The trees.

Last night, I had a dream. I did not dream I went to Manderley again but that I was chatting to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. (I know that people who tell you their dreams are among the biggest crashers on earth, so I’ll keep this brief.) He was talking about crooked vegetables, which is what he is currently talking about in real life, and then he looked at me and said ‘As for the mixed messages which women have to deal with...’ He rolled his eyes as if in actual pain. And I threw my arms round him in amazed delight and said ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ve been living with cognitive dissonance all my life. I didn’t think that men really understood.’

The swanky part of me is quite chuffed that I use expressions like cognitive dissonance even in dreams. The critical part is quite cross that in my sleeping hours I give in to broad generalisation. (I am perfectly certain that there are men who do understand.)

I am not going to bang the lady drum but I did think a bit this morning about the societal expectations of women and how amazingly confused and contradictory they are and how one just gets used to it, as background noise. I am not sure why I dreamed about that, but perhaps it is too that there are societal expectations about death and grief and those hum along in the back of the mind.

One must be stoical, but not too stoical; let it out, but don’t frighten the horses. One must feel it, but not make a drama. One must move on, but not too soon. One must honour the dear departed, but not be morbid. One must share with the group, but not too much. Even as I try to face this damn thing in the whites of its eyes, and as I do that by writing about it, there is a little voice in the back of my head which says: ‘Quick, quick, make a joke.’ One must be solemn, but not serious. Or is it the other way round?

Even as my kindest, most sane voice says there are no rules for grief, that even those famous seven stages or however many there are come packed with caveats, that one must surf it free-style as if it were a wild wave, those humming, chattering voices of the culture cannot be entirely banished. I do not live in a vacuum. I am part of the world. In my more self-regarding moments, I like to think I am a perfect maverick, like my old dad who did not know who made the rules and did not care. But that’s not quite true. I have to work hard to be true to myself. Even at such a time as this, the horrid word ‘should’ sometimes echoes through the mazy corridors of my mind.

Jung said every person that humans dream of represents a part of themselves. I am quite glad that I am in touch with my inner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He is not hidebound by rules or expectations; he is a man of the earth and he believes in real food and he hates waste, just like my mother did. I find odd comfort in this thought.

Today, the sun shone again, and I went and stared at the trees. Stanley the Manly found the biggest stick in the wood and was quite sad when we had to go and I said it would not fit in the car. He gave it one last, tragic look, and left it on the ground. I said, absurdly, out loud: ‘We’ll come back and play with it again tomorrow.’

I salute everyone who can photograph trees well. It’s my second most difficult subject, after horses at the races, which are completely impossible. I thought of all those photographers who have mastered these two subjects and felt profound admiration.

I am so lucky to have these trees. I think every day that I don’t know what I would have done without my mares. I don’t know what I would have done without the trees either. Everyone has their thing. The trees are my thing.

After the trees, I drove up and looked at the hills. They looked back at me, serene and secure in their magnificence. I tried giving Mum to them, but they gave her back. She’s not ready to go out there yet. She’s going to stay with me.

 

Today’s pictures:

When you look at these pictures, you have to imagine the beauty times a hundred. I can’t capture it with my puny eye. But this gives you a little glimpse of the loveliness:

Love and trees.

As the irrational anger stage flickers in and out like a faulty electrical current, there is also a flat stoicism. Get on, do life, don’t make a fuss. Mum left quite strict instructions that she did not want a fuss. (She meant with funeral arrangements and such, but I am taking her words to a wider stage.) So I am goodly not making one.

Quite a lot of people do not know. That’s always the odd thing when someone you love very much dies. The damn world goes on, and ordinary people go on doing ordinary things, and other humans talk to you just as if everything is rational and explicable, just as if there has not been a tear in the space-time continuum. That can cause little spurts of wild rage. Don’t you know what happened? one wants to shout, unfairly. Can’t you tell that there’s a reason my hair is bonkers and I’m wearing my maddest hat and I’m the colour of parchment? At the same time, the stoical, getting on with it self is almost glad, because one can talk of something other than death. The ordinary is soothing, and yet infuriating. It’s all very confusing.

Then there are the unexpected things that tear through the resolute, storm the defences, and break the siege. Today, it was the enchanting gentleman who helped create my mother’s garden. She made such a beautiful garden, and this fine man, who once farmed sheep and knows the land and loves it as I do, put into action all her dreams and ideas. He is a real man of the earth, and a proper human being.

I wanted to thank him.

‘She loved this garden so much, and you worked so hard, and I know how much that meant to her,’ I said, as we looked out through the mist and dreich.

The garden is a little sad at the moment, as it always is at this time of year, but the last of the white roses still lift their brave heads. The garden is in mourning too. As I thanked the kind man, my voice broke and I had to walk away. I did not need to explain. He knew.

The people who know, in every sense of the word, are the finest balm. A very old friend, someone I have known and loved since I was nineteen years old, writes all the way from India. He lost his mother last year, so he knows. Oh, he knows. And he knows me, even though we have gone into very different lives and only lay eyes on each other every year or so. The friendship, dug deep in our formative years, endures time and distance. His words are so perfect, so shimmering with love and truth, so brave and human and funny and dear, that I want to send him flowers.

Another beloved friend, who has also lost both his parents, writes: ‘It is as if a great oak has disappeared from your personal landscape.’ How clever he is, I think. How glorious that he knew the very sentence to write, the one that would make most sense to my addled mind and my battered heart. That is just it. A great oak has gone.

I always mourn fallen trees. We lose some each year in the winter storms. Only yesterday, I saw my neighbour chopping up a chestnut which fell to the first October gale, and felt a sharp melancholy. I always think of downed trees as mighty fallen giants, slain on some mythical battlefield.

Oaks are not common in this part of Scotland, but we have some magnificent ones. There are a few down by the red mare’s field, and a lovely plantation at the end of my mother’s garden. When my brother-in-law’s own mother was very young, she was instructed by stern forestry officials to cut the buggers down. She must be sensible, and plant commercial forestry, like all canny Scots do. She defied the stern men, most of whom were twice her age, and kept her oaks, and they live on, a great memorial to her.

In my world, everything comes back to love and trees.

 

Today’s pictures:

I must find some pictures of trees, I thought, as I finished writing this. But I’ve never been good at taking photographs of trees. I have snapped away at my favourite beauties, only to look at the results with a dying fall. Something about the flat dimensions of a photograph robs them of their majesty; they look oddly bathetic. Then, like a present or a shooting star or a ray of sunshine after the rain, I saw that I had captured the trees. There they were, staunchly in the background, as I had been taking a picture of Stanley the Dog, or my lovely mares, or the dear old sheep whom I adore so much. They were not centre stage, but they were there. These are the trees who people my days and never fail to make me count every damn blessing I have. Not everyone gets to see such beautiful trees. I do not take that good fortune for granted.

That is one of the old oaks, in the background:

A little rowan I planted in my own garden:

The woods I see every day:

The hill that brought me to Scotland (I fell in love with it as you fall in love with a person, and never went south again), with its fine fringe of trees:

The ones that keep the sheep sheltered from the wind:

One of my favourite mixtures of old planting and new planting:

More sheep, because you can never have too many sheep:

The avenue that leads to my mother’s house:

And her roses:

In which I come back to love and trees. And get a bit Christmassy.

The snow is coming in over the hills. I can smell it in the air. The red mare has to forgo her spa day doing mud packs as the rug goes back on and the extra hay goes out. Stanley the Dog is feeling very festive, hunting rats and selecting absolutely enormous sticks. My mother and I have laid plans and made lists. The lovely Stepfather goes out to get Marsala for the gravy.

In the village, I see people I know and stop to talk. ‘The snow is coming,’ we say gravely. I buy two final presents and indulge myself in a little Christmas posy of red roses and eucalyptus. The ladies in the flower shop are rushed off their feet, but their blazing smiles never falter. In the general store, I have an excellent conversation about the King George with my racing friend. As do all racing fans at this time of year, we secretly quite wish Christmas Day would get on with it so that we can open the real Christmas cracker, which is the card at Kempton on Boxing Day. It is packed with shining stars, and our eyes light with anticipation at the very thought.

People are kissing old friends and wishing them happy Christmas. ‘Happy Christmas, happy Christmas,’ I say to every single person I see, even complete strangers. Without knowing it, I suddenly got Christmassy. Perhaps because I gave myself permission not to force the jollity, it came flying in of its own accord, like the snow.

I’ve been quite disorganised, and the godchildren are going to have to have New Year presents instead of Christmas ones, and I never got around to anything like sending cards, but it does not matter. The house looks pretty and smells gently of greenery, the animals are happy, the presents are wrapped, my HorseBack work is done, and I’ve even had a little ante-post wager on my dear Silviniaco Conti. I’m hopeful, as long as the ground does not get too quick. I have a fridge full of treat food, and lots of watercress for health and strength. I need the iron. My little community is filled with a generous spirit.

Yesterday, my friend the Political Operative rang up and we spent a whole hour having a joyful post-mortem on the party I went south for. (One of the Dear Readers asked what I was writing thank you letters for; it was that.) We both agreed that the greatest delight was seeing so many of the old compadres looking so happy and well. The party was given by one of our university friends, so it was filled with people we have known and loved for thirty years. All of us have had our downs and ups, our moments of glad grace and our broken hearts. We have got to the age when many of us have had lost one or both of our parents. There has been triumph, but there has been tragedy too. Life has taken us out behind the bike shed on occasion. But there was a real sense of coming through at that fond gathering, as if, despite being a bit bashed round the edges, we were still holding our heads high. We were buggering on.

‘And,’ said the Political Operative, laughing, ‘as long as you and I can still dance together, everything will be all right.’ I smiled into the telephone. ‘I can still throw some shapes, baby,’ I said, in my most ironical voice.

He and I first danced together in a garden in Chelsea in the 1980s. And here we are, looking sternly at fifty, dancing still. There is something streamingly lovely in that.

I wrote a post last week for HorseBack about how, for some people, this is not a season of jingle bells and joy, but a time of sorrow and loneliness. When it seems that the whole world is celebrating and shopping and cooking and decking the halls, a heavy heart can be a devastating and isolating thing. It can be a time when memories are not ones of friendship and love, but of pain and loss.

I am keenly aware of how lucky I am, in this beautiful, peaceful place, to have so many loves. I count that blessing every single day, but perhaps today most of all.

I hope, my dear Dear Readers, that you have love. It’s the only damn thing that counts.

And trees, too, of course. Love and trees.

That really is all she wrote.

 

Today’s pictures:

I did take some lovely shots of the red mare, dreaming under the Wellingtonias, but I left the camera in the feed shed so here are pictures from the archive instead:

This land

Warning: crazed insomnia last night, so there is a very real danger none of this may make any sense at all.

 

I read something today about how humans miss the natural world without even knowing what it is they lack. Most people in Britain live in cities or towns. Cities are glorious, thrilling things. I think they are good things, because they must surely decrease fear of The Other. The Other is there every day, in the streets, on the tube, waiting for the bus. Insularity must be more difficult, in that great melting pot. And there is culture and entertainment and architecture and all the other sophisticated pleasures of which city life is made. When I lived in London, I loved her like a sister. I used to refuse invitations to go away for the weekend because I wanted to mooch about in the sunny streets of Soho, or go to a double bill at The Electric. I wanted smoke and pavements.

People still think it mildly eccentric that I should live so far north, so deep in the hills, at such a distance from the theatre and good Chinese food. But I’ve been thinking about the whole love and trees thing (and love of trees), which is probably why the article on missing the earth caught my eye.

I struggle, as does every sentient human in the middle of life, with all kinds of frets, profound and superficial. I battle with mortality. I worry about all the usual things: money, death, illness, work. I feel the mid-life regret at the scattering of friends. Some live very far away, across wide oceans. Some are only in the south, but might as well be in Ulan Bator. It’s logistically demanding to get a family of four onto an aeroplane to Aberdeen for the weekend. We rely on the fact that we can pick up where we left off, because we have twenty years of hinterland behind us. But still, I miss them.

And yet, for all the frets, I am mostly cheerful. I am occasionally haunted by the spectres of loss, but I do not wake every morning with the black dog of despair snapping at my heels. I read something lately too about depression, the proper kind, not the mild down-in-the-mouth to which people sometimes carelessly apply the word. This was about the real thing, the kind that makes the sufferer feel as if they are in a dank, slimy pit and may never climb out. I feel incredibly blessed that I do not have to crawl out of that pit. Even among all the worries and fears, I find daily joy. I laugh a lot, often at myself. I have a lot of love. I love my mare, I love my family, I love my dog.

I wonder, suddenly, whether this oddly cheery resilience is lent to me by the place itself. I know I bang on about the hills, but it does lift the spirit to see them each day. I regard green things, growing things, ancient earthed things. On Saturday night I sat outside under a venerable stand of oaks and ate sausages and drank beer. It was the glorious trees that gave the evening its savour. I walk on grass and smell clean air. I hear birdsong. I watch the swallows fling and play, as they teach their young ones the mastery of aerodynamics. I stare at lichen and dry stone walls and bark. I happily observe the sheep.

Everyone, even the most fortunate human, needs a little help. Life is baffling and inexplicable and sorrows are inevitable. No one may insulate themselves from loss and heartache. Everyone needs an existential walking stick, to negotiate the rocky paths. I think this dear old land is my stick. Perhaps that is why I show you the daily pictures of it. Look, look, I am saying: this is what saves me.

I think far too much, always have. This is a good thing, and a bad thing. Too much thinking can lead to despair. There are too many unfairnesses, tragedies, inexplicable cruelties, for one paltry mind to reconcile. Love and trees, my darlings, love and trees. And hills and sheep. And Stanley and Red, out in the gentle Scottish air, where they may stretch and play and become one with the majestic landscape they inhabit.

 

Today’s pictures are a little selection from the past few days. No time for the camera today. I’ve been doing actual work, 1648 words of it. Something, as always, has to give.

In random order:

A little Sunday parable; or, the woods are dark and deep.

Now, this one most certainly is a parable. Or at least, it is in the mazy halls of my own mind.

This morning, I walked the mare up into the Terrifying Wood.

At this point, you have to imagine timpani drums and flights of trumpets.

You see, the Terrifying Wood had become a bogey. I am ashamed of having bogeys, so I did not speak of it. I do not get stopped in my tracks by a bit of sloping timber, oh no. I cannot possibly admit to such craven weakness.

In fact, the last time we went there, many weeks ago, Red had a proper, cinematic wig-out. Up in the air with hooves pawing the vacancy; all we needed was John Wayne and Champion the Wonder Horse and we would have had a party.

She has done this three times since I’ve had her. I put it down to the fact that she had never done anything in life on her own. Racehorses and polo ponies work in great strings, and she found strange places without the comfort of companions properly frightening.

I put it down to all sorts of things. At one point, I convinced myself that she was having acid flashbacks to the starting stalls of her hectic youth.

But really, the dark voice in my head was saying it was my fault. I was not up to it; I was not a good enough horsewoman. How the real experts would laugh and mock.

Lately, all the time and patience has paid off. All that groundwork, all those cold mornings, all those hours of concentration. The bond of trust is forged. It goes to my new theory which is: it takes a year. Maybe there are people who can get a new horse and do anything with it after three weeks. I am not of that cohort.

Anyway, today it was lovely and sunny and I had decided to do no work, so I had all the time in the world. Red’s bruised foot is still faintly tender, so we were going for another amble on the lead rope. A kind man has cut us a lovely grassy track through the wilderness, all the way round the set-aside and past the far paddock rail and over the old granite bridge, and into the Terrifying Wood. I was just following it, admiring the delightful new facility, where we would be able to canter, when I reached the bridge, and thought: oh, well, why not?

The wood has alarmed me for a long time. The trees are so dense that hardly any light can penetrate. It has all the spookiness of the old-time fairy tales, and is exactly the kind of place one might find goblins and sociopaths. (All this runs through my head, despite my daily battle against magical thinking.) Even before the mare, I never went there. But it is the way out to the great riding places; once over the hill, you find miles of forestry tracks, snaking north. Despite the fact that Red had freaked out last time we went there and I am not so keen on it myself, we would have to master it eventually.

Because we just came, without plan, to the threshold, following the new track, it was not a thing. I did not wake up this morning and decide to conquer all my fears. It was just there, and I looked at my dozy girl and said: come on, then. And up we went, into the dim cool, where the shadows moved and played and the world was silent, as if someone had thrown a switch.

And the wonderful thing was that it was not frightening at all. Red moved easily by my side, not even lifting her head when Autumn the Filly, missing her lead mare, started yelling from the field below. Stanley the Dog waltzed about, picking up scents. Even when he buggered off on the the hot trail of some deer or pheasant or rabbit, callously leaving me to the mercy of the forest psychos, there was nothing to fear. The mare and I inhabited the wood, so that it was no longer a place of dark imaginings, but a benign, delightful Eden. There were carpets of pine needles on the good earth and blue wildflowers bending their elegant heads. Shafts of sunlight lit the close trees and the quiet spread out like a benediction.

All this time, I thought, watching my happy horse pick at the thick green grass, I was looking up at this crowded slope and thinking of it as a great and daunting obstacle. And now it was an enchanted glade.

Well, it feels like a parable to me.

 

Today’s pictures:

I’m always banging on about love and trees, but I don’t take that many pictures of the trees. Trees drive me nuts, because they look so majestic and filled with awe in life, but on camera, they lose all their beauty. If I take a photograph of a great beech or a mighty oak, it comes out flat and dull, for some reason. But since today is all about trees, I thought that some photographic tribute was called for.

These are rather bark and lichen heavy, because the best way I can capture the loveliness is to go in close:

The Terrifying Wood:

And the happy herd:

I love this face. This is the look she gives me when I am leaving. As if to say: you’re not really going? Not when I look this adorable?:

Mr Stanley the Dog, who had a high old time:

The hill: