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 want to be horrid and decide to be nice.

I was going to do something perfectly horrid today.

Yesterday, two things occurred to upset me. Both were very small, hardly visible to the naked eye, but they left me wounded and unsettled. As I swung into my usual tired old technique of calling in the Perspective Police and talking myself down off the ceiling, I hit on the solution. I would use words. Apart from love and trees, words are my solution to everything. Write it down, write it down, sing the voices in my head.

So, I wrote it down.

It was quite late at night, and I wrote it as a blog. I did not name the people involved, and I believed I was bending over backwards to be fair and not to impute beastly motives where there were none.

In fact, I had to admit to myself this morning, I was indulging in a perfect festival of passive aggression. I was still so sore as I wrote that I was doing that ghastly thing of seeming reasonable, when, in fact, underneath, the six-year-old in me was wailing: BLOODY PEOPLE, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SAY SOMETHING NICE?????

Even as I faced the twisted motives behind my apparently rational post, I raced around like a rat in a trap, trying to work out a way of not being passive aggressive, but still telling you the story of what had happened.

But here is the thing. Even if I worked out a way of taking the heat out of it, keeping it as vague and anonymous as possible, putting on my rational, disinterested hat, I was still flailing about, trying to punish because I had been hurt. I was not disinterested; I had skin in the game, and that skin was singed.

Fuck it, I thought. Be a grown-up. Be a decent human being. Adult humans get hurt all the time, take it on the chin, refuse to turn the thing into a three act opera, and, most of all, do not feel the need to tell everyone on the internet.

Adult humans also make choices.

I am not nearly as nice as I think I am. I really would like to be nice, an adjective I do not disdain but crave. I am capable of niceness, but I can think some unbelievably crushing and uncharitable and mean thoughts. I like to think that I don’t judge or harbour prejudices or indulge in ad hominem attacks, but when my skin is thin I can bitch someone up to beat the band.

However, in a slightly hello clouds, hello sky way, I do aspire to niceness. I really admire nice people, because I think it’s a fairly hard state to maintain in a very shouty world.

Today, I had a proper choice. I could be a passive aggressive horror show, OR I could be nice. I chose niceness.

I spent four hours doing things which were not for me. Several people have asked me for photographs of the last few days at HorseBack. My usual response is: yes, yes, of course, just let me find a moment, give me a few days, it’s all a bit chaotic, I’ll get back to you. Then, I don’t get back, because I’m sitting at my desk panicking about the two absurd books I am writing and being entirely unable to make the time to do anything else.

Today, I made the time. The whole process takes ages, because of course I can’t just whack a few snaps into a Dropbox album and send them off, but have to edit and re-edit, choose all the best ones, then change my mind and choose other ones, make manic decisions about whether I should saturate the colour or put them into black and white, crop and re-crop and I don’t know what. I’m not a good enough photographer to take a picture and let it be; it must be doctored. These were lovely people, and I wanted them to have photographs worth of them.

I started at three-thirty this afternoon, and I’ve only just finished. There are ninety-nine pictures which are now fit for public consumption.

I’m still a bit bruised from yesterday, and I’m taut as a violin string from a day of non-stop work. I did not even ride the mare this morning, but merely gave her love and food and went back to my book. (The agent is not yet quite happy, so I am still polishing and rubbing and shining, like an out-of-control fifties housewife who has lost her valium.) But I’m really, really pleased that I decided on a constructive act instead of a destructive one.

God, I wanted to be horrid. I was so cross I wanted to tear the buggery house down. But I built a little shack instead. I did the photograph albums, and they are downloading now and will soon wing their way off to their recipients. I don’t always manage it, but however wet and weedy it sounds, today, I chose niceness.

 

Today’s pictures:

Here are some of the photographs I sent out into the ether:

A lot of these pictures were for Robert Gonzales and his lovely wife Patricia. Robert, as the Dear Readers will know, is the great horseman who was visiting us from California. I learnt more about horses in three weeks of watching him than I could put into words, and I know a lot about words.

He is not only a fine horseman, he is a great gentleman too. He would not write something beastly mean on the internet, under the guise of being rational and reasonable. I should think of his example.

In the last picture, he is waiting for the horse to soften. He can do this for half an hour at a time, as long as it takes. ‘Wait for the softness,’ he says. ‘Look for the softness. Let them find the softness.’

I can learn from that too. It’s not just for the horses. It’s for the poor old humans too. Next time I get bent out of shape, I’m going to wait. For the softness.

 

Oh, and PS. To the Dear Reader who said nobody needed my permission, you are quite right. I phrased it poorly, and have been filled with angst that I sounded like some ghastly, wafty, de haut en bas creature. What I should have said is that I often need permission. When a best beloved admits to faults or doubts or muddles or confusions, I find this enables me to confess my own inadequacies without terror. I need a permit; I need my passport stamped.

I’m working on this. One day I shall cross the border without passport control. I’ll hang out more damn flags on that glorious day.

In the meantime, I’m sorry for the confusion. It’s the kind of mistake that fills me with rue.

No words.

I was going to write you a whole blog about why words matter, but then I decided not to. I’ve been editing all day and my brain is gradually turning to mush and it’s minus four outside and I didn’t sleep very well last night.

Besides, you all know that words matter.

Mr Bobby Jindal sadly had to find that out the hard way, when he tweeted ‘Your welcome’ instead of ‘You’re welcome’, to hysterical and pitiless Twitter derision.

Sometimes, words matter when you least expect them to. I had to write a condolence letter not long ago, to someone I love very much. I always feel that scratches on the page are paltry things, in the face of death. But I bashed on, trying to avoid platitudes, trying to put my heart into my pen. The reply came back today. The words, amazingly, had mattered, even though I feared none of them were the right ones. (What can one say? Really?) I felt the old communion, running between old friends, who do not see each other often enough, but who may still send out little arrows of affection, small balm to shattered spirits. That does matter.

Tiny words mattered this morning, in the arctic chill, from a tiny person. The smallest of the great-nieces had come down to see the red mare. She was defying the weather and wearing her special gold-sequinned party skirt. I know no other human who can get away with gold sequins whilst standing in a snowy paddock. She insists on choosing her own clothes, even though she is only three.

She regarded the mare for a long time, and held out a little hand to stroke the soft muzzle. The mare went still and gentle, as she always does with children, whom she adores. (A lot of thoroughbreds love children, I never quite know why. It’s very touching.)

The small person went on regarding, pondering, observing. The mare snuffled through her nostrils and whickered. The great-niece rang out peals of delighted laughter. ‘She’s so funny,’ she said.

That pretty much made my day.

Then the great-niece told me, very seriously: ‘Rabbits eat carrots so they can see in the dark.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, gravely. ‘That is excellent information.’

Well, it turns out that I did have a few words after all. And now, here are some pictures for you, selected at random from the archive:

 

A good day.

Today, I gave everything I had to HorseBack, and I have hardly anything left for you. I’m very sorry about that.

It was a fabulous day, on about eighteen different levels, and I stretched every sinew. It sometimes strikes me as curious that this voluntary job is the hardest writing I ever do. I have to pay tribute to extraordinary human beings, without falling into whimsy, or sentimentality, or hyperbole. I have to remember always the power of the simple declarative sentence. I have to try to translate experiences which are on the very edge of my imagination. Imagination is my business; that muscle is pretty strong. Yet, often, the stories I hear leave me behind, panting like an unfit pony.

The words I write for HorseBack are for many audiences – a general interested public, people who might raise funds or donate money or offer grants, professional organisations like Combat Stress or BLESMA who may send participants on the courses, stalwart supporters like Help for Heroes, new partners like the Venture Trust or Retraining of Racehorses. I write to raise awareness about the coils of Post-Traumatic Stress, and the long road to recovery from life-changing injury. But most of all, I write those words for the men and women who have served, who face challenges I shall never know, who have sacrificed much, who have to find a new road to walk.

They do not like to be thought of as heroes. I have learnt that lesson well. They want to be seen, I think, as the complex, complete, sometimes contradictory human beings that they are. They don’t want to be herded into a neat box with a label slapped on them. It’s really easy to pin a medal on someone’s chest and then forget about them. Then what? is always the question. It is a question that HorseBack tries to answer.

Inventing a fictional character out of whole cloth is a piece of piss compared to trying to capture all that. I have the language of Shakespeare and Milton at my disposal, and still I fall short.

But, like those men and women, I go on trying. Respect is due, and the only coin I have is prose.

 

Today’s pictures:

I got all poshed up with the kind Stepfather’s proper camera instead of my own ancient, battered article, and of course it was far too much kit for me, and I found out too late that I had the focus wrong most of the time. For some reason, this feels like a lesson in life and makes me laugh quite a lot. I do regret that I did not capture better pictures, because the two days have been so majestic, but I must be philosophical. These snaps will give you some idea:

I’m intensely fond of the horses I see at HorseBack, and always enjoy spending time with them. But there was a moment tonight when I came back to my own mare, to settle her for the evening, put out her hay, give her an extra special feed and rug her up against the coming snow, when I realised that nothing else would do. She is my people. She knows me so well and I know her so well and our hearts are stitched together by time and daily routine.

I’d been a little on show, meeting fascinating new people and trying to show them my best, most glittering self. I’d attempted, as Britons always do in company, to be funny. I’d wanted to be articulate. Back in the muddy old field, none of that mattered.

The mare does not care whether I am witty or whether I have hay in my hair (some had to removed, this morning, to much merriment). She brings out my best self without my having to do a thing. With her, I just am. Which is why I call her my little Zen mistress, and why I stand under a tree, stroking her dear face and saying out loud ‘I love you’, even though she does not speak English and does not know what those words mean. When we are together, we are all love. That is the gift she gives, freely, every single moment I am with her. It is beyond price.