A new theory.

1885 words written. Five hours of editing. Horse ridden. Farrier welcomed. Dog walked. Kindness on the internet. Breakfast cooked for mother. Spirited political discussion with stepfather. Admin tragically left undone.

A fairly ordinary, good-ish day, in other words.

I was thinking today about enthusiasm. I am an enthusiast, and because of this I attempt to convince myself it is an unmitigated good. Today I contemplated the possibility it may have a dark side.

This was because, I am ashamed to say, I heard the voice of a very enthusiastic man, so jigging with can-do that I wanted to first punch him in the nose and then lock myself in a darkened room and do nothing for the duration.

How could this be? I am supposed to be a fairly nice person. This poor gentleman had never done me any harm. He was just being enthusiastic, which is something I myself am. Where had this visceral and rather beastly reaction come from?

I remembered my two most hurtful blog critics, one lady and one gentleman. Both of them said, in varying shades of rage – enough with the bloody horse.

The gentleman said it made him sick.

I remember at the time being entirely baffled. She is just a horse, and I love her. What could be more benign than that?

Perhaps it was the unbridled enthusiasm that drew such fury. I wonder if, allowed to gallop about in all directions, it becomes a rudeness, a reproach. I wonder whether it is a narcissism. Look at ME with all my passions and delights, whilst you are stuck in the corner channelling your inner Eeyore. Is it almost a reproach? Does it lack empathy? If someone is in a shitty mood, the last thing they need is a bloody enthusiast, leaping about the seeing the best in everything.

I think of the people who convince me. They are not the evangelists. One fanatical gleam in someone’s eye, and I go cussed and run off in the other direction. A bit of diffidence and self-deprecation, and I am sold. Some uncertainty – I suspect, I guess – and I am caught. I think of the voices on the wireless which entrance me. They are not the fast-talking, loud voices of utter conviction; they are the quiet, slow voices which allow nuance and doubt.

I think: is there sometimes an element of bad manners in enthusiasm?

I don’t want to turn into a stale jade, but I wonder perhaps if the dial might be turned down, for the sake of tender sensibilities.

It’s a new theory and I’m still working on it. I love a new theory.

 

Today’s pictures:

Hmm. Three pictures. Dog, horse and farrier. Three enthusiasms. But at least I did not put JAUNTY CAPTIONS.

Theory and Practice.

A glorious, frigid morning dawns. The mercury hovers at minus three; the sunlight is the colour of honey. I run down to the horses filled with jubilee, because today is the day the Barefoot Trimmer comes.

I love the Barefoot Trimmer because she tells me reams of riveting facts about hooves and horse husbandry and the psychology of the equine. She knows everything, and she shares her knowledge with easy generosity.

I also love her visits because each time we see improvements in the ponies. Red, for instance, is cleverly growing herself a whole lot of new heel action, which has improved the very way she moves and holds herself. ‘You are so brilliant,’ I tell her. ‘You even know how to grow a perfect hoof.’ She nods her head as if to say: shucks, it’s nothing.

As I get down to the paddock, I see a very splendid yellow Labrador. We had caught a glimpse of him yesterday, and remarked on what a perfect specimen he was: fit and compact, with dream confirmation. This morning, he was followed by a very old friend of my sister’s, a woman I have known since I was a little girl.

‘Oh,’ I said in delight. ‘I did not know this was your fellow.’

‘I’ve brought him to see your horses,’ she said, smiling.

She reads the blog, it turns out. It is always a slight surprise when people I know in life come to these pages, and I always feel rather delighted and flattered that they should make the time.

She laughed. ‘I know everything about your life,’ she said.

I showed her the little herd. Luckily, Red was looking at her absolute prettiest, and was duly admired and lauded to the skies. I got my usual feeling of idiot pride.

The Sister’s Friend has not long ago lost her father. She had that translucent look that comes with grief. I remember it so well.

‘You are in the zone,’ I said, nodding, recalling.

So we talked a bit about horses and grief and love. She told me of an extraordinary woman she knew who works with horses and autistic children.

‘She is very, very still,’ she said, of this remarkable person.

‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘That is my great aim. That is what I try for every time I come down here.’

I am not generally still. My brain races and guns like a souped-up engine. Sometimes I wish I had a switch, so I could just turn it off.  But I try and be still with my horses, because they do not respond well to the monkey mind. It’s a good discipline.

For some reason, this meeting and this conversation made me think about theory and practice. I have a lot of very, very good theories. I also have some idiot theories and some undercooked theories and some completely wrong theories. But even when I come up with a dilly, and even when I manage to put it into some kind of practice (small things; love and trees), that’s not all. It’s not as if there is a box one can tick. I can’t say, much as I long to: oh yes, I’ve worked that one out. It’s as if every day one has to start again. I have to remind myself of things I thought I knew. Or, I can know a thing, but not do the thing.

As the two of us talked, I said something like: ‘All the things worth doing in life are hard.’

Sometimes, I long for things to be easy. I want to be able to be blithe and effortless. Ah, yes, I can do that one and that one and that one. I’ve got it all taped. Sometimes, I wish I could skip over the surface of life, accept the deaths and the sorrows and the whole damn condition. But it is not simple, and even something as expected and natural as mourning needs to be worked on, to be done well. (I think it is worth trying to do it well.)

I cannot expect my horses to perform simply because I wish it or imagine it. I have to do the work with them, each day. I cannot assume my dear little rescued fellow will just settle and be happy because he knows I love him. I have to train him and do exercises with him and not expect him to rely on some kind of mythical mind-reading. It is actions which are important, not mere thoughts.

I cannot expect to be able to do life just because I’ve been around for forty-five years, and I had a lot of education, and I ponder things. Every day, I have to remember to translate theory to practice.

As I was thinking some of these thoughts, Stanley the Dog decided to do some full-on man love with the handsome yellow Lab. I really can’t blame him.

‘That’s a bit Auden and Isherwood,’ I said.

After a bit of honest rogering, the dogs stood up on their hind legs, facing each other, and fell to embracing. I’ve never seen a canine do that before. It was very funny, and oddly touching.

‘I’ve always wondered if my chap was in the closet,’ said the lovely woman, drily.

It was a good antidote to all the thinking. Sometimes I can get caught up in the trails of my own theories. Life is earnest, life is real. But sometimes, it’s just two dogs flirting in the snow.

 

Today’s pictures:

View from the horses’ field, looking south west:

Red the Mare, in the astonishing Scottish light, which turns her coat gold:

I’m afraid there are a few of these, because she was so pretty and happy today. This was while I was making her stand, whilst I move away and do other things. It’s a really good exercise, and she is a quick study:

Standing still as a rock, even when something in the middle distance takes her interest:

BLINKY EYES:

With her faithful little friend:

M the P:

In the afternoon, we give them a good brush, and do a bit of work, and then offer them a haynet, for a winter treat. All the time Myfanwy and Red were posing for pictures, Autumn the Filly was just having a damn good eat:

Then they all had a bit of a go, in the dazzling sunshine:

As a hovering mist rolled in:

And, you may observe, bottom right, Mr Stanley doing some very good recall:

The old set aside opposite the paddock is ringed with woods and a burn and a fence, so it is a good place to let him run free and dash about off the lead:

And then we do some very serious sit and stay, as you can see from his earnest expression:

Hill:

As always, when I dash off at length about something, I finish by thinking: not sure that made much sense. Part of the thing of a blog like this is that it is ad hoc. But sometimes I think: shouldn’t I go back and polish it up and see if the thing could cohere, just a little more? But in a way, half the point is that these absurd musings go out into the ether as they are. Warts and all, my lovelies; warts and all.

Everything is edited. Or, I attempt to develop a slightly unformed new theory.

Warning for length, and unfinished nature of theory.

 

I write a small blog for The Lady Magazine. This week, I wrote about having had a rather happy Christmas, and that I suspected it might have been so delightful because I read no so-called lifestyle magazines.

I get cross about the word lifestyle, insisting furiously each time I hear it that I have a life, not a lifestyle. So this year I was quite proud of the fact that I referred to no glossy pages or celebrity recipes or interior designer’s decorating hints, but just made the thing up as I went along.

I developed this into a half-baked theory that the glossy mags can set one up to fail, since life is never as gleaming and perfect as in those pristine pages. I said something like: in my darker moments, I wonder if all these magazines and lifestyle sections only exist to make women sad.

It’s the kind of thing I write. I have a weakness for hyperbole, and I like the exaggerated ironical. It’s more interesting than the sensible middle ground.

The naughty subs at The Lady posted a link on Twitter with the tag line: The world of glossy magazines sets out to make people said, says Tania Kindersley.

This, of course, was not what I said at all, and I was about to blast off a bracing email to the offices in Covent Garden. Then I thought, well, they are trying to create a little controversy here, so let’s see what happens. I had work to do, and they are so nice at The Lady, and really, what could it matter?

No great argument developed, after all that. One woman wrote: DISAGREE. And that was about it.

But it started me thinking. There is a blog I absolutely love, written by one of the first cyberspace friends I made when I started this venture, called Miss Whistle. Miss Whistle is a British-Norwegian countrywoman, with Scottish connections, who now lives in Los Angeles, with an enchanting set of dogs, horses and children. She has a great eye for beauty, and her blog is filled with lovely things – gorgeous recipes, delirious pictures of Dalmatians in Laurel Canyon, snatches of poetry, and her own ravishing writing. (She does profound and beautiful things with prose.)

The other day, I went along to her blog to find a heartbreaking post about the end of her marriage. She has a lot of loveliness in her life, and a lot of sadness too, and she generously shares both of them. But someone, apparently, had accused her of living in a fantasy.

It was an odd thing to say, unkind and unfair, I thought, immediately defensive of my blogger-in-arms. But it brought me circling back to the glossy magazine theme. Magazines exist mostly to sell stuff; they could not survive without their advertisers. They are selling, too, an impossible dream: if only you had this kitchen, or bought these shoes, or applied this miracle cream YOUR LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT. They are edited to smooth out the rough edges, the grey areas, the knotty life questions. Everything is fine and gleaming and glittering. The ordinary woman can feel a little second-rate by comparison to that high, shining perfection.

Amateur blogs do not sell anything. There is a great purity to the good ones. They are a simple expression of one person’s life. But even here, there is editing.

Miss Whistle does not live in a fantasy. One of the things I admire about her is her unflinching honesty. She fills her blog with beauty to lift the soul, not to make people feel inadequate. (My other great blogging friend, Lou at Lou, Boos and Shoes, does a similarly wonderful thing.)

Yet every writer, in every medium, even one as new and loose as blogging, edits. Every decision about which photograph to include, what sentence to write, which emotion to express, is an editorial decision. However honest one is, some things get left out. It is not fantasy, but it is not every inch of the whole truth, with its warts and all. I do not pretend my life is perfect, because that would be wrong and mad, but most of the time I do show you the better side of it.

The regular readers will know that I include occasional black moods, and moments of melancholy, and furious frustrations and small, sometimes self-indulgent wails. But I am careful not to give you too much of that. This is mostly because I do not want to bore or demoralise. This should be a place of escape and entertainment, after all. It is not bloody Dostoevsky.

I choose the photographs particularly carefully. You see Red the Mare and Myfanwy the Pony at their sweetest and best. You get Mr Stanley at his most handsome, in the most flattering light. (Actually, he is so damn suave that he does not need a lighting director.) I ruthlessly delete the pictures of myself looking like a manic bag lady, and concentrate on the ones where I appear most presentable.

I tell you of my successful betting days, not the ones when all my idiot accumulators go south. I mark the high word counts of book, not the mornings when I cannot write fuck on a dusty blind, as my friend the Playwright likes to say. I gloss over the burnt soups, the days when I cannot find a single pair of clean socks, the nasty little puddle of unspeakable brown liquid that mysteriously appears at the bottom of the fridge.

It’s not that I want to show off, exactly, although that was my great childhood weakness. Look at me, doing the tap dance. But I suppose, weakly, pathetically, I want not only to live a good life but for people to think I am living one. I am slightly revolted by this thought, and wish I had the moral fibre to resist it.

I am proud that I do not fall for the glossy magazine fallacy. I know very well that a new frock or a volumising mascara will not transform my existence. Yet in some way, perhaps I make a little glossiness of my very own, right here. Look, look – the beautiful horse, the soaring hill, the ravishing dog, the raging Scottish light. It is as if I am hedging myself about with insurance policies. If I have All This, then everything must be well. If I can show it to you, then you will confirm the wellness: you are my witnesses.

I admit this is, as with so many of my tangled notions, a fledgling theory. There is nothing wrong with a bit of editing, after all. Most humans edit every time they open their mouths, otherwise we would all be the most crashing dullards. I’m not suddenly going to put up the bad photographs, just in the name of authenticity, or talk you through every sinew of my knottier moods. The blog will not be shaken with inner demons or riven with dark thoughts. I do want people to be able to come here for the light.

I just think that, as in all areas of life, one must step with care. It’s not a competition. My hill is not better than your hill, literal or metaphorical. A lot of the best of my days are recorded here, and I am glad for that. I like to be able to look back and remember and smile. It is also a gratitude thing. I have a great good fortune to be surrounded by so much natural beauty, and I don’t ever want to take that for granted.

One of the things I love most about keeping a blog is that, each day, as I take the camera out to forage for images, I must open my eyes. Even on the most dreich morning, I shall find a bit of lichen for you, or some moss, or a fallen leaf. I snuffle for beauty like a truffle hound.

Mostly, you do see the shinier side of it. There are shitty days and muddled days and days when I don’t know what it’s all about. There are days when the hill is lost in the cloud, and I cannot see the light. Mostly, those are the days that hit the cutting room floor, and that is probably where they belong. But they do exist. I cannot edit them out altogether, however much I might wish to try.

 

Today’s pictures, edited as all get out:

My mother has a fenced garden, where I may let Mr Stanley off the lead and watch him run free. He has the most glorious action, from his greyhound side, and when he drops his belly to the ground and goes flat out, it’s like watching Frankel in his pomp:

My lovely Red:

This slightly wistful look kills me. You might think it was because she was contemplating the Universal Why. In fact, she is wondering why I am making her wait for her food:

Sometimes, in her role as boss mare, she leads the little pony round the field in Indian file. I find it oddly touching:

The hill:

Reading through this now, my finger hovering over the publish button, I think: this is a load of absolute nonsense. I am just meandering about all over the place, making no good coherent argument at all. I stare beadily at the delete button. But I’ve got to go and do the horses, and I have no time to start all over again. And perhaps a bit of a goofy, wandering, unformed theory is in the good spirit of imperfection. So, off it goes into the ether, to live or die.

Yet another half-baked theory. Or, too much thinking.

The problem with being a geek is that you think too much. Or rather, I think too much. (It’s always very tempting when admitting something personal to resort to the generic You.)

I went back to HorseBack this morning as there were still some notes I needed to take and some questions I needed to ask. I feel a bit awkward and intrusive asking veterans questions, but they are gracious and honest and funny in their replies, leavening seriousness with the humour that is found anywhere a soldier or ex-soldier is. Britons always rely on humour, especially when matters grow grave; earnestness is one of our great national sins. Military Britons, I notice, use it even more than the civilian population, if such a thing is possible.

Everywhere I look, whether it is with the people who work there, the horses, the visitors who come to observe, the servicemen and women, both active and retired, who come to take the courses, there is interest. I am so damn interested I don’t know what my name is. It’s part of the reason I want to write about it. My endless temptation is to widen everything out: all must feed into the human condition, my favourite subject. At one point, as the sun shines down over the timeless Scottish hills, I even find myself talking, like an absolute idiot, about Jung. (The person I am talking to politely tries not to look too horrified.)

It’s something I do in writing too. There must be text, and subtext, and parallels and ramifications; there must be metaphor and symbolism. Part of the reason I like coming back to having a horse after so many years is how fascinating they are, and how riveting the intricacies of the inter-species communion.

But sometimes, the thing is just the thing. I wonder if the danger is that I wander into the mazy realms of theory and conjecture, and miss the heart of the matter. For some strange reason, I believe that thought can solve everything; it is my touchstone. (All that damn education I had, surely it must keep me safe from the slings and arrows, goes the paradoxically magical part of my brain.) Yet, the really great horsemen and women often run on instinct. They are interested, of course they are, but when they are most successful they go with the gut, not the head. Life, horses, humans - all sometimes just are what they are, and thinking too much about the whole shooting match can miss the point.

That’s my new theory of the day. I’m not at all sure it is right, but I’m going to test it for bugs. I shan’t be able to train myself out of my geekish instincts overnight, but a little middle ground might be restful, if nothing else. The human instinct is a great gift; over-thinking can mess and muddy those clear waters.

 

Today’s pictures:

Up at Red’s View first thing, I did not have to think at all, I could just look at the wild Scottish sky:

Down the road at HorseBack UK, there was the usual dose of loveliness. Gus the foal, with the hangars of the Deeside Gliding Club in the background:

Jack the Shetland:

Being wrangled, Western-style:

Watched, with fascination, by the Sporting Gentlemen:

Meanwhile, over in the other arena, some very elegant groundwork was going on:

Red the Mare, who knows bugger all about Jung, but is happy as long as she has food, water, a view to look at, and a damn good daily scratch on her sweet spot:

This is her Minnie the Moocher have you got a treat in your pocket approach:

Answer is of course yes, but only of the very healthy, meadow herb, non-sugary variety.

The chicken seems happy too, and very bonny today:

Myfanwy the Pony is content, now the bad weather has passed:

(Getting quite muddy and woolly for winter.)

And The Pigeon is always happy, having the sunniest disposition in the world:

And now all I have to think about is whether the lovely filly Certify can win the next at Newmarket. Fingers crossed.