of our childhood, of the family.

We grew up like this, with horses; this standing in a field with an equine is old language to us. It feels like some kind of circle, as we come back to it in our middle age. We remember the shows and the mucking out and the grooming and the polishing of boots. Our mother was very strict about our horse discipline; if we were to have the great good fortune of ponies, we would have to work hard for our pleasure. Now we are of mother age ourselves, we think this early training was a very Good Thing.

So that was lovely; restful, peaceful, real. The horses were happy; we were happy. I returned to my desk filled with resolve, ready for the day.

I made telephone calls and did admin before work, and there was a small car setback. It was the tiniest most idiotic thing. The car needs fixing; I had a plan for it; the plan has gone smash. I shall have to drive south with a dodgy motor. That’s fine; I have spent my life with a succession of dodgy motors. I sometimes dream of what it would be like to have a pristine new car that actually worked; instead I generally charge about in a muddy third-hand jalopy with at least one warning light on.

This is what I remember from last year: the proportion goes. Sadness removes all defences. So instead of taking it on the chin and making an alternative plan, like a grown-up, I whimpered and collapsed in a heap. This is what I discover, as I learn more about grieving. You can pull yourself together and concentrate on the good things and be determined and understand that life goes on. You can, if you are me, console yourself with love and soup and trees. But all it takes is one small thing, and suddenly I am undone, all over again. I am that line in Auden: nothing now can come to any good.

Right, I think, recovering myself; there is that thing. I remember that now. I can factor that in.

I make some stew. There must be the making of the soups and stews. I watch the 1.10 at Huntingdon, where a delightful, honest horse called Royale Knight absolutely sails round and wins in a canter, with my money on his lovely back. I feel a flicker of pleasure and admiration and delight. The horses, in all their guises, known and unknown, can still lift the battered heart.

I write this. I concentrate on small steps. I look, on the internet, hesitantly, shyly, for dogs that need a home. I veer back and forth. The empty house, the lack of that loving gaze, the loss of sound and sense of dog is awful. On the other hand, I need some time and space. But a little look can’t hurt.

I think: what was it I wanted to say again?

 

Today’s pictures:

Sister, with her dog:

The sweet companions. I love that sleepy pony face:

This is Red’s hopeful face, when she sees me coming to the gate:

By the time I got back, the light had gone and the hill was hardly visible in the murk. Light and shade indeed:

Misconceptions and consolations

I suddenly realise that I have, slowly, stealthily, created a great fantasy around my father’s death. It is that it was magnificent. Not only that, but I was magnificent. It was a marvellous sort of grief, and I did it well.

Oh, the dancing delusion elves, what they have been up to in the night. I had no idea of the work they did, until now.

Of course I was not bloody magnificent. And the sorrow was not marvellous and shining, as I have come to think of it, filled with lovely authenticity; it was lumpy and raw and messy and it hurt all over. I was not some great avatar of love and loss. I was stumping about like an old lady, with squinty eyes, red from crying. The mental pain went physically into my back, which hurt as if I had been kicked all over by a furious Shetland pony. I remember lying on the grass in the spring sunshine, groaning, whilst the Older Niece, who learnt massage in Thailand and has certificates on her wall, tried to get the knots out. At night, I used to go into the bathroom (I have always traditionally done my gut weeping in the bathroom; no one knows why) and shout, out loud: I want my father back.

Not very magnificent at all.

It’s funny that I remember it as a good thing. It’s funny the tricks the mind plays. I suppose it is rather nice that I do. There were some goodnesses in it. I do remember, right at the beginning, there was an energy in it; I remember feeling very alive. There was a lot of love. The old friends really were magnificent, and rallied like a crack regiment of the human heart. The brothers and sister were staunch and stalwart, and put their shoulders into the grief, so we could all carry it together. We used to work like a tag team. One of us would be having the angry day, whilst another would be having a wise day. (It was mostly The Sister who had the wise days; she has, in her fifties, gathered up the wisdom of the ages and put it all in her pocket.)

But, in the end, mostly, it just really hurt.

That is what loss does; it hurts. It’s like going round after round with a prizefighter who will not lie down on the canvas. I feel like Mohammed Ali, on the ropes in the Rumble in the Jungle, his great body sagging in defeat as George Foreman landed punch after punch. Even as I write that, the optimistic part of my brain, whose voice is very faint at the moment, says: But Ali won that fight. He won. He suddenly picked himself up, life flooded back into his bruised body, and he let fly a volley of astonishing blows, so powerful and perfect that poor old George did not know what hit him.

They made a great film of that fight. I had no interest in boxing, but I was a bit of a film buff at that time, and I remember going to see it at the Fulham ABC with my very old friend D. It turned out it wasn’t really about fighting at all; it was about the human spirit. It was one of the most mesmerising things I ever saw.

That same friend called, on Saturday night. We read history together at university; we go back all the way. The bonds of fondness that tie us are ineffable, and die hard. I’ve been thinking a lot about the dog love, and how pure and unconditional it is. I think it lives so vividly in the heart because it is so simple and true, unlike human love, which has undercurrents and subtexts and moments of blank misunderstanding. But I’m not sure this is quite right. That man, whom I first knew as a boy, has given me unconditional love since I was eighteen years old. He does not care if I am joyful or doleful, grumpy or delighted, in the dizzy grip of success or on the bleak plains of failure; I am his friend, and that’s that.

I’m not really sure what I am trying to write, today. I feel compelled to send in reports from the front line, and I’m lost in the fog of war. The writer brain is shouting: there must be a theme, there must be a point.

What is my theme? A phrase comes into my head. It is: scrabbling around for consolations. I think that is what happens now. Everything hurts and that pain must be felt, there is no avoiding it. I cannot run from it or swerve around it or outwit it. (It really pisses me off that I cannot do any of these things.) All I can do is scrabble about in the earth, for the small staunches that will hold my heart together. The old friendships are one of those.

The mare too is a great consoler. I spent an hour and a half with her this morning, in the light, chill Scottish air. I gave her a good groom and fed her some lovely fresh hay and stroked and gentled her. She still has the sweetness dial set to eleven. She can have moods, like all sentient creatures; she can be grumpy and distant and impatient. But since Friday she has been still and sweet and affectionate. It’s probably coincidence; the weather has been fine, and she likes that. Whatever it is, it is one of the consolations. She is doing her own little unconditional dance, and it gladdens my heart. I’m not really up to humans at the moment, so the simplicity of the animals is the ideal balm.

‘It’s just you and me, kid,’ I say to Red the Mare. She nods her head and blinks. A snuffling muzzle pushes itself into my side. It is the furry little pony. She is really searching for treats, but it feels like she is saying: Hey, me too.

‘You too,’ I say.

 

Today’s pictures:

The consolations:

Pigeon, from the 2011 archive:

The hill, completely out of focus today, but still lovely, for all that: