In which I defend the expressing of thoughts.

On the last blog, a Dear Reader wrote:

‘How C21st - someone writing at length on the internet about why they haven't been on the internet for a bit. Something has gone seriously wrong. Whatever happened to the quiet, gentle, personal, unexpressed thought? Everything has to be "out there" including "not being out there"!
My brain hurts!’

Not that long ago, this kind of thing would have made me feel rather melancholy. I would have felt a doleful sense of reproof, convinced that I had got everything wrong, that all this stupid blogging was the worst form of navel-gazing, that the internet itself was in fact the spawn of Satan and that humans really should go back to pigeon post and quill and ink.

Now, I have butched up a bit. I’m going to stick up for myself.

This is not a terrible charge. I’ve had much worse. But for some reason it made me want to mount a spirited defence. Not of myself, so much, but of the expressing of thoughts.

The ‘quiet, gentle, personal, unexpressed thought’ sounds enchanting. I expect there have been some humans who have had quiet and gentle thoughts, unspoken and unwritten, but I would hazard that most humans, for most of history, have been expressing their thoughts like gangbusters. If you walk along any city street, or get on a bus, or travel the underground, or walk in the park or shop in a shop, there are people, expressing their thoughts.

Obviously, some people are more articulate than others, and some more reticent, and some more garrulous, and some more taciturn, but the expressing of thoughts is pretty much what humans do. There are the holy women who take vows of silence, and the monks who go and live on rocks, and the philosophers in their barrels, but they are a minority game.

The Reader has a point, in a sense. The expressing of thoughts may tumble into narcissism and bombast. As one grows up, one tries to understand that other people have thoughts too, which, crucially, may be different from one’s own, and that conversation should be more like a dancing game of ping pong rather than a shouty soapbox at Hyde Park Corner. One learns to listen, so that the button is not permanently on transmit. In writing too, which really is the most shamelessly self-indulgent of pursuits if one thinks about it for more than two minutes, there is an attempt to understand the world, rather than lecture it. Or at least, there should be.

The expressed thought should not need defending, but clearly it does. I agree that some of the thoughts daily expressed are crashingly dull or rude or bigoted or platitudinous or repetitive or vacuous or cruel or stupid or bland. Not every mind can, all the time, express thoughts which are beautiful and useful. But that is why all liberal societies believe in freedom of speech. In order for the lovely expressed thought to have its liberty, so must all the dross.

I admit that I could, if I chose, express an awful lot fewer thoughts, and perhaps I should. Actually, as I write that sentence, I realise it is a beastly passive-aggressive thing to say, to make me sound much more reasonable than I am. I love expressing thoughts. Expressing thoughts is possibly my second favourite thing after riding the red mare. I have so many damn thoughts, and they buzz around in my head like cross bluebottles, and if I did not express them I should go bonkers. I could choose not to, but I don’t.

I chose writing, because I love it and I have something to say. I chose blogging, because I love the open spaces of the internet, where I may talk nonsense and put pictures of the dog and the horse and the hill and find interesting people I would have never met in life. I chose to play in the splashing pool of social media, because I find Facebook and Twitter funny and interesting and quite often surprising and sometimes properly profound.

I write about the internet because the internet is huge. To watch an entire new medium arise in one’s own lifetime is extraordinary. Because so many parts of it are uninteresting or workaday or stupid or vicious, it’s easy to forget what a revolution contemporary humans are living through. It’s not quite as revolutionary as the printing press, but it is changing people’s lives, and, if some of the neurobiologists are to be believed, changing people’s brains. Your own neuronal pathways may be stretching and twanging even as you read this.

Why would one not write about such a galvanic change, if one is to write at all? Nobody yet knows the rules, an entire new etiquette is developing, a novel language has had to be invented out of whole cloth and is continuing to develop so that even the grand gents at the OED have had to sit up and take notice. Nobody has quite decided what the internet is for or how it should be best used or whether it should be policed, and that battle rages on.

In a wider sense, far beyond this particular criticism and this particular reader, there is a school of thought which does not like the internet in its current form, partly, I think, because of fear. The World Wide Web is truly democratic, and pretty much ungovernable. Throughout history, the people in power have tried to control the word. That was why the translating of the Bible out of its priestly Latin was such a terrifying twist of the wheel. It is why every single dictatorship ever invented exercised censorship, took over the radio stations and the television and the press, shut down dissent and debate at the point of a gun.

The general horrified shout that all these bloggers and twitterers and Facebookers have no reticence or edit button or even shame, that they insist on telling the world what they had for breakfast, covers a much deeper fright. When this old school talks of the universal ‘they’, it often means some traditionally powerless cohorts. The complaint is often really about the women, the young people, the geeks, the gays, the previously unheard. Until really quite recently, even in developed societies, the means of expression lay in the hands of the elite. There were gatekeepers everywhere. You had to have a level of grandeur to be asked on the news, on the radio, to write an article for the press, to give a speech, to publish a book, to have what you had to say considered important enough for broadcast. Not so many generations ago, Mary Ann Evans had to call herself George in order to get her novels into print.

Now, the gatekeepers may be side-stepped, as the ordinary people storm the citadel. Not any old person is going to get a job on The Guardian or be asked on Question Time, but any old person can write essays on the internet, and be heard. Those traditionally silenced voices can finally sing their song.

As with all great revolutions, there is a price to be paid for this. Some of the thoughts expressed will be ugly, banal or almost entirely pointless. But it seems to me that the expression, if not the sentiment, must be cherished. Every time you pick up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, open a political periodical, turn on Radio Four, settle down to the diaries of Chips Channon, read a poem by Yeats, remember why you love Dorothy Parker, see what your favourite columnist has to say, buy a broadsheet, you are voting in favour of the expressing of thoughts. The price paid exists in the fact that for every James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, every Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Daniel Finkelstein, Matthew D’Ancona, Caitlin Moran, there is an equivalent of that cross reality television lady who makes inflammatory remarks about fat people. She is the price you pay, and, in this rushing age of new media, it is almost impossible to avoid those ugly voices. There was a prelapsarian age where nobody knew what a Kardashian was, and most people thought that shades of grey were something to do with paint colours. A certain amount of quiet has been lost, but then so has a certain amount of complacency.

I say: throw open the gates. Express those thoughts. Let others express theirs. Take the good with the bad, the smooth with the rough, the inspiring with the dispiriting. The key to the new age is navigation. It is discrimination and choice. Find the thoughts you love, or the thoughts which challenge your own, or the thoughts which startle you out of complacency, and leave the rest.

The Dear Reader must express his thought, and I shall express mine right back. No single human on the planet has to read a word I write, in print or online. There is no press-gang, no three-line-whip. I shall go on expressing my thoughts, because I like doing it, just as some people like gardening or pot-holing or building replicas of Notre Dame out of matchsticks. And the people who don’t like that kind of thing can go on not reading them. And that way, everyone is happy.

PS. After all this grand argument, I do have one faintly lowering notion. I wonder whether the Dear Reader was objecting not so much to the expressing of the thoughts, but to the fact that this particular blog post was slightly dull. And the awful truth is that it was, a little bit. I had been feeling rather cross and blah, and I think that infected the writing. For all that I will defend to the death people’s right to say what they wish, I do think that it is a matter of good manners to attempt, as much as possible, to avoid boring the poor readers to death. This cannot be achieved every day – I am a flawed human, and those flaws will sometimes show up in my prose - but the effort should be made. So, if that was the charge, I must hold my hands up.

I also feel a sense of gratitude, because that comment really did make me think. Unfortunately for the poor reader, it also drove me to express my thoughts, at some length. Still, nobody’s perfect.

 

Today’s pictures:

No blog today.

The most interesting thing about my week off the internet is that I appear to have reset my brain back to the longform. The clever neurobiologists discovered, not that long ago, that the brain remains plastic even into advanced age. As I understand it, this means that one may develop new neural pathways at the drop of a hat. Or: one really can teach an old dog new tricks.

One of the things I have noticed in the last couple of years, as my love of the web grew stronger, was that my attention span became a little hazy. The internet is a starling place, filled with scattered, shiny jewels – look there, and then here, and then over there again. Even a short tabloid-ish article is full of links, inviting one to change the subject before the piece is even read. Sitting down to long, sustained reading became less attractive. I craved distraction. I would actually say to myself, when my work was finished: ‘Ah, now I can read the internet.’

Last night, I almost panicked because I could not find my book. (Stanley the Dog had hidden it under the bed.) When it was restored to me, I was in clover. All I wanted was to read five hundred pages about the politics of the 18th century. HURRAH.

So, today, I’ve finished my HorseBack work, and I’ve posted a little story about the red mare on her dedicated page, and I’ve had a quick look at Facebook, and my internet work is done. There is no mental momentum for the blog. I would normally apologise for this, but I’m so delighted with being restored to a good old habit that I won’t. I know you will understand anyway.

Instead, here is a link to what I did do on the internet today. It was a fine morning with fine people and I’m quite pleased with these pictures: https://www.facebook.com/HorseBackUK

 

A week of living offline.

Author’s note: I’ve been off the internet for a week. I should have loved to come back with a bang, all pith and wit and to the point. How shiny and renewed I would seem. How happy the Dear Readers would be. Instead, you may have guessed, I have returned with seven days of pent-up writing, so this is my usual hotch-potch of tangents, fancies, absurd length, and quite possibly no point at all. Some things, it appears, do not change.

 

 

On Monday the 11^th of May I decided, for a lot of dull and complicated reasons, to get offline.

I adore the internet. I believe it mostly uses its powers for good rather than evil. I think it still carries the imprint of its great inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who gave it away for free. (I know that Berners-Lee did not really invent the internet. The American defence department did that with an assist from various universities, British and French scientists, and help from Hedy Lamarr. And Al Gore. Or something. But Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which is what everyone uses and what is, in daily life, the de facto internet. If I am to thank one human, he is that human.) My fondness for the internet is such that when it goes mad and starts issuing death threats to women who want Jane Austen on a banknote, I feel that peculiar sorrow that you get when a dear old friend does something entirely out of character.

Of course, there is no such thing as ‘the internet’. Just as with other sweeping collective nouns, like the electorate or the government or parliament, it is made up of the various individuals who people it. Like those individuals, it is good and bad and funny and silly and angry and generous and rotten.

Mostly, I try to fight confirmation bias, but my confirmation bias is on red alert when I go online. I see the small human stories, the moments of politeness, the daily kindnesses, the generosity of spirit, the comical pandas, the engaged and informative debates, the wonderful gaudy spree of information. All those things I would never know and all those lives I would never witness are there for me, like a dazzling human play.

But I hit a bit of a wall and my mind was too stretched and I thought: switch the machine off.

On the first two days, I remained silent – no tweeting, no blogging, no Facebook posts - but still had the odd peek behind the curtain. There was a stupid man saying stupid things which went a tiny bit viral, and I felt cross about it but did not comment. There were two people asking for help on a horse forum I follow. I sort of knew the answer, but put my bossy boots away and let others, who had more knowledge than I, sort out the problem. On the radio, a woman with an amazingly irritating voice and a mealy mouth was being annoying; I refrained from tweeting about people who cannot call a spade a spade. Instead of waking up in the morning thinking thoughts that must be shared with the group, I just thought thoughts. I did not have to photograph my dog, my horse, my garden, my life, for public consumption.

Stopping the blog and the Facebook was a bit sad. I like putting things out in the world and getting the reaction from the Dear Readers. It has a touching community aspect which I enjoy. It has brought me into contact with people I would not otherwise know and it gives me a perspective on life. It is a pressure though. I want to do something good, write some decent prose, make people smile. Every day, I try to offer something. Now, I thought, I can just think the thoughts and live the life and stay still.

The third day was easy. On the second day, I read an article in the Guardian and half an article in the Speccie and then stopped, not because I was keeping to my rule, but because my normal what are people saying about the news engine was simply not firing. After that, I don’t think I thought about the online world at all for day three. I read a book instead. I suddenly thought: I won’t have to panic any more when the electricity goes down and I have no computer and I have to sit with nothing but candles and my library.

On the fourth day, I was sorely tested. There was an And Finally item on the news. And, finally, JOHNNY DEPP HAS YORKSHIRE TERRIERS. Actually, they did not  phrase it quite like that. It was a fluff piece about him trying to smuggle his dogs into Australia on his private jet. The funniest part was a stern Australian customs man who said: ‘I don’t care if you have been voted the Sexiest Man in the World twice, rules are rules.’ It was not a story about the coolest actor on the planet having toy dogs, but that was what struck me. Johnny Depp should have sleek, athletic Lab-Collie crosses, or Weimeraners, or German short-haired Pointers, or Vislas, or a lovely lurcher, or some kind of noble hunting dog. I could see him with beagles or Dalmatians or American Foxhounds. But Yorkshire Terriers????

On a normal day I would have blogged the hell out of this. I would have made jokes about all the road trips in the world with Hunter S Thompson not redeeming Depp’s shattered image. Did he tie bows in their hair and call them Fifi and Nou-Nou? I was on the floor with amazement and interest.

Instead, I thought those thoughts in my own head and went away to write a book. After that I would read a book. I was slightly sad I could not do my Depp riff, but then I might have made people who adore Yorkshire Terriers unhappy, so perhaps it was just as well. I had a suspicion that in about seven hours I would not think it that interesting anyway. The thing about living on the internet is that you are always hunting for hooks. This story, that picture, this unlikely juxtaposition, that hysterical joke – everything must be grist to the online mill. Now, my hazy scenting mind could just see a thing as it was, turn it over, and put it down again. It did not have to be exploited for some cheap reaction. I quite liked this. Day Four was perhaps not going to be as hard as I thought.

On the fifth day, I almost broke cover. I felt slightly out of touch with the world. Of course I still had the dear old BBC and Radio Four; I heard the news. But I realised how much I gathered daily from the internet – pieces of political gossip, sudden scandals in high places, excellent analysis from sophisticated brains. International news, in particular, breaks now on the internet, and the lumbering behemoths of television and print seem miles behind.

I missed the camaraderie too. It had been the Dante meeting at York and then a new rich raceday at Newbury, with some young dazzlers and some old friends running on the sun-beamed turf. I wanted my racing posse. I wanted to talk about the cool brilliance of Ryan Moore and what on earth he was going to do with his four new watches, and the dancing beauty of Telescope romping down the straight, and the sweet, determined face of Integral, and how she ran like a tiger in defeat. I wanted to share the wonder of American Pharoah (sic) powering through the dour slop of Belmont like a doughty old warrior to win the Preakness and keep his Triple Crown hopes alive.

But I resisted. I’m not sure whether this experiment really did rest my tired brain, although it did make me realise how much of my internet use was out of knee-jerk habit. For all that, I was cussedly determined to see it through. I did damn well read books and long magazine articles and managed perfectly well without any pictures of adorable pandas. I quite liked the fact that I realised I did not have to comment on every single thing that took my interest, that the online world really did not need my thoughts and opinions, but could trundle along perfectly happily without me. I had assumed that in the burly and hurly of the antic web nobody would notice, but, rather touchingly, they did. A few kind people, used to my racing yelps of delight, daily red mare adoration, winding blog tangents, sunny Scottish photographs, and Stanley the Dog tunnel-digging bulletins, did gently make sure that I was not dead in a ditch. I was rather astonished and very moved. One of them I knew in real life; the rest were pure online friends, the absolute shining epitome of the kindness of strangers. A community is a community, even if it is virtual. The sneeriness of those who denigrate the online world would fade like breath on glass faced with the generous reality.

One of those online friends is facing the kind of profound heartbreak for which, I always think, words are no good. I love words and believe in words and am daily astounded by the power of words, but there are times when they are paltry, and this is one of those times. Yet she said, stoical and encouraging, that she missed reading what I wrote. Good God, I thought, all my absurd musings, incoherent half-formed theories, idiotish obsessions actually mean something to someone I have never met, who is facing one of life’s cruellest fast balls. Such a thing should perhaps make one feel proud; it made me feel humble.

The internet is a place of huge world events, universally famous humans, dictators, disasters, conspiracy theories, and governments. The tectonic plates of geo-politics shift and grind. It is a wide prairie of important information which effects real humans. But it is also a place where one may find illuminating, touching, startling and inspiring slivers of ordinary lives. These lives will not go down in the history books. They will not have monuments built to them; they contain no levers which  may shift the world. But there, in little flashes of online reality, they exist, provoking a laugh, a cry, a frown of recognition. They mean something.

Those lives mean something whether they are written down or not. You do not have to do a tap dance on Facebook to prove your worth. But those glimpses, seen by unknown humans thousands of miles away, are, I think, benign little arrows which fly from one ordinary heart to another.

All of which is a very, very long way of saying: I’m glad to be back.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from a sunny day at the end of last week:

The ice bucket challenge.

I did the ice bucket challenge this morning.

Since it went viral, there has been the inevitable backlash. Oh, say the doubters, surely giving to charity should be a quiet, private thing. It should not involve show-offs prancing about on the internet. A very thoughtful and rather charming Australian news anchor politely declined to nominate any individuals, and instead challenged everyone to make the world a slightly better place. He added that the whole shooting match could be seen as a waste of water, and that one might be better donating to Water Aid instead.

I absolutely see the intellectual point of these arguments. They are all true. Besides, I did not much fancy a bucket of water over my head. So I kept quiet, and vaguely hoped the thing would pass me by.

Then my friend Jay Hare nominated me. He is a Royal Marine, and as I remarked in my video, you don’t say no to the Marines. The intellectual arguments went out of the window, and the instinctive took over. I could of course just donate, and skip the whole look at me with my bucket aspect. But I had the strong and immediate feeling that it would be curmudgeonly to refuse. Part of the whole experience is the element of fun and idiocy and sharing with the group. I don’t think it is showing off; I think it is being stitched in to the collective, and that is one of the great strengths of this internet age. I was galvanised, even if there would be cross people who tutted at one more damn bucket video.

Someone I loved very much died from Motor Neurone Disease. It is a brutal thing, and if a nutty viral trend is getting it more money and more awareness, that surely can only be for the good.

I was also suddenly excited about the possibility of involving the red mare. This was fairly high risk. I pride myself on the desensitising work I’ve done with her, but what if she freaked out, for all to see? She is a thoroughbred, after all. Still, there was no question that I should do it without her. She would be the Debbie McGee to my Paul Daniels. (Very lucky that the red duchess does not read English; I’m not sure how pleased she would be with that comparison. She almost certainly sees herself more as a cross between the Duchess of Devonshire and Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. If she had eyebrows, she would raise them.)

I had only twenty-four hours to organise the thing, and I had no video equipment. A faint sense of panic nipped in.

All the stars aligned. My sweet family was available, at the shortest notice. The Younger Niece and The Sister swung into action. My sister does not go on the internet much, and had not heard of the challenge. ‘You want me to pour a bucket of water over your head?’ she said, at first, entirely baffled.

‘That is correct,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ she said, with equanimity. ‘I suppose I can do that.’

The red mare was more than ready for her close-up, even though she was slightly surprised to find that instead of slow work and breakfast she was being made into an internet queen.

My mother, when told of the thing, looked at the grubby coat I wear to do the horses and said, in a very dry voice, ‘Well, that jacket does need a wash.’

The water was a blinding shock, but afterwards I felt wildly energised. My sister ran me a nice bath so that I could warm up, and we reminisced about our old dad, who used to turn the water in his early morning shower from boiling to freezing before he went out to ride first lot. He would bellow as the cold hit him, but it set him up for the rest of the day. We wondered whether we should follow his example.

The whole thing was enchanting, from the brilliance of my clever horse, to the sweetness of my dear sister, to the lovely laughter of my niece, who was holding the video camera. It was one of my beloved Small Things. Of such small things is the good life made.

And it taught me something else. I shall never, ever again carp at television presenters. Speaking to camera is really difficult. I wanted to say a few words before the water hit, and my arms appeared to have a life of their own, waving about as if they were channelling Sir Patrick Moore. I also seemed to have developed an odd swaying motion. I wished for a moment afterwards that I had not waved the arms about so much, and that I was not having such a rotten hair day, but then I realised that this is not about me at all. It really was not the time for vanity. The mad waving and the bad hair made it all the better, in a way. I was not some polished public person, but a very ordinary woman, in a field, with a horse.

The horse, of course, was not ordinary at all. If she does not get a television gig after this, I shall eat my hat.

There was no camera on hand, so here is a screenshot from the video. The amazing mare did not MOVE A HOOF:

It’s a hopeless picture, but it gives you the sense of the brilliance of that red girl.

As I finish writing this, my video has finally gone up on Facebook. The absurd thing was that the planning and filming took about fifteen minutes, whilst managing to download the video clip, locate it on my computer, make it compatible with Facebook, and get it up there has taken three hours. Every avenue I tried contained a furious error message. It was the wrong type of file; Facebook would not recognise it; it downloaded from the niece’s camera to the most obscure part of my computer which refused to share it with anything else. At one point it disappeared altogether and I had to spend ages ransacking my entire hard disk. When I finally worked out that I could share it from Microsoft Movie Maker, that horrid application would only allow me to post it with an advertisement for itself, rather than the words I wanted to write. When I tried to edit the words, it simply deleted the entire video, which had already taken forty minutes to load. I had to start ALL OVER AGAIN.

I went into gritted-teeth tech rage. Only the most bloody-minded refusal to be beaten got me through. Somehow, this feels quite appropriate. The thing itself was quite easy. Getting wet is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Donating money was easy; the lovely MND Association make it as straightforward as falling off a log. Getting the video out nearly made my ears fall off. But there should have been some element of sacrifice, even if it was only time and a bit of fury.

All the arguments against this kind of thing are perfectly logical. But, my darlings, it was a riot. It felt like an unalloyed Good Thing, on so many levels. If you are nominated, go for it. If you can find a red mare to star in your challenge, all the better.

Never send to know.

It’s quite an odd thing, to cry for a stranger. One may feel sadness and melancholy and regret for so many deaths: the ones in the newspapers which run into horrifying statistics, almost beyond the ability of the brain to process, like the Yazidis or the Syrians or the Gazans, or those closer to home, the teenage car crashes or fire fatalities reported in the local press. John Donne’s lines live always with me:

Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee. 

But still, to find oneself weeping blindly in an ordinary kitchen, making an ordinary cup of coffee, on an ordinary, rainy Scottish morning, because of the death of a famous person, as if that person were a best beloved – that is quite strange.

And yet, perhaps it is entirely explicable. Many other people seem to have had the same reaction to the shocking loss of Robin Williams. I sat with a friend in the field in the rain, as the red mare listened, and tried to work it all out. It was not just the straight sadness of a bright spirit snuffed out too soon. It was not only the thought of the family and friends left bereft. It was, we thought, the terrible poignancy of a man who gave so much joy, who lifted up so many hearts, being unable to stop himself from sinking.

We came back to the same line: if Robin Williams could not make it, who could?

Perhaps too there was the contemplation of the power of those demons, which robbed him of hope. If they could overcome such a dazzling, inventive mind, such a good heart, such a glittering talent, they must have been almost supernatural in their agency. The thought of the long fight he must have waged with them was one of unimaginable terror.

Depression is a bastard, and it is a thief. It is random and it does not discriminate. It takes the brilliant and the beautiful, the kind and the good, the funny and the clever. It does not give a shit how much you are adored or how much joy you give or how many prizes you win. It is no respecter of money or class or fame.

As the affection and grief roll round the internet, my friend and I say, as one: if only he knew how much he was loved. There is the silent, melancholy rider: it would have made no difference. Depression does not count blessings. Blessings, ironically, may make the sufferer feel even worse. How dare I be afflicted when I have all this?

Out in the open prairies of the web, where so often the craziness of crowds lives, comes the wisdom of crowds. People are shining lights into those dark corners where debilitation and shame live. It’s a condition, they are saying, as real and painful as a broken leg. You can’t fix a shattered limb by the power of thought or will; you can’t say to someone with a smashed femur, cheer up, butch up, man up. Don’t be afraid to ask, people are saying; stretch out your hand for help. There is help, there are people who love you, you are not alone.

Ordinary people, touched by this extraordinary man, are remembering Captain, my Captain, and wanting to stand on their desks and be remarkable.

I met Robin Williams once. I was a waitress in a tiny café  in a valley in Scotland, and I went over to a table and asked the new arrivals what they would like, and stared straight into that familiar, smiling, open face. I have an odd benchmark of character: I judge people very much on how they treat waiters. Williams was enchanting. He was gracious and polite and regular; he had no sense at all of the Big I Am. He was gentle and quiet, with no trace of that wild, manic, public persona. The other lovely thing, in that small highland village, was that everyone left him alone. Nobody pointed or stared or asked for his autograph. They gave him the courtesy of allowing him to be an ordinary man, just for one day.

I have a fantasy in my mind that he ordered the special lentil soup that I had made that morning. It was a long time ago. I think he probably did not have the soup. I think he just had a cup of coffee. I prided myself on my barista skills, newly learnt, and I made the hell out of that cup of coffee. I don’t expect you can really judge someone on one brief transactional meeting, but I was left with the impression of a very, very nice man. A gentle goodness shone out of him like starlight. Perhaps that is why so many people, from the humblest waitress to the most storied Hollywood star, are so sad.

He did not belong to us. I think of the heartbreaking moment in Out of Africa, where Meryl Streep looks down bleakly on a mound of dry earth and says: ‘Now take back the soul of Denys Finch-Hatton, whom you have shared with us. He brought us joy, and we loved him well. He was not ours, he was not mine.’

And yet, so many of my generation feel as if Robin Williams was stitched into the fabric of our lives, from Mork and Mindy in our youth, through Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets’ Society in our formative years, to the later, darker films of our middle age. He was so reliably present that perhaps many of us thought he would always be there.

There is something tragically democratic in his loss. Perhaps that too is what speaks to every bruised heart. He might have seemed to live up on that higher plane, where coruscating invention and wild talent and universal fame exist, in the troposphere where ordinary mortals may not go. Yet this kind, funny, haunted man was no more immune from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than the most workaday amongst us.

I very rarely use the universal we. I don’t like to speak for anyone else. But I’m not sure I have seen such an agreement on anything, in the rushing new age of the internet. There are no dissenting voices, no snide remarks, no cheap jokes. There is a collective sense of love and sadness, in their most authentic, unifying form.

In the end, there is not much point in trying to understand or dissect the extraordinary reaction to the death of one brilliant man. In the end, it is what it is. It is a shining light gone out, a brave soul lost, a fighting heart broken.

He gave us joy, and we loved him well.

Go free, now.
 


As I choose this picture, I think:

Tell someone you love how much you love them; take solace in the small things; be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle; lift your eyes up to the hills. Those are my resolutions for today.

What do you think?

I need to do some crowd-sourcing for one of the secret projects. Even though they have both now been read and green-lit by the agent, they still feel like secret projects to me. I rather enjoy this small absurdity, as if, in the mazy corridors of  my own mind, I am an International Woman of Mystery.

The crowd-sourcing is because I have read the experts, wrangled my own brain, mined close, observed experience, and now I want the view from the internet. This is where the internet is brilliant. In my own tiny corner of it, I find people I should never, ever meet in real life. There is the intensely kind lady in Sri Lanka, who is one of the original readers of the blog, and the brave woman who went through the Christ Church earthquake. There is the Dear Reader in Canada, who also loves horses. There is the number one Stanley the Dog fan, and the lady who adores chickens. There is my friend in the north, who knows all about animals breaking your heart, and missing departed fathers. (I say friend, because she feels like a friend. I don’t expect we shall ever see each other, face to face, but that is how this odd intimacy works.) There are my blogging sister-in-arms, some of whom I have actually met, but whose support comes most keenly through the ether, which is our place of mutual connection.

I feel that connection, with everyone who comes here, and one of the things I think over and over again is what a great leveller the internet is. We may have very different life experiences, but it comes back to that meme which did the rounds a while ago: be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. I feel that everyone here is fighting their battles. There is death and divorce, professional set-backs, illness and physical pain, aging parents and the daily frets of bringing up children. Everyone, it strikes me, is really trying their best, sometimes against long odds. There is a lot of quiet courage, and a lot of stoical grace.

Because of this, I sense there is a wisdom in this crowd, and that is what I want to tap.

My subject today is irritation. I was thinking about the things that drive me nuts in the head. I was thinking about the human things which are the most annoying. I don’t mean the big catastrophic faults, like war crimes and corruption and corporate greed. (Although, this morning, I felt a twisting spasm of rage at the man in charge of Nestlé, who has said that water is not a human right.) Those are horrors, and deserve a stronger emotion. I don’t even mean things like unkindness, which is a serious ill and should be regarded with gravity. I mean the small things which don’t really matter, but which produce a disproportionate response. I mean the things which make you want to throw heavy objects, and then, afterwards, you say to yourself in puzzlement: what button did that press?

On my own list would be: people who do not listen, people who are rude generally, but in particular to waiters, people who look over your shoulder at parties to see if there is someone more interesting or important to talk to. Also: personal remarks, bad-timekeeping, dangling modifiers, jargon, condescension, smugness, and being cheap. I get the nails on the blackboard feeling from people who say one thing and do another, who never listen to the other side of the argument, and who jump on bandwagons, particularly those that involve conspiracy theories or intellectually lazy received wisdom.

But at the moment, my number one, five star, ocean-going, fur-lined bête noire is: people who offer unsolicited advice.

Why should this drive me so demented? It really does not matter, in the wider scheme, not when Israel and Palestine are going up in smoke, and the refugee camps spread on the Syrian border, and Mr Putin grows daily more unpredictable. It produces a visceral reaction, a desire for violence, when I am by nature a pacific person.

I can perfectly well listen to it and let it go. I do not have to follow it. I can politely nod and smile and ignore it. But oh, oh, it makes me want to scream and shout.

I think: why would anyone tell another human what they should be doing when they have not asked? Why should someone think that other people are such idiots that they cannot manage their own life or make their own decisions or know their own minds? To me, it is the height of bad manners. The implication is that they are such fools that they need a dose of superior wisdom in order to straighten themselves out. It is, psychologically, an act of aggression. It is an invasion of personal space. It is a denial of autonomy and agency. It is a way of saying: I am brilliant and you are stupid. It is almost a negation of self.

I need to go back and have a hard search in the darker regions of my soul, in order to work out why this small irritation makes me go bat-shit crazy. Almost certainly it is some kind of failing in my own self. I have many failings. But one thing I can say with certainty is that I have never, ever told another person what to do unless they have requested the advice. I think it is an affront.

The line that comes to me now is – I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. I smile as I write it. No busybody, however well-meaning, can take that away from me.

I want your own irritations. Will you tell me? I am consumed with anticipation and curiosity to know what they are.

 

No time for pictures now, just this one of my best beloved:

We did our big practice run into the heart of the village, to get ready for the old people tomorrow. There were huge hissing buses, rattling dustbin trucks, squealing schoolchildren in high-visibility vests, men hurling building waste into industrial skips, and all sorts. The red mare spent her competitive life on quiet grass, working always with other horses, away from the hurly-burly of humans. Until she came to me, she had never been out on her own or seen anything busier than a tiny country lane. This was a lot of stimuli for a sensitive thoroughbred.

All the hard graft I have been putting in paid off. She was a little more reactive than I would like, which means I need to go back and check my working. She had a damn good snort and a look around. But the lovely fact remains that I took a fine thoroughbred into a completely new environment, riding only in a rope halter, and for all that she was sometimes uncertain and alarmed, she listened to me. I was very, very proud of her.

In a most touching moment, she stopped kindly and made friends with the small children, and she stood graciously and sweetly as they gazed up at her and stroked her nose. ‘She is very big,’ said one. ‘And very beautiful,’ said another.

Then we met a smiling old lady. Again, we stopped to talk. The lady told me that she had been in signals, in the army, in 1946. ‘With Louis Mountbatten in South-East Asia Command,’ she said, beaming. ‘It gave me a taste for travel. I’m off to Africa next week.’ I was so awe-struck by this extraordinary piece of information that I reverted to the language of my teen years. ‘That is so cool,’ I exclaimed.

She smiled up at Red, and gave her a gentle stroke down the neck. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid of horses. So that’s something.’

That is something. I rode home grinning all over my face.

The kindness of strangers.

The internet is such a curious thing. This morning, a writer I like very much was having difficulties with the etiquette of social networks. It is always a minefield in such a new medium, as everyone makes up the accepted mores as they go along. She had tried to do a little rationalisation of her online posse, and someone had become offended and got cross, leaving her rather bruised and baffled. Then I read an article about religion vs atheism on the Spectator website, and was amazed that the readership of such an august old lady as the Speccie should be so free from manners. The comment section was a brawling free-for-all, with everyone getting furious and calling each other names. The great-aunt in me was horrified.

These are the difficult sides of the internet. But there is also the miraculous, kind, touching side.

I follow various pages about this new school of horsemanship which fascinate me so much. I find them very interesting and very helpful. In my quest to let the red mare express her truest, most glorious self, and my own attempt to learn something every day, I find these places invaluable. I am normally too shy to write a comment, being conscious that I am at the very beginning of my journey. (What do you know? shout the voices in my head.) But today, a horseman I admire wrote something which struck a real chord, and so I threw caution to the four winds, and left a remark.

Would the fellow laugh, discern at once my most amateur status, peg me for a fool? Would he see quite clearly that I know nothing?

And then there was a little ping on my computer. The kind gentleman had replied. This alone is an act of courtesy. Most people do not have the time. What he wrote was absolutely delightful and filled me with joy. He wrote: ‘I guessed you were a writer when I saw what you wrote on my post.’

When I think about horses, I think that the most important thing is that mysterious attribute called feel. It’s almost impossible to pin down. It’s to do with the physical – a softness and give in the hands, a rhythmic way of moving the body. It’s to do with the mental – reading your horse, trying to think your way into their world. It’s to do also with the spiritual, if I may say that without sounding like a flake. It is a communion of two spirits, across the species divide.

This morning, I sat with my mare and watched her eat her hay. The spring grass is slow in coming, and she still needs a bit of the good hay to keep her going. It is glorious, fresh stuff, brought by the kind local farmer. She adores it, and as she eats she goes into a happy meditative state. I stayed by her and watched her dear face and thought about those two spirits, hers and mine, and how sometimes I cannot tell where one begins and the other ends.

Writing, too, has its mysterious, unnameable element. You can learn all the technical stuff you like. You can make yourself mistress of the semi-colon. You can quote Strunk and White by the yard. I have read all the damn manuals, sat at the feet of the masters, gone through The Great Gatsby line by line to try and identify where its genius lies. But there is that extra thing which is required, the thing which has no name, which is perhaps the equivalent of that feel I look for with my horse. It is a thing of the spirit. It does not arrive every day, but sometimes, when the light is coming from the right direction, something mysterious happens, a little alchemy, a sprinkle of stardust, and everything falls into place, and the words run free, and it is like dancing.

I could tell you were a writer, says the kind gentleman, out on the internet. (He could tell, yells my inner six-year-old, dancing with glee.) There it is, winging through the ether, a confirmation of my belief in the kindness of strangers, the best thing anyone could say, the perfect antidote to the shouting, rough voices. I shall smile for the rest of the day.

 

Today’s pictures:

After our dazzling Easter, dear old Scotland has reverted to her most dour state, so I did not take the camera out today. Here are a few pictures from brighter days:

I love the good companions, bowing to each other like Japanese diplomats:

And this is the contemplative look my old duchess has when she eats her hay, as if she is mulling over the Universal Why:

Remembering the great old gentleman. Or, the internet is surprising.

Crazy, long day, so packed with work that I thought my ears would fall off. My time management continued poor, especially as I thought that industrial amounts of caffeine might help. All that happened was that I grew slightly manic and my fingers were too trembly to type accurately.

I’m too tired to write of my day, which was interesting, and shall record it tomorrow. But one incredibly touching thing happened, and I want to tell you the story of that before I fall off my chair.

There is a tremendous organisation called The Amateur Jockeys’ Association. My father was its president for many, many years. It runs a very good Twitter feed, and I have become friendly with @amajox because they often say lovely things about my dad, and remember him well. It’s one of those interesting relationships that builds up through the ether, between people who have never clapped eyes on each other. We even make little jokes at each other, getting especially excited whenever a female jockey rides a great race, as rather a lot of them have lately. The hashtag #girlsontop gets deployed, with lots of exclamation marks and happy smiles.

Anyway, today, at dear old Plumpton racecourse, one of my father’s favourites, the 3.40 was for the Gay Kindersley Memorial Salver. To mark the occasion, The Amateur Jockeys’ Association tweeted a wonderful photograph of my dad jumping a fence, with a most characteristic gritted-teeth expression. I know that face so well that it made me laugh and it made me cry. It was the face he made when he knew he was getting away with it, because he had almost certainly been roistering about the night before. (As well as being very courageous, he was very, very naughty.)

I took the picture and put it up on Facebook, and people who knew and loved him left sweet comments.

This is what the internet can do. In between crazed sessions of work, I could take five minutes and look at the picture, and look at the remarks underneath, and think of my darling old dad, and smile. I liked thinking of those days when he rode with wild corinthians who threw their hearts over fences. I liked remembering his tremendous physical bravery. He never thought twice when he got on a horse: he just pointed it at the nearest fence and went hell for leather. I’m much more cautious. I’ve ridden work, but never faced five feet of birch at thirty miles an hour. He set a high bar.

He was loved in racing because he was bold and he was a true horseman and he did not swagger. The jokes he made were most often directed against himself. If you really, really wanted to make him laugh, so his shoulders would hop up and down and tears would fall down his cheeks, you only had to tease him about one of his own personal foibles. He did not judge. He took people exactly as they were. He asked merely that they not be dullards. (He had no time for the puffed-up or the pompous either.) He was an outstanding character in a world of characters. He was so completely and utterly himself, and that self was so idiosyncratic and without rules and generous of spirit that people used to smile involuntarily whenever he walked into a room. That is a lovely gift. I never met anyone quite like him.

I think the real reason that I got the red mare, and the real reason I write of her so often, is that she makes me feel close to the old gentleman. I miss him keenly. But today, it was the funny old internet which made me feel close to him, and lifted my heart. That is not necessarily what it was designed for. It is not what it is most used for. But alongside the rants and the trolls and the cute kittens and the inexplicable conspiracy theories, there exists, on the wide prairies of the web, something very human and very good and very true.

 

This was the picture:

Three things I especially love about it, apart from my fa’s expression – the magnificent britches, the kind, honest face of the horse, with ears pricked, and that wonderful old-school position. That’s what they used to do in the fifties, sit back and slip the reins.

Magnificence, AP, and the kindness of strangers.

Be magnificent, said the voice in my head as I woke up this morning.

Actually, that was not the first thing it said. The first thing it said was: ‘Why are you dreaming about Kind?’ Kind was Frankel’s dam, and reportedly one of the best-named broodmares ever, as sweet and gentle as the day is long. She was the star of my dream last night and the voice in my head thought that was quite peculiar.

Then the voice moved swiftly on to the magnificence.

The Be Magnificent thing is because I have had quite a lot of angst and fret lately, about a variety of matters too dull to bore you with. These are matters with which I must deal. In times like this, my instinct often is to try and explain myself. I forgot that or neglected this because I was working to a crazy deadline or my brain went phhhtt or I’m desperately trying to wrangle my career back on track after a professional setback of fairly shocking proportions.

I wish always to be understood, which is why exposition is my default. But the problem with explanations is that they often sound like excuses, and in a way they are. I decided that that magnificent thing to do was not to twist on a pin but to apologise with grace, and correct the omission, and leave explanations for the birds. It did, I freely admit, go against all muscle memory.

The next thing I asked myself, in my drive for magnificence, was: ‘What would AP do?’

(For those of you new to the blog, or who have no racing interest, AP McCoy is the most champion of champion jockeys Britain has ever seen.)

This is a novel thing for me, but it’s been cooking for a while, in the echoing back corridors of my mind. In America apparently there are some very religious people who always ask themselves What Would Jesus Do? Sometimes, to remind themselves, they abbreviate it to WWJD and put it on t-shirts. (This may be apocryphal.) Since I do not have a deity, I decided to ask myself what The Champ would do. He is a man of stoicism and steel. He buggers on where lesser humans would throw up their hands. He does not brag when things go well, and he never complains when things go wrong. I also suspect that he may be in possession of a most excellent Occam’s Razor.

I told my mother this at breakfast. She put her head on one side and regarded me quizzically.

‘What would AP do?’ she asked.

‘Ride another winner,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘he would not give in to angst and navel-gazing and midnight fretfulness. He would never make excuses. He would just go out there and ride another winner. You see?’

I’m not quite sure she did.

Up on the hill, with the sun pouring down like honey, and the red mare at her most glorious beneath me, I gazed over the blue landscape between her pricked ears and thought: you are my winner. As she gave me, with all the sweetness of her generous heart, the most beautiful, collected, smooth sitting trot I’ve ever felt in my life, I thought: this is that winner. And I am riding her.

Then I went home and wondered if I could be magnificent. It’s so much easier to be chipped about the edges and a tiny bit second-rate and messily ordinary. It is easier to make excuses and point to reasons and demand exculpation. I would have to pull myself up to my full height and draw on all my resources.

And then, at that very moment, someone else did the magnificence for me.

A person I know only through the internet recently asked for my address. I usually would never give out this information, despite being surrounded by fierce guard dogs and neighbours who go out lamping half the night, but this particular gentleman seemed so intelligent and kind and funny that I decided to err on the side of trust rather than caution. You get out what you put in, after all.

The thing he wanted to send me arrived today. I opened it. I stared. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It is a little book by US Cricket Guy, the funniest spoofer on Twitter by a country mile. He galvanises the Ashes by referring to decision timbers instead of wickets and cries ‘Let’s play CRICKETBALL!!!’ when things are getting tense. He makes me collapse with laughter.

A complete stranger had gone to the trouble of tracking the book down, buying it, packing it, addressing it, and sending it all the way to Scotland, just because he knew from my intemperate Ashes tweeting habit that I love test cricket with the adoration of a true believer.

That is magnificence.

It makes me smile and smile, even as I write it. The kindness of strangers never gets old for me. Each time it takes me by surprise; each time it is as keen and new and lovely as the very first. Each time, it restores my faith in human nature. I doggedly believe that most humans are mostly good, and sometimes this rickety faith has to be held together with baling twine. Today, it was bolstered with Corinthian columns and flying buttresses.

The only problem is that it sets the magnificence bar very high. My kind internet friend has raised the stakes with his immense generosity. I shall now have to leap as if I have springs in my heels. But then, that, that is what AP would do.

 

Today’s pictures:

Apologies to the polymaths. It’s late and I still have not finished my work so there is only time for the rampant loveliness that is my furry, muddy, scruffy, magnificent red mare:

Despite this season of fretfulness, when I am on her back, everything is all right. It is as if I have come home.

The seas of the internet continue stormy. But there are shining shafts of light.

I have, as usual, yet another secret project. I am always starting secret projects and then getting distracted and letting them lapse. This morning, I write 1079 words of this one and wonder whether I shall stick with it. It is a long-term project, and I love it, but I am not certain if it will come to anything. Still, some imperative drives me on, and I blindly obey.

Then I must turn to the other work of the day, attempt to get my house in order as the family begins to gather for the highland games, and do some particularly knotty and rather dispiriting admin. I hate admin because I am very bad at it, and it reminds me keenly of my own glaring shortcomings. (Why, why, why can’t I be one of the Organised People?)

In the midst of all this, the internet still throws up its outrages. A writer I follow is being pestered by a nasty Twitter troll; not violent or abusive, but unkind and persistent. The writer, not surprisingly, feels sad and beleaguered. Hannah Bettss writes a measured and sane response to the whole Caroline Criado-Perez saga, and expands it to encompass the amount of abuse that many female writers get when they venture online. Beneath the piece, in the comments section, on the august Telegraph, that elegant old lady of Fleet Street, one man writes that ‘Speaking for myself I abhor the notion of violence towards women, but that doesn't change the fact that I wish, most of the time, that they'd just shut the hell up. Women talk too much. They always have, and they probably always will.’ Another instructs that feminists should lock themselves up with their dildos. To the Telegraph’s credit, this comment was later moderated, and the dildo part removed.

Oh dear, I thought, demoralised. All my vain beliefs in the goodness and kindness of strangers were tottering and rocking under a wave of general crossness and intemperance.

And then, an enchanting thing happened. There is a woman I got to know online who works for a big and ancient and storied organisation. I had the pleasure of meeting her in real life this spring, and I follow her both in her professional capacity (she organises, very brilliantly, the entire online life of her important organisation) and in her personal incarnation on Twitter. We share a love of thoroughbreds and racing, and it proves a delightful bond.

Today, she put up a particularly enchanting picture on Facebook which made me smile through all my fraught stressiness. I sent a little comment, saying how much it had cheered me. And she replied that she had been thinking of me when she posted, and had hoped this might be the effect.

In the rush and dash of the worldwide web, this is a fleeting act of kindness. It would not make headlines or put a dent in the furious rows which are currently raging about online life. But to me, it was a shaft of light and reason and goodness and sanity in a mad world. I WAS NOT WRONG. Look, there, there, is the good heart, the thoughtful pause in a busy day, the moment of blazing generosity. This is the lifebelt which keeps me afloat on a stormy sea.

I’m not saying the sea is not stormy. I’m not so Pollyanna-ish as all that. I may cling to a kind of defiant naivety, but I am not an idiot. What I do say is that the lifebelts are there, the small boats, the brave little fleets that sail out into the teeth of a gale. And there are enough of them to make a difference.

 

The fraughtness continues, and the time management does not improve, so no time for the camera today. Just one picture, especially dedicated to my kind online friend. You know who you are. And a picture of my duchess, with her goofy face on, reaching over the fence to get the tips of the lush long grass is my best thank you.

Oh, that face is saying: the absolute, sheer, absurd DELICIOUSNESS of the long green grass.

 

And one more thought before I go. Sometimes, in the clamour of the internet, one may feel shy to say something nice, or complimentary, or plain encouraging. The person does not need to hear from me, you may think. I often do. I am oddly bashful about offering words of kindness. Perhaps it is the British in me. Perhaps I am afraid they may come across as mildly patronising even. Oh, well done, pat on the head, blah blah.

But you know what I think? Risk it. Say the thing. If in doubt, write the kindness. Put up the picture of a sweet foal for your friend who loves foals, even if half the rest of your more urban followers will think you an idiot. (I did this yesterday. I know my friend in Brooklyn will have been rolling his eyes. But my friend in Norfolk was in transports.)

Because the only way to counter the mean voices is not to challenge them directly – they will shout back at you even louder and call you names, because their bitterness and misery is too deeply rooted – but to lift your own voice in generosity. It’s like a good choir belting out show tunes to drown out the sound of death metal. If there are enough determined singers, then Oh What a Beautiful Morning wins.

And that is my thought for the day.

Well, that, and: fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

Love, hate and Twitter. Or, the good and bad of the internet.

Yesterday, someone called me a pompous, sanctimonious arse.

I was ill for three days; that is why there has been radio silence. There was a fairly ordinary state of health one moment, and then – hit all over with hammers. It’s that kind of thing when you can hardly move or speak, just groan. It made me think of how I take health for granted. I always say of course, of course it’s the most precious thing, but I’m not sure I really stop to appreciate the actual truth of that. When your entire body hurts and you can’t move, nothing is worth anything. You could have a cellar full of rubies downstairs, and it would not matter a damn. I thought of all those people who struggle with chronic pain every day of their lives, and felt very small and very grateful.

Anyway, it’s a Sunday, so I’m going to tell you a rambling story. Yesterday, I was a bit better, but still very tottery, so I lay in bed with my swimmy head and Stanley the Dog gazing at me with his best Florence Nightingale eyes, and watched the racing. I still get rather grumpy with Channel 4 for aspects of their coverage – they have the maddening habit of putting banging, non-specific music over all their montages and even across Clare Balding saying interesting things about the history of Ascot, almost drowning out her accomplished words – but I do appreciate that they allow me to watch the racing live on their website. (I have no television in the bedroom.) It was good racing and even though my eyeballs felt like boiled sweets I was enjoying it.

A mighty German horse called Novellist absolutely hosed up in the big race of the day, under the great Johnny Murtagh, and, because it is that time of year, all thoughts turned to the Arc.

Twitter is fascinating in its sociological and cultural make-up. Quite unexpectedly, the racing community has adopted it wholesale, and you will find everyone there from jockeys to betting shop managers to clerks of the course to work riders. One of my favourite Twitter friends turns out to be the head of Coral, which I find rather grand. It’s clever too; he is so nice that I now bet with Coral as well as with William Hill, which is my default account.

So, immediately after the race, where the classy French horse, Cirrus des Aigles, underperformed, and the German horse smashed the track record, a great post-mortem broke out. One gentleman got very shouty and I suddenly could not deal with it, in my weakened state. Instead of sensibly just unfollowing him, I announced it.

This is the danger of social media. It’s in its infancy, and the rules and mores and small etiquettes are still being worked out. Also, I find that when I am in a Twitter storm, which happens usually during sporting events, I often type before I think. I get into a zone, and everything goes public. Some of my kind followers find this faintly diverting, but sometimes it is dangerous.

I did not mention the gentleman by name. I just wrote something like: ‘Am unfollowing cross people. Too weak.’

The cross people clearly knew who they were. Back came the reply: ‘Good riddance.’ Hm, I thought, mazily. Ungracious. I pondered what to do. He is a stranger, and I generally do not have conversations with him; the online ones who have the power to hurt are those with whom one has struck up a relationship. I was not wounded, but perhaps my pride, or something, was a little dented. Foolishly, I wrote another tweet. It went something like: ‘Don’t take it personally, cross people. Festivals of crossness must not be stopped. Just not my thing. Each to each.’

I admit, this was a bit passive-aggressive. The rational part of me knows that some people find a bit of expressed fury marvellously cathartic and invigorating. I believe ardently that speech must not be shut down. On a purely subjective level though, I really do hate it. I do wish that everyone was polite and minded their Ps and Qs. So I was being a little disingenuous. If I had been entirely honest, I would have said: oh, for God’s sake, Cross Person, stop being so grumpy and shouty and rude. I was especially narked because he was shouting at another racing person whom I rather like, and for not much reason.

And that was when he got really cross. ‘You are a pompous sanctimonious arse,’ he wrote.

Well, I thought, that’s that. I went back to the racing, and felt happy as clever, canny Sir Mark Prescott, one of most idiosyncratic characters in the whole of racing, had a quickfire double, with two tremendous, doughty campaigners, Big Thunder and Alcaeus, both of whom are on an unstoppable winning streak. I had them in doubles and trebles and a fivefold accumulator, and I won a shed-load of money, even with my viral load, and I felt that that would show the cross person.

But it’s slightly scratched away at me ever since. I was not hurt, because, as I have discovered online, you need to have built up a degree of intimacy for a sudden attack to hit the target. I am vulnerable on the blog, and on my Facebook page, but not to random Tweeters. On the other hand, there was a part of me that really did want to punish that rude person for being so disobliging and intemperate. I wanted to smack him back and hang him out to dry, even though I knew that would be ridiculous, and the only thing to do was gently move on.

Just as I was examining all these feelings, I came, rather late, to the saga of the Jane Austen hate club. I don’t know if you have followed this story. A woman called Caroline Criado-Perez started a campaign to get dear Jane on the British banknotes, and succeeded, and all was lovely, until she started getting a vicious, concerted set of tweets, some of them containing rape threats.

This put my little spat in perspective. I at once went over to sign a petition for Twitter to put up a Report Abuse button, so that these kind of haters can be dealt with. This felt meaningful and pointful, and I forgot my own tiny pinprick.

The whole thing made me think again about the nature of life online. I choose to regard the internet as a benign place, and treat it as such. Most of my blogs and tweets and Facebook posts are positive; I try to resist the temptation to let my inner bitch come out and dance. I feel I should confine her to the privacy of my own room. Unless Channel 4 Racing drives me to a pitch of distraction, which I admit it sometimes does, I attempt to emphasise the positive and skip over the negative.

In particular, when writing racing tweets, I have a very strict rule not to criticise jockeys, even if they do make a hash of a race, because I grew up with a jockey and I know damn well that even the most brilliant will have an off moment, run into traffic, misjudge the pace, and that they will be far too busy criticising themselves to have any need for outside help. Besides, I suspect that the armchair jocks have absolutely no idea what it must be like to have to make split-second decisions whilst going at forty miles an hour on half a ton of youthful thoroughbred, perched on a saddle the size of a postage stamp.

Generally, I find that I get back what I put in. At the very same time the cross man was calling me names, another lovely gent, with whom I have bonded over our mutual love of lurchers, was sending messages of ineffable funniness and sweetness. The good and bad were marching there together, and I chose to let the good win.

But I am perhaps a little naive, even wilfully so. As the blameless Caroline Criado-Perez found, you can do something which seems utterly ordinary and uncontroversial, and suddenly insane people are threatening to violate your very body.

As always, I’m never quite sure what to make of all this. I shall bash on in my hopeful view of the online world, because 90% of it is charming and funny and illuminating and generous and kind. I get glimpses of other lives, radically different from my own. I get sudden belly laughs from complete strangers when I am feeling low. People I shall never meet ask after Stanley the Dog. Properly useful information is shared. There really is wit, and quite often wisdom too.

There are moving collective outpourings, such as the very touching concern for St Nicholas Abbey, as he recovers from a life-threatening injury and two complicated surgeries. He is a great horse, not much known to the general public, but hugely beloved by racing aficionados, and the hope for his welfare touches my heart.

If the price I pay for this is the occasional sanctimonious arse, I think I may count myself lucky.

As for the real, vicious haters, the ones who attack women from behind the craven cloak of anonymity, the interesting thing about them is they do seem far outnumbered. The majority has risen up against them, pointed the finger and said no. They may never go away. We shall never know what private miseries and bitternesses drive them to their own twisted outpourings. But I do know this: they shall not prevail.

 

Today’s pictures:

Pouring with rain outside and still too tottery for pictures, so here are some quick beloveds:

Stanley the Dog does not give a bugger about the internet, BECAUSE HE HAS A GREAT BIG STICK:

And now he is going to look for another one. You can’t keep a good dog down:

And Red the Mare, after our last lovely ride, thinks only of the green, green grass:

Musing on light and shade. Or, the good parts and the bad parts, and all points in between.

Happy Independence day to all the dear American readers. It is also the happy birthday of my beloved Older Niece. So it is a day of jubilee all round.

Sometimes, as you may have noticed, I sit down to write this with hardly a thought in my head. Because I have taken on idiot amounts of work and have a horse and a pony and a dog to look after, my days are an endless parade of Not Enough Time. As a result, the blog has morphed into a series of small snapshots: this is my small life.

It once was a place where I could muse on the great matters of the day. I could parade my feminism and my politics and my old bleeding liberal heart. I liked doing that, and I liked the Dear Readers joining in the debate. It was like a little Mrs Merton all of its own.

There is no space for that now. The Today programme beams into my room each morning, and as my brain charges up with all the things it has to do, it takes in shards of news – horrors in Syria, the raging arguments over leaks and government surveillance, the oddness that is happening in Texas, the Where’s Waldo life of Edward Snowden. I contemplate these things in brief snatches and then gallop on to my immediate life, which has to be lived.

As I drive down the rutted HorseBack drive after my morning visit, looking up at the blue hills, where weather is swishing back and forth, veering between hard rain and bright sun, I think suddenly of the blog, and what it is all for, and what effects it may have. On my Twitter timeline, which I glance at quickly before settling to work, someone has put up a link with the words ‘Lifestyle envy’ on it. I resist the word lifestyle; I like to think that we humans have lives, not styles.

But there is something about the internet which does encourage a lifestyle. People put up little snatches of their existence – an amusing picture here, a paragraph of achievement there, a lovely view, a sweet canine. They generally show the good parts. I suspect that most people want to live well, and now in the age of the online life, they want to show that they live well. And sometimes this does lead to envy. I occasionally feel a bit of a pang when I see a perfect paradise of paddock and barn, or an ex-racehorse covered in rosettes, or a woman who has conquered the dizzy heights of chic. (This last makes me look ruefully down at my blackened hands and muddy jeans; dirt is a constant when you work with horses.)

I do tend to tell you the Good Stuff. I wail sometimes about a fraught day, or the moments when my heart aches for the Dear Departed. Mostly though, I say: see, here is a magical moment with my mare, or this is my great word count, or this is the kind thing some kind person said. You will notice I no longer boast of my cooking skills or my garden; both of those have rather gone by the wayside as my time has contracted. I am more likely to eat a ham sandwich than some intricate oriental dish, and have let the garden find its own way, so it has taken on a wild aspect, everything seeding itself where it will.

I think: is this bogus, or is this a charming little bit of light relief? Humans, after all, as TS said so wisely, cannot bear very much reality. You do not want to hear my daily frets and moans; much better to see the handsome face of Stanley the Dog and hear of the latest triumph of Red the brilliant Mare.

On the other hand, I scent the whiff of whitewash. Am I guilty of presenting a lifestyle, rather than a life? Middle age is filled with the rocky stones of reality. The Old People are going. (Another of the Good Old Men left us on Sunday.) I worry about all my responsibilities, wish I were more organised, lash myself to get more things done.

Despite the good word counts, I sometimes feel this book is just spinning its wheels. I wish that my poor mum was not in pain most of the time. She is brave and stoical, but it is a hard thing to have a body that hurts.

I struggle with the brutal fact of mortality, which is something I think pretty much everyone is up against at this time of life. My sleep patterns are sometimes erratic; I get scratchy and over-tired. In the wider sense, I worry about bigotries and hatreds and stupid tribal rivalries. My old inner hippy comes out and I wish everyone could just accept that love is love, and humans are humans, and there is more that unites us than divides us.

I have no answers to this question of how much dark should balance the light. I am just musing out loud. Perhaps the silver lining aspect of the internet is a good thing, not a phoney. I do smile when I see the delightful pictures of service dogs or wild places I will never visit or baby elephants that pop up on my Facebook timeline. Perhaps all this is not whitewash against reality, but a useful corrective, a reminder that in all the small daily frets and tensions that infect even the luckiest life, and the big global injustices and horrors out in the wider world, there is also goodness and beauty and small, potent acts of kindness.

Perhaps it is a fine thing to be in the presence of my old stalwarts, love and trees, literally and metaphorically. I genuinely don’t know.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack morning:

Even though I was in a rush as usual, I stopped and spent ten minutes with this girl. She is one of my favourites, sweet and solid and kind and earthy. We stood together for a while and had a damn good chat, and she walked with me round the paddock, and I felt my raging mind calm and the centre hold. There is an astonishing thing about horses; all the existential doubts and fears fall away when I am with them. They are so authentic, so wonderfully anchored in the moment. They are like little four-legged yogis:

This dear mare is about to foal at any moment. All fingers are crossed for her:

Home:

The girls and Stanley the Dog having a good graze in our little makeshift arena before their afternoon’s work:

Red was astonishing today. In the blinding sun, which cast light and shade, with the wind up, she walked, step by delicate step, over a billowing tarpaulin, backed, again one step at a time, moving the very foot to which I pointed, through a narrow L made of rails, and followed me without blinking under a low makeshift arch with a flapping curtain on it. (The Remarkable Trainer is getting very imaginative in setting up her desensitising obstacle courses.)

These exercises require a huge amount of trust, accuracy and concentration. They are foundational, building confidence in us both, so that when the great day comes when we ride off to Mount Keen or some wild place, we will have no fears. They can throw anything at us.

I love the work, because it is gentle and slow and precise. I love seeing what my miracle mare can do. I love that she defies all stereotypes about thoroughbreds and mares and chestnuts. I love that her glorious lower lip wibbles throughout. I love her so much it sometimes feels as though my heart will burst.

And it has to be said that sweet Autumn the Filly was foot-perfect too, as if she had done this kind of thing all her life, when in fact she is only just four and at the beginning of her education. These clever girls give us so much joy.

And the hill, taken this morning before the sun came out, lost in the mist and murk: