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.

The ordinary.

Author’s note: I’m all played out today, and I have absolutely no idea whether any of this makes any sense. For some bizarre reason of my own, I’m pressing publish anyway, on the off chance. 

 

500 new words. I’m supposed to be killing darlings, and instead I write a whole new scene. I shall never learn. The book, which I want to make shorter, grows longer by the day. Too many notes, Herr Mozart, too many notes.

And yet, as I read it and re-read it and look for the places where I may plunge in the knife, I find myself liking this curious world I have created, and wanting to stay there. Perhaps it is not such a disaster after all. If the story does not bore me witless, even though I’ve read it now about nine times, perhaps it may not bore others.

I think: ah, the greatest of great British fears. The terror of being a bore.

Outside, there are furious gales and bitter sleet. The horses are all rugged up, with their hay in nets so it will not blow into the next county. We all dream, a little sadly, of spring. The roads to Tomintoul and Glenshee are closed, the snow gates up, and the weather feels unrelenting and heartless. I’m normally fairly good about weather, but today it has battered me into submission.

To cheer myself up, I go to the chemist and have a nice conversation about evolutionary biology.

I come home, finish my work, and attempt to scrape up an interesting or original thought for the blog. I fail.

Should I just forget the whole thing? There is no rule which says there must be words. Actually, there is a great, shouty voice in my head which insists there always must be words. A day without words is a day lost. This is absurd, of course. Yet words are my amulets. Sometimes, even the physical act of tapping at the keyboard, making black marks on a screen where there was only blankness, causes my spirits to rise. Sometimes, my mazy mind is so blurred that it does not quite believe reality exists until it is written down.

Then another voice, a quite stern, matter-of-fact, forgiving one says: this is the whole point. Every day can’t be Doris Day. Every word cannot dazzle. This blog is an ordinary account of the ordinary life of an ordinary female. That is sort of the whole point. It’s not show tunes and jazz hands. In a world of glossy magazines and urgent media and the rush and dash of the internet, ordinariness does not get much press. In my wild youth, I despised it. One must reach for the extraordinary, not settle for the quotidian, the banal, the mundane. Now I am older and more bashed and more inclined to cherish love and trees, I think: perhaps the secret of the whole shooting match is finding the joy in the ordinary. On a day when the Oscars are announced, and all is red carpets and glittering prizes, I’m flying the flag for the usual, the unremarkable – for earth and weather and hay and the red mare and work and green soup and a good dog with a big stick.

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today, on account of the weather. Here are a few shots from sunnier days:

Just as I was finishing this, the Older Brother’s Best Beloved sent me some pictures she had taken with her new lens. I was incredibly touched she took the time. This is one of my favourites. I’d just finished working the mare on the ground and am giving her a gentle scratch of congratulation. She is wearing the expression I love the most – dozy donkey ears, soft eye, mouth as near as dammit to an equine smile. It is not dressage. It is not the Horse of the Year show. It is not winning the Oaks, which is what she was bred for. It is very, very ordinary. And it fills my heart like nothing else.

Weathering the storm.

I was going to do a mighty blog for you today. It was going to be about love and nuance. I had it all in my head, running like tickertape.

Then work took over. We had a ninety-mile-an-hour wind last night, and there are trees felled all over the compound, crashed through walls and fences, lying sadly on the battered ground like wounded giants. Horses hate wind; it gets in the hairs in their ears and they cannot hear, and losing a sense is very alarming for a prey animal. So it was important to work the mare, to steady her. Changing the subject is sometimes the best thing you can do for an equine.

She’d clearly been on mountain lion watch all night, and she was not much interested in me. When I asked her to free-school on the ground, I got two galvanic bucks and the prancing Spanish Riding School of Vienna trot that she puts on when she is at her most racehorsey and duchessy. Do you know that I have the Byerley Turk on my bottom line? she is patently telling me. But I pushed her on through, and suddenly there was my soft, dressage dowager, as polite as a diplomat, as responsive as thought. Afterwards, we stood for a while, as the Older Brother’s Best Beloved took some photographs, and old Posy Posington put on her posh face. I thought what a miracle it is that I can bring this horse back from a storm.

Out in the world, a storm is raging which will not respond to steady groundwork. As the fears and horrors pile up, the arguments are starting, and people who think they know the answer are beginning to shout. That was why I was going to write about nuance. But there was no time. I had other work to do. I started on my HorseBack job, and then worked on a favour for Help for Heroes, who are HorseBack’s great partner and supporter. It was a small thing, just finding some nice archive pictures for them which they want to use on their website. Hours later, I was still mired in the archive. By the time I sent the collection, the light had gone and the day had fled. For a moment, I castigated myself. What about my book? What about my career? What would the agent say? The deadlines grouched and growled at me.

Then I thought: bugger it. I’ll edit over the weekend. That is what being self-employed is all about. Today, I did my amateur work, in the true sense of the word, which has its root in the Latin word for love. It’s just as important. When the world feels as if it is spinning off its axis, perhaps doing something for someone else is one of those minute offerings which can steady it, for a moment. My puny human plan seems very mere in the face of outrage, but all I can do is stick my head down and cling to those small things which mean something to one human heart.

I went down in the indigo gloaming and gave the horses their fragrant hay, and fed them their dense, herby feed, which they lipped with soft, delighted mouths, and settled them for the night. The wind had dropped. All was still. Two contented mares stood again under their favourite tree, instead of out in the open, away from danger. They are sturdy and stoical and entirely present.

It was the first of the storms. Another is tracking its way across the Atlantic, and will hit us tomorrow. The hatches will again be battened down. We must steady the buffs. We shall hold on to the small things.

 

Today’s pictures:

As I went through the archive, I came upon this thing of beauty:

And these are the ones taken by the BB, after work this morning. Soft face:

Posh face:

Well, as posh as she gets in her winter woolliness.

PS. There have been some particularly lovely comments from the Dear Readers in the last few days. Thank you for them. They are very touching.

Weather.

A lunatic storm comes blasting out of the west. It is Chicken Licken weather, with the wind howling so viciously that I keep looking up at the sky, in case it should fall on my head. The clouds are the colour of heartbroken doves, and race from west to east as if pushed by some unseen hand.

It is the kind of weather where looking after the horses becomes a battle. There is no more dreamy Zen contemplation as two hearts become one, but wading through mud and wet, wrenching back banging doors, being on constant alert as two flight animals are ready to fly.

There is an interesting thing I learnt about horses and wind. I used to think it made them flighty because it went under their tails and annoyed them in a purely physical way. In fact, it is their ancestral voices calling. When the wind comes, it mucks about with the tiny hairs inside the ears, so the horses can’t hear. They lose a sense. For a prey animal, this is serious business. They become acutely reliant on sight, so they lift their heads and tense their necks and make constant sweeps of the places where danger may be lurking. It is amazingly atavistic.

The red mare has no time for dozy hellos. She is on MOUNTAIN LION WATCH. She is the lead mare and must protect her charge. The little Paint, rather touchingly, stays close to her big red friend, mirroring her every step. They have gone back into their animal kingdom, where humans are almost an irrelevance.

Yet the funny thing is they do seem to know we are here to help. When the storm first hit, there they were, waiting expectantly at the gate, enquiring looks on their faces, as if to say: what time do you call this? Despite the howling of the wind and the creaking of the trees, they stood stock still so the rugs could go on. The moment the last strap was done up, they were back to constant motion.

I’ve been at my desk for four days, doing a final polish of the manuscript, and I find this elemental work quite galvanising. I wish I were not slightly damp all the time and covered in mud, but I quite like that sense of being out in the wind and the rain, doing things that matter. It is the kind of weather where I go down to the field by moonlight, to check the girls are all right. This feels proper and meaningful. For all that the storm takes them deep into their most visceral horsey selves, they do still need their humans. Everyone likes to be needed.

I’m going to have a couple of days off now, after the last great push. I’ve edited and re-edited an absurd 118,000 words. My plan was to have enchanting long rides and dreamy grooming, but the rain is still lashing down, confining me to barracks, so my slightly tragic geekish treat to myself is to catch up with my two favourite things: old episodes of the Rachel Maddow show, and podcasts of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo and their magnificent film programme. (Should I admit to this sort of thing?)

Then, slowly, slowly, I’ll get the crazed deadline tension out of myself, and I shall start to feel normal again.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from before the rain:

The weather gets wild.

I go to sleep with the gentle sound of Vic Marks in my ear and wake up to nothing. There is only the plucking, howling sound of wind beating its way round the house.

The power is down. I have no way of knowing whether Australia suffered a sudden batting collapse at 3am. (I discover much later that dream did not come true.) I am momentarily confused, deprived of news, as if my sensory receptors are shocked at having nothing to receive. I take my bath by candlelight, which sounds marvellously romantic but is in fact maddening when you have horses to do and books to write and the pressing need to get on.

Down at the field, the door is off the feed shed and the roof felting is flapping in the gale like some crazed bird. The wind has entered the shed, removed items from it, and scattered them over a thirty foot radius. It is actually quite sinister. There are body brushes embedded in the mud as if a sociopath has hurled them there with the force of a thousand furies.

The gales, which I later discover are gusting at up to ninety miles an hour, blow visible sheets of rain in horizontal legions, as if they are marching to war. I look with trepidation at the Wellingtonias, which are rocking about like drunken old sailors on a binge. But I can have no Chicken Licken moment. I have Beloveds to see to.

I hear a distant whinny. Red has taken Autumn the Filly to the farthest corner of the field, the place most precisely distant from all trees and branches and gale hazards, and is standing guard over her. It is rather pitiful seeing her being responsible for only one horse now, when she looked after two with such care. She takes her job as lead mare very, very seriously.

The whinny is almost a question. Is it safe to come in?

I call to her, and she leads Autumn slowly along the long, winding path to the gate. Red rolls her eyes at me, as if to say: ‘You won’t believe the night I’ve had.’

‘I know, old girl,’ I say. ‘Not a wink of sleep, I shouldn’t think.’

Horses hate wind not just because of the obvious reasons – the rush and the noise. They hate it because they cannot hear. It muddles around with the hairs in their ears and screws up their detection systems. They are still prey animals at heart, and if they cannot hear the footfall of the mountain lion over the hill, they become nervy and unsure. The junior horse is fine, because it is not her job to be on the qui vive. The big mare is jumpy and unsettled, looking for reassurance. I give it to her, along with lots of hay and plenty of rations. My spectacles are covered in rain and I can no longer see where the falling trees are going to come from so I just get on with it and trust to luck.

The power cut lasts until lunch. I light candles and cover myself in blankets and read a book. That is all you can do when the electricity fails. Every time it happens, it further amazes me how reliant I am on that invisible spirit running through the wires. I cannot type my book, see the news, cook food, heat the house, or even boil a kettle. The day begins with no coffee. My creaky body cries out in protest.

I think always of how much time must have been spent on mere survival, on the taking care of logistics, in the age before electricity. The chopping of wood, the making of fires, the boiling of water – all would have taken hours of physical labour. Even the lighting of lamps would have been an event, as someone went round the house doing the candles and the lanterns. This does not take us back as far as the nineteenth century; it is not all Jane Austen, who is the one I tend to think of when I am plunged into a pre-technological age. You do not need to go nearly that far. A huge number of rural houses would have been off the grid until well in the 20^th century. How did they function? I am filled with awe at their doughty resolve.

For a moment, I rather despise my modern softness. I’m afraid to admit that I panic when I do not have the internet. So much of my life is there. I resolve to grow more hardy, to get my mindset back to that tough, wood-chopping, water-carrying incarnation of my ancestors. I must teach myself not to wail if I miss the 12.40 at Wincanton. Butch up, I tell myself sternly, and remember your inner steel.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are not awfully good. I managed to snap a few shots in the calm between the two storms:

Hard to believe only yesterday I was cantering up that far slope in vivid sunshine:

Red, on guard, while little Autumn peacefully gets on with her hay:

WIND EAR:

This is the red mare’s stoicism face. Even though she is so finely bred, she’s tough as old boots. She has a huge shelter but she rarely uses it. Even in weather like this, she prefers to be out in the air. I think it is her evolutionary past, singing in her delicate ears. Always be able to move your feet, those ancestral voices tell her. Do not let yourself be confined. What a trooper she is:

The hill, amazingly serene in the wild winds:

 

Ha. I’ve just come back in after writing that. It was tea-time for the horses and extra rations were required. Out came piles and piles of the best hay, placed tenderly in the sheltered spot; out came the extra water, in case the trough should freeze in the night; on went the protective necks which attach to the rugs and keep the girls from getting icicles on their manes. All this was performed in gales which have now dropped to a modest forty miles an hour, with the temperature at zero, and the snow looming over the hills. I am pretty soft, I can’t pretend otherwise. But for the hour of evening stables, when it comes to the wellbeing of my dear equines, it turns out I am like a tough, stompy old farmhand in a Thomas Hardy novel.

And talking of toughness, I take my hat off to the staunch engineer who went out in all that weather, and put the power lines back together again, so that I may be warm and connected again. That was quite a thing to do.

A good day.

The sun shines like a crazy thing. I go out for the first time this year without a coat. In truly inappropriate, not-giving-a-damn fashion, I pitch up at HorseBack in a bright scarlet silk shirt. I’ve no idea why. It seems to suit my mood.

As the weather gentles everything, I feel my shoulders come down. I can get my work done and organise my life without having to be gritted and hunched. This feels like a revelation. It makes me realise that there was an element of battle in getting through that long, bleak winter. Everyone in the village is smiling; everything seems lit with possibility.

I talk at length on the telephone to my very old godfather. I always slightly dread making the call because he is so long in years and so stricken in health and I hear myself making awful platitudinous remarks, which do not cheer or comfort. One must not do the pity voice, but on the other hand, one must be thoughtful and sympathetic. It’s a horrid line to walk and I’m not very good at it. But today, the doughty gentleman, despite being ninety and with three different kinds of hideous illness, is filled with stern stuff and tells me long and antic stories which make me laugh.

He will suddenly say the most extraordinary things. ‘After the war,’ he says, ‘I joined a secret army, Phantom, you know. I was blowing up railways and bridges and that sort of thing.’ Slight pause. ‘I very much enjoyed that.’

When he talks of being staunch in the face of the horrors of old age, he says: ‘Well, I was a Welsh Guardsman, you know.’ The implication being that the Brigade of Guards can face anything, which it probably can.

I am overwhelmed with affection and admiration. I can write this here because he is old school, and does not have a computer, and so will never see these sentences, but I am keenly aware that each conversation I have with him may be the last. I cherish every word.

The Horse Talker and the Remarkable Trainer and I take the filly and the mare out for a ride. (The Trainer walks on foot, dancing about in her athletic, balletic way, taking pictures.) The little filly is immaculate, and Red, in only her rope halter, defies every nasty stereotype about ex-racing thoroughbreds. Without a pause or a shiver, we go past billowing blue tarpaulins, farmyard equipment, a working building yard with all its manifold trucks and diggers, and I have one hand on the rope and a song in my heart. This is a mare who used to shy at shadows on the ground. AND NOW LOOK.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ I yell, in delirium. She wibbles her lower lip and blinks gently at me.

I watched Badminton at the weekend, for the first time in years. It’s an extraordinary level of horsemanship, and those huge cross-country fences are a mighty challenge. But at the same time, there is a lot of stress there, as there is in all competitions, and a lot of kit: martingales and double bridles and all sorts. I feel as proud that my lovely girl will walk out on a loose rope as I would if she were performing those feats of acrobatic daring that I saw on the television. It’s a different kind of achievement, but it is a blue riband nonetheless, even if it exists only in my secret heart.

The lambs are jumping, the sun is shining, Stanley the Dog is laughing. It was A Good Day.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack morning:

The wonderful sheep:

We haven’t had the beech avenue for a while. It amazes me that we are into May, and there is not yet a single green leaf on any of these venerable trees:

Nor on the limes:

But my young apple tree has suddenly sprung to life:

And the honeysuckle has come into leaf, almost overnight:

The Horse Talker with Autumn the Filly:

MR STANLEY HAS A STICK:

I think this face says - don’t you dare try and take it away. Look at the reproachfulness:

My beautiful brilliant girl:

This is what she looks like when she sees me and Minne-the-Mooches over for love. She is amazingly love-orientated. Not that many horses are. Some can take it or leave it; some really prefer to be left alone, like cats. It’s a mere freak of chance that I ended up with a mare who wishes for nothing more than to stand in a field being adored. Since adoring her is all I really want to do:

Update. Or, too tired to blog.

It was a glorious sunny day in the south, but I get atrocious reports of blizzards and ice at home, and now feel rather gloomy about bashing through the weather to my poor old home. Still, still, a dose of the perspective police and a couple of tins of ice-cold Guinness will do the trick, and I shall rise tomorrow filled with purpose.

Back on the road on Wednesday, and shall go very slowly in my shiny and restored little Audi, with its trusty four-wheel drive, which is promised, by the kind people at the garage, to work by then. Thank goodness for Hurricane Fly and Quevega, who between their dear, battling hearts, shall pay for my ridiculously expensive new brake pads.

According to my mother and The Horse Talker, this is the only person on the compound who is cheerful, despite his rather serious face in this shot:

Whilst this normally sweet and biddable ladyship is utterly fed up with the weather and has given in to bouts of grumpiness:

And everyone is covered in mud, and furry white coats are a thing of distant memory: