The Rat Man.

Today, the rat man came.

Thank goodness for the rat man, or I don’t think I’d ever have written this blog again.

I went away on holiday, to the enchanted island of Colonsay, and the sun shone and I saw old and dear friends and Stanley the Dog charmed everyone and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

Then I came home and various things were a bit fraught, so I thought I’d leave the blog for a bit until life settled down.

This was fatal. I started thinking about the blog. The first rule of the blog is NEVER THINK ABOUT THE BLOG.

The moment you start thinking about it, the internal conversation goes something like this:

I’ve got to come back with a bang, because the Dear Readers have been waiting. At which point, the Critical Voices, who are already on their second martini, laugh with so much derision that their hats fall off. Waiting for what? they scoff, wondering whether they should move on to a Gibson.

But, continues the dialogue, the world is getting madder and madder and sadder and sadder and there are huge tragedies unfolding and what price my absurd, tiny life and my flimsy, flaky thoughts in the face of all that? Can I really talk about love and trees and Stan the Man and the perfect cowgirl canter the red mare did this morning, in the face of outrage?

It should have wisdom, says a determined voice, suddenly. That’s the ticket. Rework the whole concept. Every day, give them one paragraph of wisdom. You’ve lived life, you’ve been round the block, you know a thing or two. Be useful.

But I have no wisdom, wails the hopeless voice, who is feeling a bit beleaguered and does not really know how anything works.

The Critical Voices at this stage have gone into a huddle and are bitching about something called a Kardashian.

Might as well give it all up, says the hopeless voice. Nobody needs to know what you think about the world. You have two jobs and three secret projects and a horse and a dog and family obligations. There is no time. There’s no point doing a daily tap dance, saying look at me, look at me.

Then the rat man came. I’d just finished working the mare and she was dozing outside the feed shed. Stan was sunbathing at her feet. The rat man and I talked about rats, and voles, and working dogs, and pointers, and evolutionary biology, and inter-species communication, and trust, and anthropomorphism. If I did not have work to do, I’d be talking to the rat man still. If I had the choice between talking to a rat man or a philosopher, I’d take the rat man every day and twice on Sundays.

And then, I came home and wrote this. Some odd Occam’s Razor had come and slashed its way through the nonsense.

It’s just a thing. Some people are disdainful of it, and that is their right. It hides in its little, poor, obscure corner of the internet, and nobody is obliged to read it. It does not need a reason, or a justification, or a validation. Any daily writing is good discipline; a free exercise of prose helps my fingers and my brain and my muscle memory. It is exactly what it is, no more and no less.

I bless that rat man, and all who sail in him.

 

Today’s pictures:

A small collection from the last couple of weeks:

Queen’s View, near my house:

Stan the Man:

The Younger Brother and me:

The beat of my heart, who, through all my recent grumps and groans, has remained magnificent. I need new words for magnificent:

Rare photograph of all four brothers and sisters together:

Stanley on holiday:

Colonsay:

The right reasons.

Today, I had twenty versions of the blog running round in the mazy corridors of my mind. Some were grumpy, some were confessional, some were, I am ashamed to say, a tiny bit passive aggressive. I have a truly dreadful habit of expressing subliminal anger under the guise of sweet reason. (People sometimes say to me: don’t be so hard on yourself. I agree that pointless lashing is pointless. But I also think one must look one’s flaws in the whites of their eyes and get their measure. And the phoney sweet reason is a flaw that must be stared down.) One was certainly self-indulgent, which will surprise nobody.

Then I had a hard ride. I don’t mean it was difficult, but we were doing some serious work so I had to concentrate. I had to call on all my powers. I was thinking about balance, and softness, and feel. I was very conscious of my body, and my centre of gravity, and letting my physical self go in harmony with the mighty thoroughbred body underneath me. I was in, I think, that wonderful state called flow, where everything drops away, and all that matters is mastering something that is very slightly beyond your capability.

All the stupid things dissipated into the bright air.

There was an authentic, beautiful, funny, clever creature, in a green field starred with clover, being her own true self. That was all that mattered. This time and this place were all that mattered. She really is a mistress of Zen, that mare.

And then my wise old owl voice, which doesn’t often get much of a hearing, because it is steady, and low, and does not shout, said: always do things for the right reasons.

That, my darlings, is my thought for the day. Good old owl. I should listen to him more often.

Embrace the Rain.

I think again about choices. It’s pouring with dreary old rain; the sky is like dirty washing-up water. Even Scotland’s great beauty cannot survive this weather. The place looks defeated and drowned. The field is muddy and filthy and its usual feeling of hidden magic is muted.

I could fight the rain. I could hunch my shoulders and get furious and moan about the horrid Scottish summer. We quite often have summers like this – relentless wet and a paltry ten degrees. Spring and autumn are the seasons of sunshine and beauty. I never understand why people come to Scotland in August; it is our cruellest month.

Even though I know this, I could let it infuriate me. I could think of all those happy people in the south, who have brightness and lightness and reasonable temperatures.

On some days, I do. Today, as I run up and down to the mare to put the rug on, take it off, and then return to put it on again, I decide I am going to take the second choice. I’m going to accept the rain. I’m going to embrace the rain. I put my hat on and make my peace with the fact that I am going to get wet, and that I shall be slightly damp for the rest of the day.

Even as I write that, I laugh to myself. Slightly damp really isn’t the end of the world, is it? If you asked yourself – What is the worst thing that can happen? – and the answer came that you might get slightly damp, you really would think that you could deal with that. In a world of problems, that is a very, very small glitch.

Slightly damp is a killer when it goes along with an existential chorus of other damps. If the sorrows are coming not in single spies but in battalions, and then it rains on top of all that, it can seem as if nothing will ever come to any good. It is a temporal stamp on the passport of despair. Everything has gone to hell, and even the weather is against you.

Today, I’m not doing cartwheels, but I’m not down-hearted. The rain and I are old friends. It is what makes the grass grow and the trees thrive. I would not be without it.

The mare, catching my mood, lifts her head and gives an enchanting whicker, as I go down to put her raincoat back on. Sometimes, when the weather comes, she shuts down and goes into bare-bones survival mode. In that mood, she has little use for humans. I am merely the bringer of hay and the putter-on of rugs. Today, however, she is light and bright. She is pleased to see me. She rests her head on my chest and lets me scratch her sweet spots. I chat to her for a while and she blinks her eyes. When I go to leave, she follows me, so I return and give her some more love. It’s just rain, she says; I’m still here.

PS. Particularly lovely comments yesterday. Thank you so much for them. My secret wish is that, at least once a week, this blog might prove useful. I sometimes laugh at myself for this, and think it grandiose. Sometimes I say to myself: you don’t have to tell them everything. Take a step back, I say; make it light and objective and not so searching and serious. Protect yourself, I say, because revelation makes you vulnerable. But the part that wishes to be useful knows that revelation does the trick, because I think that humans crave communion and connection. Every time a Dear Reader says ‘I’m so glad I’m not the only one’, I feel as if a light has gone on or a happy klaxon has sounded. Conversation is always better if it has an ounce of confession in it. One can build the castle walls and hide behind them and that’s fine, but I think that it is better to take a risk, to lower the drawbridge and come out into the open. Here I am, with all my frailties and flaws, and there you are, too.

PPS. I’m doing a new thing with the pictures, putting them into the post rather than leaving them until the end. Can’t work out if this is better, or worse. Today’s pictures are obviously not of today, because it was too wet for the camera. They are of sunnier times.

In which I am ridiculously interested.

Two of the things I love most in the world are people who are really, really good at their jobs, and people who can talk fascinating talk for sustained amounts of time. Today, I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who combined both.

When I go up to HorseBack for the work I do there, I usually gallop in, have a quick chat, take some photographs, and tear back to my desk. The writing of their Facebook page and the editing and collating of the photographs takes quite a long time, and I do also have a day job, so the whole shooting match is done at a fast clip.

Today, I met a Royal Marine who so was absurdly interesting that I sat in a chair for an hour and a half without blinking. As well as being a Marine, he is a sportsman, a sporting coach, a mathematician, and no mean psychologist. He understands the body, and he understands the mind. He is also a polymath. He was injured, and he was bored with not being able to be an active Marine, so he put himself on a reading programme. I suspect, from what he said, that he was always something of a polymath, but he is now the fully fledged article.

Our conversation did have a point. He wanted to ask me some questions about writing. But it opened out like a flower in springtime, and, before we knew it, we were off to the races. (You can see that I am so excited that I am mixing my metaphors and similes like a crazy horse.)

What I love most about really good talk is that galvanising sense of excitement that comes when you are up against someone who is better than you. You have to raise your game. Every neurone and synapse in my brain was firing on all cylinders. I drew on everything I knew and everything I thought. At the same time, I was concentrating on listening well. This kind of chat can be like a ping-pong match, but if you are too carried away with the balls whistling back and forth over the net, you can miss the good stuff. So for quite long periods, I sat back, opened up my body (I have a theory that body language is important for good listening), rested my zipping mind, and just absorbed all the interesting things the gentleman was saying.

He has a fascinating idea. He thinks everyone has one most telling flaw. Humans are composed of many flaws, but when the spiral comes – some kind of negative behaviour, bad thinking, a cracked plate state of mind – there is usually a definitive trigger which derives from this one most important flaw. If you identify that, he thinks, then you may liberate yourself.

I particularly love this because it goes along with one of the most interesting sentences I ever heard about working with horses. Like so many interesting sentences, it is very simple and very profound at the same time. Ray Hunt, who is the godfather of the horsemanship I follow, would often do clinics with problem horses. He bucks out of nowhere, a horse’s human would say; she bolts out of the blue; he suddenly rears for no reason. Hunt would always ask the same question. ‘What happened before what happened happened?’

It’s so clever because it’s all about listening to your horse, and not blaming externals or superficialities or human projections. Nothing, with a horse, ever comes out of the blue. If you go back and see what happened before the buck or the bolt or the rear, there is your answer, shining with truth. You fix that, not the subsequent behaviour, and all manner of things will be well.

(My mare’s flaw was that she would get in a state, lose confidence in herself, forget her focus, and have no trust in me. So I worked on the trust, and the focus, and made myself into the human she needed, and this built up her own confidence and sense of self, and now we canter round the Scottish fields with me waving my arms in the air. She did not need technical fixes; she needed a profound shift in perception. That is why she can carry herself kindly in a steady gait on a loose rein. Although, having said all that, I see it was not really her flaw, it was mine.)

My interesting gentleman has the same idea about human beings. I love it. When I have finished my work, I am going to look for my defining flaw. I have so many that it shall be like rummaging through the Cupboard of Doom. But I’ll find it. I have my mission, and I choose to accept it.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just time for three today. The Interesting Gentleman, learning to ride Western, and my two raving beauties:

Into every life, a little rain must fall.

It is ten degrees, and the sky is the colour of lost hope. So much water is pouring out of it that I start to suspect that something has gone wrong with nature. It’s the kind of rain that should be a brief storm, it is so intense, but it keeps on rolling, as if it has taken a bet. The hills have disappeared into the smoky cloud, and even the sheep look despairing.

Down in the field, the horses do the stoical, flat thing that they do in the weather. They close in on themselves, and have no use for humans. It is purely atavistic; they are in survival mode. Water lies on the fields, dirty and reproachful, and the two mares stand under their favourite tree, but even its majestic green arms cannot protect them. I bless the new rug technology, but the wet still runs down their dear faces and into their ears. (I laugh a hollow laugh at the vastly expensive shelter I built for the weather. They only use it to get out of the sun and away from the flies.)

I too have rug technology, but despite a laughably ‘waterproof’ coat, a hat and sturdy gumboots, after half an hour the rain has got me. It sneaks down my neck, finds its way down my back, trickles sullenly into those stomping boots. I have to accept the wetness. There is no fighting it.

I gain some small consolation from putting out the sweet-smelling, dry hay and mixing up an extra special breakfast for the poor, drowned girls, rich with meadow chaff and herbs. I stand and talk to them as they eat. They cheer up and come out of their shells and flicker their ears at me, and I leave them a little brighter than when I found them.

All the same, this relentless downpour seeps into my soul and leaves me with a humming spiritual ache. I am generally stoical about the weather, but it’s been so rotten for so long, and everything I own, including my house and my car, has turned into a festival of mud. It knocks over my defences and makes me dwell on the sad things, rather than determinedly looking for the silver linings.

Then, of course, I feel cross with myself, because people have so many burdens to carry, and it’s just a bit of mud and wet. I go to the shop, to get some bread and coffee and ham. I see a mother and daughter. The mother is perhaps fifty, rather elegant and smartly dressed. (I look down ruefully at my filthy jeans.) The daughter is about twenty-five, and has some kind of severe mental impairment. She talks loudly, in the simple language of an infant, and stays very close to her mother.

I look again at the mother, with her bright, put-together surface, and feel a moment of awe. Her child will always be a child. She must have to look after her all the time. I wonder if she ever gets a holiday, or can go away for a day. I think of the enduring and unconditional nature of love, of the battling human heart, which does not quail from difficulty. Perhaps that mother loves that daughter even more, because she was not like the other children in the playground. But all the same, there might have been expectations, hopes, dreams, which had to be adjusted. Humans are very wonderful, I think.

As they leave the shop, the daughter turns around to say something to the lady at the till. The speech is so blurred that I cannot understand it. But the lady at the till, who seems to know the girl well, gets every word and chats back, and laughs. The daughter smiles a smile so dazzling that it lights up the gloomy day.

Never assume, I think.

I think of a woman I know on the internet. One of the things I love about the blog, and about the fine side of social media, is that I make quite profound connections with people I shall probably never meet. When people get sneery about virtual life, as opposed to the vaunted real life, I wonder at how little they know of the internet. The kindness of strangers lives there. Those strangers become known; small redoubts of common interests, thoughts, feelings, sympathies, jokes, generosities are set up.

This woman is dealing, with enormous courage and elegance and grace, with one of the greatest tragedies in life: the slow end of her Best Beloved. She writes about it a little, in brief, potent bulletins of sadness, but she will also write of small pleasures – the beauty of her landscape, the making of a cake, the antics of her chickens. I think of her great grief, and the dauntless bravery with which she faces it.

And all I have to deal with is a wet, gloomy day. I hear the knocking at the door as the Perspective Police demand to be let in. It’s just a little bit of rain.

As I think this, my spirits do not lift straight away. One can know a thing intellectually, and not quite feel it in the gut. I understand that there are people out there, brave men and women, who are fighting battles I can hardly comprehend. I understand that I have very little of which to complain. Yet, the cross voices still persist, shouting defiantly in my ear. They are on a roll, and will not be turned away so easily.

I go out again, into the rain. On days like this, the very land seems drowned, as if the elements have defeated it. I want to take a picture of it, to show the gloom. As I begin to focus the camera, I find not gloom, but beauty. The raindrops dance off the puddles like little firework displays. Tiny beads of water cling to singing green leaves like diamonds. All the greens are so green. If it were not for the rain, I think, there would not be this lush, verdant glory. I imagine the relentless nature of the desert spaces, where rain is hardly known. I think of the people of California, who are running out of water.

I stare at the beauty. There it is, in the small things, on this dark day.

I feel better. The oppression lifts.

I go inside, laughing at my own absurdity. The Beloved Cousin rings up, always a moment for celebration and delight. She makes me laugh more than anyone I know. And England take a wicket.

It’s just a little bit of rain.

 

Today’s pictures:

As I finished this, I thought – I’ll just get on the Google and see if there are any nice poems about rain. The only line I could think of was that enchanting one from ee cummings – ‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’ Which of course is not about rain at all.

The first poem I found was this one. It is by Longfellow:

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Some vague thoughts on niceness.

As well as thinking quite a lot about the small things, I think about the ordinary, unsung traits. I think a lot about niceness and kindness. I don’t think I am an especially kind person, but I try to do nice and kind things. Sometimes, I almost think every choice can be boiled down to picking one of two possibilities: the good or the bad. Are you going to get furious with that Sunday driver and hoot and gesticulate, because your own celerity is so very important, or are you going to smile and let them dawdle for a while? Are you going to be brusque with that poor cold caller, or do your best to understand it’s a shitty job and they are just working off a list, and get out of the conversation with as much grace as you can? Will you rush to judgement, or will you do your best to understand?

The problem with all this is that it sounds so sappy and soppy and utterly pathetic. Niceness and kindness do not make headlines. They are not thrilling or sexy. They are not words which feature in articles about the famous or obituaries for the mighty. (Although, they are sometimes marked. My heart did rather lift when I saw something on the internet the other day about Keanu Reeves being the nicest man in Hollywood.) Columnists are not employed to be nice; quite often they seem chosen entirely because they are so mean.

Being nice and kind is often conflated with weakness. They are the defaults of the mouse, of the doormat, of the pushover. Nice people may be used and abused: oh, yes, she’ll do it; ask him, he never complains.

Yet, in what is often a shouty, rushing world, I sometimes think that choosing niceness is quite a brave, muscular decision. Staunchly standing up for the small, overlooked traits is not the act of a weakling. In some ways, it’s much easier to be jaded and bitchy. You’ll always get a laugh that way. There are very few nice jokes; the sharpest humour often has a low sliver of cruelty in it.

But every time I choose niceness, I feel a little bit better about everything. I can’t always do it. I had some very nasty thoughts this morning, of which I was rather ashamed. They were cross, mean-spirited, finger-pointy thoughts, and they were certainly neither useful nor beautiful. I suppose one cannot be mentally pure or perfect; one has to let off steam sometimes; the badness and sadness of the world is such that every so often one must rant and rave and judge and point and mock or one would run mad.

Yesterday, I had a clear choice. Someone missed an appointment. I was first a little annoyed, then a little disconcerted, and, finally, worried. It was unlike them and I thought suddenly they might be dead in a ditch. I hate waiting for people; it reminds me too much of when my father was late to pick me up from school, and I would sit on the steps after everyone else had left merrily with their respectable parents, whilst I dolefully prayed that my rackety dad might eventually appear. I could have been a bit prickly and terse when the apology and explanation came. I chose, quite deliberately, not to be. Don’t worry about a thing, I wrote; it could not matter less. And, in fact, it could not matter less. I had one hour of mild anxiety and uncertainty. I am not the poor people of Greece. It was an inconvenience so small it could hardly be seen by the naked eye.

These things are a choice, I think. They may not be glittering or remarkable or extraordinary. Each tiny decision leaves hardly a ripple on the sea of life. But perhaps there is something cumulative, internally and externally. If choosing niceness or kindness becomes the default, minuscule increments of something better may accumulate into the absolutely good.

Or something like that.

 

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today as we have thunder and lightning and rainstorms. Here are a few snaps from sunnier days:

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: