My mission, should I choose to accept it.

Well, the Be Happy For Mum plan didn’t go all that badly, in the end. I thought that it might be the most shaming disaster. I thought that everyone might shout through the ether Oh for goodness’ sake, just be bloody sad and get it over with. (I suspect that was a bit of Freudian projection, and in fact was the voice of my critical self, who is a terrible old vampish harridan and has always had too much gin.) In actual fact, on the Facebook, on the blog, kind people, some known well to me, some complete strangers, all rose up in glory and said generous and funny and wise things, which touched and amazed my bashed heart.

Here is what I learnt, because I must always learn something. All these years on, and I am still a girly swot at heart.

There is one place that the sadness really and truly does go completely away and that is on the back of my thoroughbred mare. I always knew that she did have super-powers. I just did not quite know how powerful they were. Being with her is cheering and soothing, but it’s on her back, when I feel her power under me and the peace that she carries in her flowing from her mighty body into my puny one, that everything falls into a stunning equilibrium. All the bad and sad things just fall away and I am free. I don’t know how this happens, but it does. She is a miracle horse and that’s the end of it.

The joys are there, if you look for them. They don’t banish the sorrow, but they go in tandem with them, like a pair of slightly grumpy and ill-matched carriage horses, the kind that the Queen would not use for state occasions. I’m going to go on driving my wonky carriage, and one day, those two ponies will learn to trot along together.

My stabs at normality are quite funny. I’m a little off kilter. Everything I say is a crotchet off-beat. My laughter is a bit too loud. My walk is a bit ragged. My clothes are frankly peculiar. My hair is a bit bonkers. My attempts to make sense don’t quite make sense.

Laughter still exists though, and it is as healing as tears. I have a new theory that grief is like a trapped energy and has to be let go, in great gusts. It needs to be released from the actual body. Shouty tears can do this, but so can shouty laughter. The Beloved Stepfather made me laugh at breakfast so much that I couldn’t speak for four minutes. It was one of those comical stories so recondite and absurd and almost tragic that only he and I (and my mother had she been here) could get it. That made it even more intense. Once he had told me the absurd thing, and I started laughing helplessly, he started laughing too, the first proper laugh he has done since it happened. It was naughty schoolboy laughter, because it was the kind of thing that was really quite sad in some ways, but we couldn’t help it, it tickled us to death. That laughter opened the door and let some of that captured energy out.

I have to keep reminding myself to let my shoulders go. I have another theory, you will be amazed to hear, that people trap their emotions in different parts of their bodies. Some people get headaches, or stomach cramps. I get the shoulders up around my ears. Every half an hour, I have to say: get those damn shoulders down.

Talking out loud is oddly helpful. I’ve always been prone to this, and it’s getting worse as I get older. Lately, I find myself in the Co-op saying, at shamingly high volume: ‘Now, what have I forgotten?’ Since Saturday, I have been walking round the house saying ‘Oh,’ and ‘Ah,’ and ‘Oof,’ and ‘What next?’ I say: ‘Oh, Mum,’ with a dying fall. I expect soon I shall move on to: ‘Steady the buffs.’

I like having a mission, and I’m going to keep on my mission of hunting for beauty, squinting for the good, searching for the consolations. My old friend The Horseman, who is a man of great matter-of-factness, not a sentimental bone in his body, but a man of oak, the sort of man on whom you can really rely when the chips are down, wrote me a brilliant, pithy message. It said: ‘Live hard in respect for those who can’t.’ That is my mission.

But, and here I think is the important thing, I’m not going to scold myself when I can’t do that. There will be days when it’s not possible. It’s a good goal, and a fine thought. I keep it in the front of my mind, like a shining amulet. The good old Horseman. He was there when my dad died, and when my dog died (he found me in streaming tears on his drive and staunchly faced them without fear) and now he has sent me a line to live by.

Rather to my astonishment, I have achieved quite a lot this week. I have written words, and done good work for HorseBack, and made soup, and worked my new mare, and ridden my old mare in glorious cowgirl canters on a loose rein, and even arranged some flowers. There are roses on my desk. There are never roses on my desk. They were on special offer and I thought, bugger it, I must have roses. They feel sweetly symbolic and I look at them now as I write and think: yes, yes, the small things. I live now in the world of the small things, so that the big thing does not overwhelm me, so that I do not drown.

 

Today’s pictures:

The roses:

I found this wonderful picture of my mother this morning. I remember that fur hat so well. I was very small when she had it, and I used to whip it off her head and hold it and stroke it as if it were a small bear. I can feel it now:

And this picture was in the same book. It is my sister, on her side-saddle champion. This says a lot about my mother. It was she who taught us to ride these ponies, who schooled them and groomed them and taught us sternly to look after them. If we were to have the great fortune to have such glorious animals, we had to be responsible for them. We were never allowed to come in at the end of the day until our ponies were happy and settled with their bran mashes. She would get up at three in the morning to drive us to distant shows – to the Three Counties, and Builth Wells, and Windsor, and Peterborough – and she would make us the best bacon sandwiches in the world to sustain us for the road:

Not not not the screw top.

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

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

What the buggery bollocks were you all thinking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

Pictures.

Crazy working day and there was no time for the blog. Hopeless. Here are some photographs from the last few days to make up for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the smallest of small things – the hills, the moss, the green, green grass of Scotland, the mare, the dog, hunting for beauty and tiny pleasures in each day. I suddenly realise, as I post these pictures, that the small things are all there. The red mare and these Scottish hills are vast to me, but in the scheme of the world they would not even make the back pages. As I get older, the things I love and value are further and further away from the classic headline desires. I’d love my next book to be a best-seller, but only so I can keep the horse in hay. I’d like to make some money, so I can build many beautiful paddocks out of lovely post and rails and fill them with ex-racehorses. I don’t want to be fashionable or famous or feted. I want my fingers to work so I can go on playing with prose, and my body to work so I can still be riding thoroughbreds when I’m seventy, and my eyes to function so I can read and look at the racing and gaze at this beloved landscape. I’d like my reflexes to stay sharp, so I can drive south and see the old friends. I’m starting to think I’d quite like a goat. That’s about the sum total of my ambition.

Love and trees, my darlings. Love and trees.

And sheep, of course. The ewes this year are so elegant I can’t stop staring at them.

In which I return to the small things.

Back to the smallest of the small things. I always do this when the news is bad and there are too many sorrows out in the world. The small things are what make me feel that I can cling on, that the turning earth will not tip me off into vacancy.

So I tidied the feed shed, and made up a new kind of home-made fly spray for the mare, and then rubbed neem oil all over her body to soothe her skin and deal with the lumps and the bumps which come up in summer from the horrid horse-flies.

Setting a kind, trusting animal to rights is one of the keenest pleasures I know. I find her hot and bothered, snatching at the biting critters with her teeth, shaking her head and twitching her great body. I leave her anointed and soothed and settled. I give her a great scratch all over, getting at all the maddening places she can’t reach, including right into her dear ears, and then I cool her with water, and then I smooth the ointments and unguents on her red coat, and then I let her lean her sweet head against me and give her a dozy massage on her poll. It is a form of communion which goes beyond words.

We ride out and I take her to see my mother. My mum is not very mobile, so seeing the horse is a rare pleasure for her. I teach the mare to walk up the steps to the door, one delicate hoof at a time, so she can say hello.

‘How are you going to get her off those steps?’ says my mother, in some astonishment.

‘Like this,’ I say. I point at each hoof in turn. ‘Back one,’ I say, and the clever mare moves one foot at time, returning without fuss to the ground. She looks quietly pleased with herself, and has an ‘aw, it was nothing’ gleam in her eye.

‘We haven’t done that for a while,’ I say, unable to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘But she remembers everything, she’s so intelligent.’

I write 1876 words. I do my HorseBack work. There were young people at HorseBack this week, as part of the fledgling Youth Initiative, where local children who face a variety of challenges work with the horses, helped by several of our regular veterans. There’s a lovely circularity to it, and it’s been a hugely successful experiment, and will now become part of the core of the HorseBack work. I find looking at the pictures of the young people, as I edit and collate and select for the Facebook page, intensely moving.

As I finish this, I can hear a piper playing. There is a wedding about to start across the way from my house, and the sound of proper Scottish bagpipes will welcome a happy couple. Soon, I’ll go back down to the field and attend to that dear red mare. I’ll look at the deer and the trees and the pied wagtails and the swifts and the green, green grass, and Stanley the Dog will hunt for rats and play with enormous sticks, and all those small, small things will settle around me, little battalions against a world which sometimes does not seem to make any sense.

 

Today’s pictures:

A group of elegant ladies have just moved into the west meadow:

This is Glen Tanar, three miles west on the South Deeside Road, where I spent the morning on Wednesday:

And this was my lovely girl this morning. She does not always come when I appear. Sometimes she is too busy eating, and I wander down and get her. But on some days, she lifts her head and moseys right on over, with a there you are look on her face, which makes me want to laugh out loud with sheer happiness:

The Small Victories. Or, a slightly unexpected event.

More dull rain. Working working working. Head full of book. Excellent HorseBack meeting. Galvanised.

Despite the weather, I worked the red mare on the ground this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks. I’ve been away, and it’s been pouring and pouring, so she’s had a long holiday. Usually, she goes round like an old dote, running through the steps she knows so well, her head low and her neck relaxed. Today, I don’t know what it was, she suddenly felt all her racehorsey, thoroughbred blood. Whoop, whoop, she went, putting on her best Spanish Riding School of Vienna act, leaping and plunging, letting out mighty bucks which made me laugh. I let the rope out and sent her on. You want me to do WHAT??? she said. Huge amounts of snorting, tail stuck vertically in the air so it flew like flags, that astonishing thing where she grows a hand before my very eyes. She is normally so low and relaxed that I sometimes forget how big she is. When her dander rises, I remember, with awe and respect, that I am in the presence of a half-ton flight animal.

After about five minutes of this malarkey, she returned to her poised, dowager duchess incarnation, and was as cool and immaculate as a dressage horse. She remembered the merest voice cue, the lightest bit of body language. Once again, her ears twitched towards me, listening to what I wanted. The gentle harmony between us was restored.

I don’t know what it was – the long time off, the awful weather, a testing of the boundaries, a pure moment of high playfulness. I loved it, because it reminded me that she is, after all, descended from storied champions, and all that glorious animating spirit lives in her, however sweetly trained she becomes. There is nothing dull or shut down about her.

I loved it because I knew how to deal with it. In the old days, I would have been frightened, and possibly even grown cross or fractious in my fright, as humans do. Now, I know the good techniques, I know exactly what to do, and more than anything, I know her. I took care to remain away from those bucketing back hooves, but I was not afraid. And with a little steady calm and perseverance, I got my kind girl back. There was no shouting or drama; I let her work it out of her system, and steered her through it. I admit, I felt quite proud of myself.

As always, I log the small things, the tiny, private victories. I made my mother laugh, I wrote a decent line or two for a good charity, I was not fazed by a mighty red mare challenge. The book goes along, and I start to see the shape of it and know the people who inhabit it. Stanley the Dog searches doggedly for mice in the feed shed, only his determined lurcher tail visible, sticking out of the hay. He never actually catches a mouse, but he never gives up trying.

This dreich could bring one down. The atmospheric conditions at the moment make me feel as if I am swimming in a bowl of old soup. Everything is brown and drowned. It is relentless, day after day of low, brooding skies and despairing rain. But there are enough tiny, existential sparkles of light to illuminate my days. On, on, on I bugger, recording my small victories, the ones that are of absolutely no importance to anyone but me, winning my own, tiny, challenge cups of the mind.

No time for pictures today, just a couple of shots from the archive. Hard to believe that this dozy, butter would not melt person can transform herself into a fiery, plunging, snorting creature. It was only for a moment. Just to show she's still got it going on.

Some absolutely pointless Friday questions.

I stand down by the shed, with the red mare’s head on my shoulder, talking of life and complicated families and the odd twists of human psychology. The sun thinks about coming out, and then changes its mind and goes sullenly away. The mare is covered in mud and growing her teddy bear coat for winter. She is content. I love her very much.

I think about the oddities of the things that make one human happy, and the things that make another human sad. I think particularly about the small things. Poor Matthew Parris just wrote an article about what a furious mass of crowd rage he had uncovered when he dared to write something disobliging about UKIP. He is an old school, one-nation Tory, rather courteous and thoughtful, and the intemperance of the Kippers made him despair. Underneath his article, all the furious people came out and were ruder than ever. It’s all ad hominem with them, although they could not see the irony. This fury on the internet gets a lot of press, and there is an odd herd mind which takes hold on message boards. I don’t know why it astonishes me that the readers of those two old grand ladies, the Speccie and the Telegraph, leave by far the rudest comments. They are much more polite over at the Staggers, and much funnier at the Guardian.

I do mind the rudeness very much, but just at the moment I find myself fixated on the absurdities of the unimportant. I really do mind about the absolute lack of spelling and grammar. It’s not just on news sites, where some of the crosser comments use English which looks as if it were randomly selected by a bot. It’s on every forum I visit. Breaks for brakes, should of for should have, you’re for your. I like playing with the language, and will merrily split an infinitive so it damn well stays split. I will rashly end a sentence with a preposition, and sometimes invent new words. (I do not think that wibbly is found in any dictionary, although it is the only satisfactory adjective for the soft lower lip of the glorious mare.) I make typos and sometimes completely forget how to spell.

I know I’m a writer, and it is my job to use the English language. I know that I am a nerd, and it is my obsession. But it’s so easy to write simple, clear English. Anyone can use a full stop, or put a capital letter at the start of a sentence, or understand the apostrophe. I find the trashing of such a beautiful resource almost physically painful.

Once I’ve got onto this hobby horse, and galloped off in all directions in the manner of a Daisy Ashford hero, I become fixated on tiny expressions which drive me batshit nuts in the head. It used to be jargon which had this effect. For no known reason, I grind my teeth every time someone says they are going to grow a business, rather than a pot of mint. Now, it is growing wider than dead management-speak. Today, a government minister said that the world needed to ‘wake up to’ the problem of Ebola, and instead of fretting about a fatal pandemic, which would have been the correct reaction, I grew furious over that unlovely phrase. In a similar manner, I want to throw things every time a person says ‘it’s down to you’. It used to be ‘up to you’. Where did this awful ‘down’ come from? Even Lord Fellowes has smuggled it into Downton Abbey. Don’t even get me started on ‘end of’, or ‘TB’ for thoroughbred, or ‘hun’ as an abbreviation of ‘honey’. They fly like stinging arrows to my idiot mind.

My old dad always said that once you got the irritation there was nothing you could do about it. Some poor hapless person would annoy you in some way, and, after that, they could say nothing right. They could be the nicest person in the world, but every word out of their kind mouths would be nails on the blackboard from then on.

It’s so irrational. How on earth can it matter, when the world is so oppressed, whether someone chooses to say end of, or TB, or use he as the universal pronoun? (I get particularly livid when people do this with horses, as if they are writing off ALL THE MARES.) Talking of generalisations, I find the universal we even more distressing, particularly when it comes to women. We all want to lose half a stone; we all obsess over shoes; we all crave the latest must-have. What is this we of whom you speak? And while I’m on the subject, ‘must-have’ causes me daily offence. It is wrong on about eight different levels.

On the other hand, there are lazy tropes and worn phrases of which I am fond. I rather like ‘back in the day’, which drives one person I love demented. I use ‘old-school’ far too much. Almost every single one of my metaphors has an equine aspect. (There is a lot of galloping, and many, many prairies.) My skies are almost always the colour of some pigeon or other – doleful, despairing, or desperate. Practically everything is dear and old – Scotland, the weather, Blighty, TS Eliot, the hills. I’m always ransacking the most obvious parts of Shakespeare – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the sorrows not in single spies but in battalions, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. When I was editing the manuscript of the book, I found myself shamingly unable to kill all the darlings that should have died. I have developed awful little tics and twitches, and indulge them far too often.

Taste is so odd. Why do I love green but hate yellow? Why does it drive me mad that everyone has started using the redundant So to start every single sentence? Where did my adoration of Scott Fitzgerald come from, when I cannot wear Nabokov? (This is particularly wrong, since Nabokov is supposed to be the ultimate writer’s writer.) Why do I worship Nina Simone, but find myself left cold by Michael Jackson?

Those are my Friday questions.

Now I’m going to watch the racing. It has not only the great beauty of the thoroughbred, but also a glittering language all its own. I love every single racing expression. Racing has a lingua franca which stretches across nationalities and cultures. It is tribal but not exclusive. It is the sound of my childhood, the voice of my father, and it never ceases to thrill me.

 

Still no time for the camera. Just this dear old face:

As I have made the complaint about bad English, the irony gods will ensure that there shall be at least three howlers in this post. I’ve read it through twice, but my eyes have gone squinty. I rely on the Dear Readers to point them out and save me from myself.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are.

The glory of sheep.

Today, I rounded up sheep.

It was mighty.

The red mare and I had gone out for a quiet ride when suddenly, over the brow of a small rise, we came upon a crazy flock of sheep, skittering about in all directions. It was a bit of a Gabriel Oak moment, I must admit.

Without thinking, I went into cowgirl mode. I circled the wheeling flock and brought them into order. On the other side, I saw the old farmer and his two grandsons, one on a quad bike, one with a sheepdog. ‘Which way do you want them to go?’ I shouted, reining the mare this way and that.

The farmers here are three generations. There is the old farmer, who has officially retired, but who, in reality, comes every day to check the ewes. He loves those animals, and casts his wise eye over them to see that all is well, missing nothing. There is the young farmer, who runs the show and works harder than any man I ever met, rising before the dawn and finishing his day in the dark. I have seen him doing the silage at ten-thirty at night, with his tractor lights blazing. Then there are the young boys, the grandsons, learning the ropes, understanding the land, developing those life-long habits of industry and striving.

There are few things I love more than observing knowledge passing down the generations. As I watched this good farming family at work, I felt something real and true stir in me.

The red mare had no such misty thoughts. ‘Excusez-moi,’ she said. ‘I am a racehorse, descended from generations of Derby winners, and you want me to do what?’

‘Bugger this for a game of soldiers,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to the paddock, to my nice, explicable Paint friend, instead of hanging out with these inexplicable sheep.’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘it will be fun.’

By this time, I had a picture of us in my head, all wild and free, galloping across the plains of Wyoming with the wind in our hair, cutting cows like we had been born to it. In reality, we were one extremely duchessy duchess, and one scruffy middle-aged woman, wearing a distressingly mundane crash helmet and smeared spectacles, making absurd whoop whoop git onnnn noises.

Still, dreams die hard.

And for a moment, we were in the green grass of Wyoming, as the mare regally consented, and we cantered alongside the quad bike, the sheep running before us in perfect formation, under the lime trees, across the main road, and up to the long sloping meadow to the west. We damn well were My Friend Flicka.

My friend Jim, who does not have a head filled with green grass fantasy, saw us lope by and laughed so much he practically fell over.

My other friend, the owner of the Paint filly, drew up in her truck. ‘You’ve been doing what?’ she said.

‘Herding sheep,’ I said, as if we did it every day. The red mare snorted, as if to express how far beneath her dignity the whole thing was.

More gales of laughter.

‘I do admit,’ I said, ‘we weren’t exactly asked. The farmer did look slightly surprised.’

The red mare nodded her head, as if to say: who could blame him?

We waved our goodbyes, and went for a little racehorsey gallop to celebrate. Then I got off and walked her home, thinking she deserved the weight off her dear back after all that hard work.

‘You rounded up sheep,’ I told her, out loud. ‘You are a sheep-horse. You contributed something to the community.’

I swear that she almost rolled her eyes at me. Sheep, schmeep, she was clearly thinking.

I’m not sure I ever felt so important in my life. The 2601 words of book I wrote afterwards, even the HorseBack work, could not touch it. Today, it was the sheep that counted. It was something so small and ordinary, it could hardly be seen by the naked eye. It was moving some livestock from one field to another. Yet, in that wonderful moment, I felt we were part of something, doing something useful, stitched into this good Scottish earth. My red duchess may have been the slowest racehorse in the history of the sport of kings, but damn, she can move an ovine. The glow of it fills me still and makes me grin like a loon.

When the news is crazy and the world seems mad and the sorrows fill the pages of the papers, I cling on to the small things as if they are the life-raft which will stop me drowning. As I get older and more bruised, I believe it is in the ordinary that salvation and solace come. When I was young, I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted the marks of worldly success. I wanted to do remarkable things. Now, I think that the greatest fortune and luxury is being able to know and love ordinariness.

Today, the ordinary came in the form of sheep. Take it where you can find it, I think to myself. It may not be everyone’s idea of glory, but for one shining moment, it was mine.

 

Today’s pictures:

You want me to do WHAT??????:

With those?:

Instead of hanging out with my nice dozy friend???:

But you know, if this writing lark does not work out, I think we’ve got a future in herding.

Brick by Brick. Or: of horses and grammar and small things.

As I am taking the red mare to the village on Wednesday for her first visit to the old people’s home, I am spending a lot of extra time working with her, to make sure she is ready for the Great Moment. I am going right back to the foundations, and checking that they are dug deep.

In this remedial horse work, I have been reminded of something very important. It is that it is crucial to get the little things right, so that the big picture becomes a joyful one. If you get sloppy or careless or hubristic, the whole thing cracks and crashes.

Every time you take a step with a horse, you are teaching it something. That is why the small things are so vital. I keep thinking that this must apply to human life too. When I write a book, I do an entire semi-colon edit. I make jokes about this, because it is so absurd and anal. But one punctuation mark in the wrong place can make an entire sentence collapse.

I’ve heard people say that insisting on correct grammar and spelling and punctuation is the elitist howl of the snob and the pedant. Yet language should sing, and it cannot do that if the apostrophe’s are incorrectly placed. (Do you see what I did there?) Prose has a rhythm and syncopation, like music. I listen to it with my ear as well as read it with my eye. Sometimes, I will change one syllable, because it throws the beat off.

Stern, joyless grammar is empty and wrong. Sometimes, an infinitive should damn well stay split. Twisting yourself into a pretzel to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition can be a pointless task, and can deaden the words on the page. I still insist that the general rule of correctness holds. Paradoxically, it is liberating, for the writer and the reader. The reader need not worry that the eye will be arrested, nor fear she will be yanked out of the fictional world by a howler. If the words flow in the right order, and the commas are nicely placed, and the apostrophes do not belong to the grocers, the reader will have the delightful subliminal feeling of comfort and ease that comes from being in safe hands.

For the writer, knowing the foundations are fine and sturdy means that the imagination can fly. If you are constantly stopping to wonder whether that modifier is dangling, or whether this colon is ill-timed, you cannot let yourself canter across the prairies of invention. Only when you know the form can you play with it. Then, confident, you can throw the language of Shakespeare and Milton into the air and watch it fall.

I galloped my red mare this morning, out in the hayfields, on a loose rein, as a reward for all her hard work. I let her go, and boy, did she shift. I could do this because I had run through twenty tiny checks on the ground first, from yielding her hindquarters to lateral flexion. Only when all that was working, and she was sweet and relaxed and responsive to a soft cue, could I let her run. She was confident and I was confident, and we flew over the shorn grass like the swifts that played over our heads.

I talk a lot about the small things, in the context of happiness. If I can love and notice the moss, the trees, the moving clouds, the song of the birds, then I know that I am in a good place. Now I see the small things matter in the context of work and achievement too. Start with the tiny steps, and you can climb to the highest peaks. It’s what Emperor Hadrian said about the building of Rome. Brick by brick, my citizens. Brick by brick.

The love.

I had something good and big for you today. It was a whole human condition thing.

Then the day happened, and life happened, and work happened, and I now have absolutely no idea what it was.

I sometimes teach writing workshops, and one of the things I always tell my students is: carry a notebook with you wherever you go. Have one in the car and by the bed and in your pocket. That brilliant idea, glimmering with promise, will slip away down a back alley if you do not write it down.

Part of the reason I write this blog is because of the voices in my head which yell: write it down, write it down. The older I get, the more I think it is the small things which are important. It is not just the big, gleaming ideas which will get lost; it is the memory of the minuscule things which make a day joyful. I love to record these tiny events, these fleeting, precious moments, so I can look back and sigh and smile and say: yes, yes.

My sweetest of the small things today was, literally, small. The tiniest of the relations appeared, with her smiling mother, to see the red mare. The small relation, the youngest of the great-nieces, was wearing spanking smart gumboots, and rocking a gold sequinned skirt. It was a fabulous look.

‘Are you going somewhere special after this?’ I asked, gazing at the outfit.

‘No,’ said the smiling mother. ‘We just felt like the gold skirt.’

There is something wonderfully kick-up-your-heels about that. Why not damn well wear a gold skirt on an ordinary Monday?

The four of us set off for a walk around the block. The red mare was, as usual, entranced by a creature so tiny, and was at her gentlest and softest. We stopped on the bridge to play Pooh sticks, with the small person trotting joyously back and forth to see her sticks, and the mare delicately sticking her head out over the burn to observe the progress.

When I was young and foolish and certain about everything, I used to be rather jaded about family. Blood was not thicker, I thought. There were friends and interests and an entire globe, teeming with life. I was a citizen of the world. Family seemed rather stuffy and old-hat, and I hated the emphasis on family values with which the government of the day was so obsessed, as if everything else was second-rate and not valuable at all. I would slip the surly bonds and make a new kind of family, out of two sticks and some binder twine.

Now I think that family is a cornerstone. I adore it and appreciate it. Mine is not a neat, meat and potatoes affair. It is diffuse and complex and various. It would not fit nicely on a poster. But oh, oh, the love. And that is all that counts.

 

Today’s pictures:

Horse Talker, World Traveller and the smallest relation, with the red mare doing her dopiest dozy donkey face:

Gathering the sticks:

TRIUMPH!!!:

There they go, off to the sea:

The mare had slightly lost interest by this stage, so I let her have a pick in the long grass:

You do see what I mean about the outfit. The other particularly lovely thing about this small person is that she thinks the world is a perfectly splendid place. That smile has been a fairly permanent fixture, since she was a very small baby: