Airy somethings.

Writing is such an odd business. On some days, I feel as if I am wading through mud. My addled brain has nothing of use in it. I write because I must write; it’s a job, and waiting for inspiration is no good at all.

On some days, my fingers move and my mind is leaping about, but I don’t really achieve anything. I’m just spinning my wheels.

And, on some glorious days, it all falls into place. The words are there, waiting for me. It’s as if someone has given me a Christmas present.

I have absolutely no idea where the good stuff comes from. It feels as if it has nothing to do with me, that I can’t even take credit for it. I am merely transcribing.

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

I have so much airy nothing. Sometimes it stays that way. Sometimes it does have a habitation, and a name.

A slightly unexpected life lesson.

Quite a long time ago, with a lot of sweating and swearing and yelping, I hit the deadline for the manuscript of my current book. I whacked it off to the agent, after staying up all night, and then collapsed in a heap.

After all the rushing and striving and grand-standing, I had to wait quite a long time for a response. This sometimes happens, and I have learnt to deal with it. I am a pro, after all. At least the thing was done, and I could fill in the time by working on my other book, and, lately, on the new secret project, because I must always have a secret project.

There was, at last, good news. She loved it; she was very happy; she was fired with enthusiasm. She had plans.

Then there was a check. She thought perhaps it needed more work. A change in emphasis might be needed. A little structural tweak. She wanted to go away and think for a while.

I am a pro, I told myself.

Then, finally, finally, an email arrived. I read it so quickly that I did not fully understand it. I was clearly much, much more terrified than I had allowed myself to believe, and this seemed to blur my very vision.

What I thought it said was that she was losing faith. I thought that she was trying to shuffle me off, that really she did not like it any more, that she did not trust me to fix it.

I went into a wild defensive crouch. I kept trying to do the new draft, and could not. What price that famous professionalism now? I had many good excuses – complicated life mostly, but then everyone has a complicated life. In my experience, you only don’t do a thing when you don’t want to. The excuses are always bullshit, however good and shiny they might seem on the surface.

It took me two weeks to realise what was going on. What was going on was that I was FURIOUS. Not with the poor agent, who is a brilliant woman and who has stuck with me through vicissitudes which would have sunk a lesser human. I was furious with the whole shooting match. I was livid with the process.

Writing daily for the internet is a really good discipline. It has keen personal pleasures. I get to meet Dear Readers from around the world, and learn about other views and other lives. I can keep a record, which I like very much. There are precious jewels on this blog, which would have been lost to memory had I not written them down – there is the day Kauto Star won his fifth King George; there is Frankel in his pomp; there are my dear, adored old canine ladies, whom I still miss. The writing itself is important, as it keeps my fingers moving, locking the very act of writing into muscle memory.

But it is also horribly spoiling. I can write what I want, and it can go out into the world as free as a bird. There are no mediating market forces, cultural shifts, publishing shake-ups, economic turbulences to wreck it. It has a lovely purity and immediacy and ease to it. I write it; you read it. I am sometimes proud of it; you are sometimes bored by it. If it lags and sags, I must try harder. If I’m in the zone, it sings its song, and the Dear Readers smile.

I don’t have to do a tap dance, or a dog and pony show. I don’t have to edit and revise and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I don’t have to have any bloody meetings.

The perceived doubt of the email brought all those old rejections, imperatives, wilderness years into one ball of rage. Fuck them all, the childish voice in my head was yelling. I was not even sure who or what I was cursing. The fates, the demands of the job, life itself; the whole buggery mess and muddle.

I was so angry that I then refused to write at all, and listened to the Ashes instead. The voice of Blowers on Test Match Special was the only thing which made me feel as if my fragile world was not rocking on its axis. That, and the red mare, who rose to the occasion, and was more sweet and funny and responsive and adorable than I’ve ever known her. Each ride was more enchanting than the last, as if she knew that something was up, and understood that it was in her sole power to give me the gift of peace for two hours every day.

But then the Test Match was over and I had my deadline to meet and I had to stop being such a sulky fool and do the damn work. Otherwise I cannot keep the mare in hay. (I had tried, over the weekend, to win thousands of pounds on an accumulator so that I could retire on the spot, but it did not go well.)

Crossly, after too much coffee, I went back and read the email again, to see what it was the poor agent really wanted.

It said not one single thing I had inferred.

It was still filled with enthusiasm and belief. She just wanted a few small changes, and then it was all guns blazing.

I read it again.

What had I been thinking? She had written one thing; I, in blind fear, had read another.

I sat down and did all the major edits in one session.

I’ll still need to do some more pondering and have another polish and sharpen up some of the self-indulgent parts, but all is not lost, my career is not yet over, light is shining through the tunnel.

I often say that I am an idiot. Then I have to remind myself sternly that I am not quite an idiot, but an ordinary human who sometimes does extraordinarily idiotic things. There is an important difference. This is one of those idiotic things. Will I ever learn? Back to the drawing board I go, back to the schoolroom, back to learning yet another life lesson that I don’t seem to have imbibed.

Read your emails carefully does not sound like a lesson for the ages. But in this case, it really is.

 

Today’s photographs:

Just one today, because I’m exhausted with all these revelations of my own folly. But it’s a good one, because it’s how I feel. Born free. And also because it’s of the person who has stopped me collapsing from mild hysteria into the very depths of the abyss. She really does have that power.

Into the woods. Or: be brave.

There is a moment in a book when I think I am editing and slashing and cutting, killing darlings with a ruthless hand, slaying those irrelevant, indulgent, extraneous paragraphs like Attila the Hun on a wild Saturday night.

In fact, I am fooling myself. I am living in a state of tense fear. I have written all these damn words, and thought all these damn thoughts, and I am holding onto them for grim death. I trim a passage here, and chop a conclusion there, but I am tinkering round the edges. I find that my perspective goes, and I can’t liberate myself. I’m so terrified of losing the good stuff that I dare not murder the bad stuff.

This morning, in the field with the red mare quietly grazing by my side, I shouted into my mobile telephone to my agent. We had one of those revelatory, galvanising conversations which change everything.

‘I AM GALVANISED,’ I hollered, into the light Scottish air. The mare took not the blindest bit of notice.

I did not go to HorseBack, but ran straight to my desk. I merrily threw out 1700 words, and wrote 2339 new ones to go in their place. I was no longer frightened. It had taken me nine months of trying to work out what this book was really about, and, finally, it was the objective eye of the clever agent that cut through the thickets and saw the light.

The thing that is making me laugh is that the heart of the book turns out to be the part about which I harboured profound doubts. It was a piece of folly and self-indulgence, I thought, too much even for me. I could not resist it, but I corralled it into little separate sections in each chapter, so that when the agent shrieked with derisive laughter, as she surely would, I could quietly remove those nutty bits and sit up straight and be a grown up.

Those parts may now be released from their box. It is the happiest irony that they are the glorious, chugging engine of the whole book.

The red mare, as you dear Dear Readers know to your cost, is not just an actual horse. She is a metaphor horse. She is my totem, my shining light, my daily life lesson. After taking a holiday whilst I was cheering on her cousins at Cheltenham, she has come back into work, and I got back on her for the first time today. Warwick Schiller, the lovely Australian horseman whose precepts I follow, has a delightful exercise which he does with his horses every day. It is called: ‘Where do you want to go?’

The idea is that you get on and you let the horse wander where it will. The only rule is that they must keep a steady gait, but you do not steer them. This achieves many wonders, too many to go into now, but perhaps the most important is that it teaches them not to get stuck. If Red heads for the gate or the feed shed or the place where her little Paint friend is grazing, I make her work by disengaging her hindquarters and moving her in tight circles. When she goes off kindly, I leave her alone. Sometimes I wave my arms in the air, just for fun, and think about how good this is for my independent seat. I always love seeing where she wants to go next, and sometimes have to lie on her neck as she weaves her way under low-hanging branches and through the trees.

On this day of all days, after I finished the liberating, galvanising conversation with the agent, I got on the mare and asked her where she wanted to go. She set off to her usual haunts, near to home, and we described a familiar circuit.

Then, something amazing happened. She pricked her ears and struck off into new territory. She was going where the wild things are. She headed with purpose, without any doubt or terror, to the scary woods. The woods to the west are indeed dark and deep, with rough ground and alarming shadows. The pheasants which used to send her into shocked, vertical leaps live there, along with cohorts of invisible woodland critters, hiding in their umbrous lairs.

In she went, had a wander about, took everything in, and then found her way out again into the light. On the border of the scary wood is a ragged area where the building yard beyond the southern treeline stores all its old stone. Huge blocks of ancient Scottish granite lie there in heaps, along with old carved pediments and fanciful curlicued columns. Some of it has been there for so long that the moss and grass has started to grow over the sleeping humps, as if the very earth is reclaiming it for its own. This was not only far out of her comfort zone, it was treacherous ground, difficult to navigate. She was Magellan now, setting out without a map, going to the edges of the known world, into the realm marked Here Be Dragons. I stifled my delighted laughter, and went with her, wherever she wanted to go.

She beat the bounds, picked her way, sure-footed as a mountain goat, over the hummocks and crevices and sharp edges of the monumental stones, tracked her way past the young trees, and emerged, triumphant, all terrain conquered, back into the familiar flatlands of her own field.

I’ve been guilty of thinking she was not a very brave horse. I made a category error. It was not courage she lacked, it was good, sturdy, human boundaries. Once she had those, it turned out she could go anywhere.

There is a profound idea that when you work a horse well, you find out who it really is. If the human is not up to scratch, the horse may hide its true nature under a defensive layer of compensations and survival mechanisms.

Now she has confidence in me, the red mare may be brave. As my agent has confidence in the book, so I may be brave. It was a perfect piece of symmetry.

I cast away the old words, and wrote the new, and I had a humming sense of pleasure in the work. But nothing, nothing, could match the delight of that moment when my courageous mare cast off her shackles and headed out into the unknown.

 

Today’s pictures:

There was too much going on to take photographs on top of everything else. Here are a couple from the last few days. I’m afraid I am taking the opportunity to show you yet another lying down picture. Any excuse.

She’s actually staring at the scary woods in this picture, because some invisible creature is moving about down there and making a racket:

Stan the Man is always brave as a lion when he has that magical stick in his mouth:

A trot, a drive and a thought.

I found my trot.

There it was, all the time, down the back of the sofa. The red mare, moving lightly within herself on a loose rein, as composed and collected as a 19^th century marchioness doing the gavotte, twitched her ears in the Scottish air as if to say: yes, yes, I think this was the item you were looking for.

Then I went for a drive and looked at the blue land in the sunshine and felt lucky.

I did some other things as well, but it’s Friday, and I don’t want to bore the arse off you.

(Wrote book; made soda bread; ran errands; had long and soothing conversation about the human condition. Same old, same old.)

Felt particularly pleased that I captured an image of Stanley the Dog with the Scottish sky in his eyes. All the time he was posing he was itching to be off to the undergrowth, where he heard the rustle of tempting critters. But he goodly stayed, and I got my shot.

There have been some interesting pieces of wisdom floating around on the internet lately. I find these reassuring, as the news gets madder and badder. (Greece; Putin; Libya; chaos and sorrow and insoluble problems.) The small wisdoms restore some sense to the stretched mind. One of them was from a lovely man called Ira Glass, and it had at its heart: don’t give up. Keep trying, keep pushing through, and you may achieve the beautiful thing you wish to make.

When I get frustrated with my bumbling horsemanship, I have to remind myself that I was off a horse for almost thirty years. I sat on a pony before I could construct a sentence, but that long gap meant that old, good instincts and muscle memory had atrophied and even disappeared altogether. The people I admire and wish to emulate have been doing it, every day, for those thirty years. They can do things without thought on which I have to concentrate very, very hard.

I can write a sentence which pleases me because I have been practising with words for those thirty years I was off a horse and at my desk. I knew a lot of the theory when I was in my twenties, because I read all the books and I had an avid mind. I went to all the great ones for example and advice. But I could not quite yet get my ducks in a row, because the knowing is one thing, and the doing is another. The fine doing comes only from the years and years of practice. Do your scales; play your arpeggios. Don’t give up. Embrace your mistakes, because without them you learn nothing.

I can write a sentence because I worked at it. I’d still like to write a better sentence, so I’ll go on working whilst I have a brain that functions and fingers that type. I’ll go on striving to be the horsewoman that my mare deserves until they have to hoist me into the saddle with ropes. It’s never finished.

Don’t give up. Keep trying. Stretch your sinews to the sky.

That, slightly to my surprise, is my thought for the day.

 

Today’s pictures:

Every day, in every way, I love that face a little bit more. I should not have thought such a thing were possible. I did not know one small human heart had so much love in it. It’s sort of crazy that it’s a horse who has unlocked this bounty, but I do not look gift mares in the mouth. (Except of course when her teeth need doing.) Love is love, wherever it might be found.

A book and a horse. Or, it’s not magic beans.

Drum roll, please.

I have finished the fifth draft.

This is not quite as drum-roly as it might be, on account of the fact that I was supposed to be slashing and burning and did not, in the end. It turned out to be a quite different edit than the one I had planned. It was, in the end, a character edit. I had been living with the characters for long enough to see below the surface, so I found myself writing new scenes, to give them depth and nuance, to explore and cement the relationships, to let them leap off the page as three-dimensional individuals instead of lying there like types or cardboard cut-outs. Now, I know my people, and I had to give them room to breathe.

The kill your darlings draft is yet to come. I’m going to take four days off, clean my mind, and then print out the manuscript, so I can read it with a stern eye. A hard copy is always better for this process, and one may take a ruthless pencil and CROSS THINGS OUT. One can put squiggles and question marks in the margins, and little tentative ticks for the sections which work.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about horsing and about writing. They have a great deal in common. You have to go over every element again and again, get the tiny things right, or the whole will not fly. You have to pay attention to the minute details, which the careless or the cavalier do not even notice. You have to dig the foundations deep. You have to practice and practice and practice, every damn day, if you want to be good.

I sometimes suspect that almost anyone could write a book, in the simple sense of putting a hundred thousand words on paper. (My nutty book is currently clocking in at over 160,000 words, which is why the darlings must, must, must die.) What sorts the sheep from the goats is the willingness to go back and do the endless drafts, wrangle and mangle and pummel the thing into shape. The difference between the amateur and the professional is the taking of time.

Just like writing, good horsing can’t be rushed. I worked my mare this morning, in the snow, paying attention to the most basic things, checking those foundations, not letting the fundamentals slide. It’s take me a lot of time to realise what is really important, in this new approach I am learning. At the beginning, I was so excited to have discovered an entirely novel way of thinking about horses that I leapt about all over the shop, as if I were teaching the mare circus tricks. We made some progress, but there would always be a moment of disaster. It took me a while to figure out that it is the doing well of the right things in the correct order that brings enduring results.

One of the fascinating things you are teaching them is that the world has pressure in it, shocks and surprises and things not always going in a calm and predictable way. You are teaching them to deal with that, and not scoot off into a maze of adrenaline and panic. To do this, you put pressure on them, on purpose. If you pussy foot around, if you coddle them or namby-pamby them, they learn nothing. Quite often, on a still day like today, I’ve thought: oh, it’s a bit mean to ask her to work. She’d be in her dozy Zen state, enjoying the sun, and even though I know most horses like a job, I felt like a horrid slave driver. So when I asked her to do something, it would be with an underlying note of apology.

Today, I assumed my stern face and put the pressure on without regret or restraint. If I ask her to go, she must go. No messing. She was slightly surprised. Hey, she said, throwing her duchessy head in the air, what’s that all about? Good boundaries, I said; clarity, consistency, clean lines. After a firm ask, I’d relax her again, with a rest and a damn good rub. Then, off she would go once more. We rinsed and repeated for fifteen minutes, until all I had to do was lift my hand and she would walk off, click my tongue and she would move into a smooth trot. Oh, she said, looking utterly delighted, I really do see. It was as if I had encircled her in a gleaming ring of safety, because she knew what I meant, that I really did mean it, and that she could rely on me to be absolutely consistent in that meaning. All was clear.

Life lessons, I thought, extrapolating like a crazy thing. That’s the whole point of growing up. You learn to deal with pressure. You learn to take the knocks. I talk quite a lot about my battered heart, the one I have taken to funerals, the one that misses my old dad, my old dogs, my old godfather, the great generation which is leaving us, one by shining one. I think sometimes that I am holding it together with binder twine and hope. (And strong liquor.) But this morning, I watched my mare learn to take more pressure, to be a little braver, a little tougher, a little more sanguine, and I thought: the battering does not make the heart weaker, chipped and bashed and second-hand, but makes it stronger. Life will always make the heart ache, because of the sorrow and the pity, but it will not break it or smash it, not if you learn the habits of resilience.

She was so happy and content, after doing good work, that kind mare. It was so simple, what we did, but wonderfully profound. It’s taken me a lot of time for the understanding of the whole to grow strong roots. Yeah, you can get all the books, and watch the videos, and listen at the feet of a master, and ask questions, and discuss niceties with people who are on the same path. But you have to let the knowledge settle, you have to make mistakes, you have to think and think and think, and that cannot be rushed. There are absolutely no short-cuts, no tricks, no tick tick ticking of neat boxes.

I always thought that horsing was an instinctive thing, and in some ways it is. Some people really do have it. I thought that writing was an instinctive thing, that some lucky souls had a feeling for words, a facility with language. The feeling has to be there, but with both disciplines it is the thought that makes the difference. I think and think and think, and I work and work and work, and every day, it gets a little better. It’s not magic beans. It’s effort. And the more effort you put in, the more effortless the thing becomes, so the words fly off the page and the sweet mare goes forward in ravishing harmony, her great thoroughbred heart and my chipped human one stitched into each other, across the species divide.

 

Just one picture today. I think I already put it up on Facebook, but I’m posting it again because I love it so much. I love her wibbly lower lip, and her furry ears, and the fact that she has the Scottish sky in her eyes:

Horse and book. And life lessons.

Author’s note: really don’t know what I’m writing about at the moment, so the poor Dear Readers need to put their Forgiving Hats on. Or, at least, it might help.

 

That sound you hear is the sound of hollow laughter. When I said yesterday that I was starting to feel faintly organised, the hubris angels flapped their wings and fell on the floor laughing. Today, I have piles of washing all over the floor, mud everywhere because there is obviously no time to brush it up, a car that needs an oil change (the light flashes plaintively at me, as if knowing that it will get no joy), forty-seven emails to write, a calendar which has question marks all over it as the dates I am trying to confirm prove as labyrinthine as backstage manoeuvring at a G8 summit, and a TO DO list which is longer than the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Also my shoulder hurts and I’ve only managed to edit ten pages of book and am reduced to sending pathetic pleas to the agent to push the deadline. (Who thought it would be a good idea to write two books at once?)

On the other hand, the frost is glittering in the blinding sun, and the Younger Niece came out with me this morning and did some more filming as I rode the red mare. The duchess started off as relaxed as an old cow pony, but then felt the cold snap and the open grass under her twinkly toes and the antic world around her and threw down a couple of challenges. I could feel the power building in her mighty body and thought: well, this could all go pear-shaped. But it didn’t. I concentrated and kept calm and tried to remember all the new things I have learnt and she came back to me. The adrenaline fell, and I had my sweet girl again, and we ended on the loveliest of good notes.

I had, of course, despite my daily fight against perfectionism, decided to produce a perfect ride, for the Younger Niece to record. Then I could put it on the internet and be covered in glory and everyone would be impressed and tell me what a brilliant horse I had.

The mare said: perfect, schmerfect.

She was enchanting on the ground, as if lulling me into a false sense of security, and then wilful under the saddle. I wanted to go one way, she wanted to go another. I had to use my intelligence and persuade her, going back to a most basic exercise. ‘I have to do this,’ I said, slightly breathless, to the Younger Niece, as we turned in tight circles, ‘otherwise the whole ride will be a disaster.’ So, I fixed the wanting to go home issue, and everything went calm and docile and easy, and then the little Paint started yelling and people were doing strange things in the woods, so the mare decided she was worried about that. ‘I’m changing the subject,’ I panted at the Younger Niece, as we did serpentines and worked the special left-right exercise and made figures of eight round young trees. ‘If I can get her focus back to me and control her feet, we’ll be fine.’

We were fine. But it was not perfect, it was messy. The Niece, who is amazingly wise, looked up at me, as the mare, quiet again, stood silhouetted against the dancing sun, her head low, her neck stretched out. ‘I’m glad it wasn’t perfect,’ she said. ‘It’s good to see what happens when it goes a bit wrong, and then to watch how it comes right. I’m glad she wanted to go the wrong way.’

I sat very still, rather astonished. There was brilliance in her simplicity. She was not judging: she saw the triumph and she saw the disaster, and she treated those imposters just the same. If there was no going wrong, there would be no coming right.

It is my own idiot brain I need to fix, not my horse. I keep wanting to gallop ahead and say: look, look, there, I have it all sorted, I made a Perfection-Horse. Tell me I’m clever; give me a gold star.

I’m forty-seven years old and I still want a gold star.

After thirty years away from equines, I’m learning a whole new way of horsing. I’m still a novice at it, and I’m still in the foothills, and I’ll still screw up. But the point is that in ten years I shall still be learning. I’d like to be in the saddle when I am ninety, and I’ll be learning then too. It’s not about having a perfect horse, or getting any gold stars, or being a finished horsewoman, it’s about opening my absurd mind and letting knowledge come into it every single day. It’s about slowness and humility and concentrating on the process. Some days there will be wild, flinging delight, high peaks of achievement; some days there will be a crashing down to muddy earth.

The red mare is no pushover. She may be one of the dearest creatures I have ever met, but she is still a half-ton flight animal, bred purely for speed and strength and stamina. She has not an inch of sentiment in her, and if she feels fretful and flighty she will let me know and it’s up to me to do something about it. Three hundred years of selection went into her powerful thoroughbred body, and when I feel that power rising I remember that I can never get cocky or lazy or take anything for granted. Every day, she teaches me something, if only I will let her.

I find this a good reminder for life in general. The book I am writing came to me in a rush, and the words poured out, and I love it and believe in it. But it does not mean I can be cavalier about it. Just as I have to damn well ride that red mare, so I have to damn well write that book. I have to cut and polish and reshape; I have to think and think and think. I have to tie up loose ends and not just skate over the difficult parts. I have to go back to the beginning, literally and figuratively, and take slow steps until I get the thing right. I have to fight, every day, against self-indulgence. I have to fight, every day, against rushing and cutting corners and showing off. It’s not tap dances and show tunes; it’s steadiness and rigour. Which may not be glamorous, but it’s real and true.

 

Today’s pictures:

It was a ravishing day today but cold as buggery, and my fingers are still frozen from removing slabs of ice from the water troughs. So I found some summery pictures from the archive to remind me what warmth feels like:

In which I accept the mystery.

A very interesting work day today. I should know every damn thing there is to know about writing a novel by now. I’ve read all the manuals and even sat at the feet of a master and listened in awe and wonder. I’ve read most of the great novels and watched for how the mechanics work. But it’s a long time since I wrote a fiction, and I’m rusty. It’s coming back, bit by bit, and I watch the returning memory with interest.

Today, I thought: a crucial change does not have to be a big thing.

There are themes which need developing and deepening and characters who need more nuance and complexity. It’s all a bit bland and straightforward at the moment. I need to put my twisty little firestarter hat on. I had been rather daunted by some of the changes that were required, until I reminded myself of the power of smallness. You really can transform a chapter by adding a couple of lines. A profound shift does not require five new ten-page scenes. A line here, a word there, and the thing suddenly shimmers off the page. If a scene falls flatly, plodding along without that mysterious galvanic element, you can merely cut a paragraph or two, add three lines of dialogue, throw in a dash of weather, give it a smell (smell is really important and often overlooked in novels) and – le voilà – GORDON’S ALIVE.

Obviously you have to read that last part in a Brian Blessed voice for it to make any sense.

Anyway, once I realised this, I dashed off with the smoothing iron and did all my work in about ten minutes so I now can sneakily treat myself to the 2.45 at Fontwell, which is very cheering.

There are days when I plug away, putting in hours and hours and achieving nothing. And then there are bright, light, dancing days, when I suddenly get the point, and do what needs to be done in double-quick time and sit back with a sense of flushed triumph. How did that happen? I ask myself.

Nobody knows. Writing, like the thoroughbred, contains an insoluble mystery. One can learn it and practice it and codify it and get better at it, but there is a part of it which bears no explanation. Why do the words suddenly fall into the head, as if they have been sent? Where do they come from? Why are there days when everything is rotten and gone to hell, and days when everything works like a magic trick?

Nobody knows.

I do not know why my red mare will trot around me in perfect circles, as collected as a dressage horse, attached to no rope, responding sweetly to the merest body language. I’ve studied herd behaviour and learnt profound methods from the Australian horseman whose wisdom I follow, but I still don’t really know why she will do that. It still feels like a mystery and miracle.

This morning, after a display on the ground good enough to win gold medals, she stood quietly as I got on, did her lateral flexion as sweetly as if she had been secretly taking a course in the night, and walked out into the Scottish fields, as contained and poised as an ambassadress. She did perfect transitions from voice only. Usually, I cheat a bit, giving her a little cue from seat or legs. Trust her, I thought. She knows. So I really did just do one click for trot, and said walk for walk, and did not move my body or my hands at all, and there was the pin-sharp response, as light as air, as accurate as geometry, as beautiful as dreams.

I don’t know when anything has made me so happy. It was a deep, spreading delight, a flinging disbelief, a wild joy. How do you thank a horse, I wondered, for such gifts? She got strokes and love and scratches on her withers and extra breakfast, but I’ll never really be able to thank her in a way she can understand.

Accept the mystery, I thought.

I thought: I really am turning into an old hippy at heart.

I am a rationalist, and I like reasons for things. I like digging out the bones and working things out and having some good logic on which to rest my feet. But in the two things I love the most, in writing and in horsing, there is an essential mystery and I must let that be. Perhaps it is in that mystery that the joy lies.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just time for one, no prizes for guessing what it is. I’ve been hopeless about pictures lately, but I’m busy and pressed and in the crowded days something always has to give, and at the moment it is the camera. Very sorry about that.

In which a Dear Reader asks a question. I answer it.

For a glancing moment, the sun comes out and Scotland glimmers and glitters in the light. The red mare lifts her head, amazed. Then the clouds roll in again and we are back in the brown soup. Despite this, I feel oddly happy. Good work this week, and a lot of action, and even some admin. (I made at least two dreaded telephone calls and sent some put-off emails.)

A Dear Reader asks: ‘Any advice on how to silence the Monologue of Doom?’

I am delighted. I really, really do know the answer to this question. Her query was specifically about writing, her desire to shut off the beastly, destructive, critical voices who say that every sentence is a crashing disaster, but I think that the technique I use can be extrapolated to all areas of life. I suspect that an awful lot of people have a fairly persistent monologue of doom. (I love that phrase, by the way.)

For the writing specifically, the first thing is to give yourself permission to do an absolutely rotten first draft. In fact, you must sternly instruct yourself to write nothing but buggery bollocks. The only important thing is to get the words down. It’s at this stage that you need to get your muscles going and your sinews stretching, almost feeling the process as a physical one. Don’t think too much; get those fingers moving.

This achieves several things. It gives the mean voices nowhere to go, since when they say ‘Well, that’s a ghastly construction,’ you may cheerfully agree. This pisses them off mightily, and they may well decide to leave and go and see if they can wreck another party. It gets you cooking, so that you may pile up many, many words, which is encouraging. The thing grows, and gives you hope. By allowing yourself to be absolutely crappy, you may find that you come up with flashes of brilliance. If you go too carefully to start with, trying to get everything right, your wild inner creative can never fly. You will amaze yourself when you read the thing back to find dazzling thoughts you never knew you had.

However, and this is the stern part, you must know, all the time you are doing this unfettered, crazed writing, that you will go back with your critical hat on. Because you have planned this, you are in charge, and you may select the good critic, not the wrecking ball critic.

The good critic is perfectly lovely and every human has one. The good critic does not deal in shame and hysterical hyperbole. She knows that just because you get something wrong it does not mean that you are wrong. He understands that a mistake does not invalidate you as a human being. The good critic has perspective and is judicious.

The good critic says: right, that part does not work, let’s have a bash at licking it into shape. (In the same situation, the bad critic says: that part does not work, therefore you are an unholy mess of a human and should probably never go out in public again.) The good critic is constructive, and suggests improvements. He is stern and rigorous and will not put up with sloppiness. She is hopeful and galvanic and always believes there is a way through, even if you have to work your arse off to get there.

There is an enchanting idea with horses, which comes out of the old cowboy school of Ray Hunt and the Dorrances. It is this: it is very, very important to allow your horse to make a mistake. Some people desperately hold on to their equines, always preventing them from going near the wrong thing. In this way, the horses grow tense and nervous and never learn anything. The cowboy notion is to let the horse make the mistake, and then show it a better way. You don’t punish it or make it feel stupid. You simply say – if you do this, over here, like this, everything will be much, much easier for you.

I think this works with humans too. I think this is what the good critic knows. Everybody makes mistakes. Even Tolstoy and Jane Austen will have written shoddy first drafts. In the starting stage of a novel, which nobody ever sees, there will be terrible longeurs, and stretches of pointlessness, and glaring over-writing, and characters which do not cohere, and phrases which are worn and banal. The difference between a writer and a good writer is that the good writer REWRITES. I put this in capital letters because it is so important. And I mean rewrites. Over and over again, draft after draft, until some kind editor or agent gently removes the manuscript from crabbed and reaching hands.

I find it quite useful to give my drafts names. At the beginning, there will be narrative drafts, and character drafts, and dialogue drafts. As you get into the weeds, there will be platitude edits, and repetition sweeps, and semi-colon drafts. I am so obsessive that I quite often do a platitude edit and a cliché edit. Which may be threading the needle a little too finely, even for me.

The final thing, which applies I think to life as well as to writing is: give yourself a choice. Do this consciously. You may want to say it out loud or write it down. It’s quite important that it is out in the world.

Say to yourself: well, you can listen to the Monologue of Doom, and convince yourself that you are pointless and useless and feckless and hopeless, and should go into the garden to eat worms. You are perfectly welcome to do that, if that is what you want. Or, you can listen to your sensible, kind, rigorous voices, who tell you that nobody’s perfect, who tell you that with a little graft and application and determination you can get the thing right. You can choose to listen to the useful voice. The mean, destructive voice has no utility. You can pay heed to it if you want, but it won’t get you anywhere, except to make you feel horrid and send you into a defensive crouch. If you want the defensive crouch and the existential angst, for whatever reason, that’s fine. You are a grown-up. It is your decision.

This sounds so stupidly blatant that it’s almost absurd. But it really, really does work.

It’s a psychological trick, I think. It’s an opening up, rather than a closing down. It gives you dignity. By offering yourself a choice instead of merely scolding yourself for hopelessness, you are treating yourself as a sentient human with agency, rather than a captive pawn in a chess game played by unseen hands.

And sometimes too, I think of my kind self. I have a mean self, a judging, carping, lashing self. I generally direct this inwards, although sometimes, sadly, she does escape into the wild. The most salutary reminder, when the Monologue of Doom is raging out of control, is the thought that I would never, ever say to my best beloveds the horrid things I say to myself. If the people I love come to me and tell me that they’ve fucked up and they don’t know what to do, I do not break out my nastiest voices. The kind self lifts her head like a bird dog and reminds the beloveds of all their fine points, their good skills, their fighting hearts. The kind self ruefully tells them that they are not alone, because everyone screws up sometimes, most of all me.

You can choose to build up, or you can choose to tear down. It really is your very own choice.

 

Today’s pictures:

The light is like a despairing dull beige haze, so no camera today. As I went to the archive, I hit at once on these two pictures, taken by my friend the Horse Talker. Since I have hardly mentioned the red mare, it seems only right that she gets the visuals. In keeping with today’s theme, I laugh ruefully at my absurd riding outfit and my goofy face. I’m never going to look like a posh girl on a horse and that’s all she wrote. I don’t care. I care about the joy, which streams out of these shots and reminds me, as if I need reminding, that this beautiful girl lifts my heart every single damn day, and brings out my better angels, and makes me whole.

I also love her slightly resigned look in these pictures. I was coming home for a good groom and some breakfast, she is clearly thinking, and you expect me to stop and do idiot Posy Posington? Don’t you know who my grandfather was? Isn’t all this poncing about rather beneath my dignity?

PS. It’s been a long week and I’m quite tired. I always fear that when I write a blog on writing I shall include frightful howlers and typos and there shall be pointing and scoffing. But my eyes are crossing too much to do another proof-read. So please forgive my mistakes.

A small thought on writing.

Good work today. The mists are slowly clearing. Yes, yes, says the unflinching, critical brain (the good critic, who is galvanised and constructive) this part needs beefing up, and this part needs cutting back. There must be more obstacles, it says, firmly. This sounds a bit manipulative and phoney, as if the story is not arising organically, but I have a fatal tendency to fall in love with my characters and so make everything too easy for them. The rule of fiction is that there must be barriers to overcome, or there is no drama and no tension. The rule of life, which is rather different from fiction but also obtains, is that rarely do things easily fall into place, as if mere wishing might make them so.

Therefore: make it a little harder.

Then there is the thing of voice. My other weakness is that quite often many of my characters take on the same cadences of speech. It really is too phoney to give them all their own distinctive tics, but a little judicious differentiation is important. Voice can also reflect character. This fellow does not use adjectives, because he is a direct, getting on with it sort. That kind of thing. I have at the moment one woman who speaks as if she has walked out of a 1938 black and white film, and I’m having a lot of fun with that.

The actual cutting is still not going that well. The thing is still far, far too long. This feels like self-indulgence to me. One must not pander to markets or even readers, but I am keenly aware that humans live busier lives than ever before. I sometimes think a very long book is almost an act of passive aggression on the part of the author. Everyone can sharpen up. I recently read a very, very long book by a very, very famous writer, and the first three chapters could have been done just as well in ten pages. WHERE IS THE BLUE PENCIL? I found myself shouting, furiously. The writer was doing a lot of very writerly writing, as if to say: look at me, with my literary sensibility. I felt it was an awful form of showing off, and it took me out of the fictional world and made me cross.

Even the most brilliant natural talent needs editing. I always think of that famous manuscript of The Wasteland, with Ezra Pound’s frenzied markings all over it like a palimpsest. The sad story is that now, once writers get very successful, hardly anyone dares to edit them at all, so that just as they reach maximum brilliance the quality of their work often goes sharply downwards. It is not that they have been ruined by fame. It is that they are not cut. Also, there are very few devoted editors of the old school. There are few Maxwell Perkins any more, and I feel regretful for that.

For all these reasons, I have to be fierce with myself. I don’t care that you think that sentence sings and dazzles, I tell myself sternly, IT MUST GO.

It will still be a flawed book, because all books are flawed and because I’m not quite in the top rank. When I was young and ambitious, I thought I would be. I thought if I read hard enough and worked hard enough and practiced hard enough, I’d be the kind that won prizes. I’m not. I can write well enough to bring pleasure, but I don’t have that ruthless, diamond brilliance of the very best.

Perhaps that is not a bad thing. The very best gave everything to their work, and tended to be drunk and mad and despairing in life. I think always of sottish F Scott and furious, bonkers Hemingway, and Mrs Woolf with the voices in her head which she could only stop with stones in her pocket and a running river, and Dorothy Parker, who somehow lived into old age, but existed in a twilight of sad hotel rooms, unrequited love for Mr Benchley, and dog shit.

Being in the second rank is not so bad. It’s about right. It does not mean I do not strive. I strive like hell. Even in this funny little blog I strive. I think: if, each day, I can give them one good sentence, then it is worth it. If I can get one passage of prose to dance, then it’s all right. It’s just that I have no false, luring expectations of glory.

What I really love is doing the work. I love that every day I get to play with language. I love that language is my medium, and I know it and understand it and am friends with it. When I was young, I did want a prize. I wanted an outside agency to award me something. Now I know that the very fact that the work itself brings me joy is the prize.

That, and the wild good fortune of flexible hours, so that I can pause for a moment and watch the 3.30 at Plumpton.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from the archive. I scrolled through entirely at random, and picked the ones which stood out. One day, I shall manage to tidy up my photograph files, but at the moment they creak and groan like over-filled bookshelves, tottering gently in the bowels of the machine.

PS. Slightly geekish note - I was never so glad in my life to find that Windows Live Writer was working again. It disappeared yesterday, and I had to resort to the horror that is Blogger. I know I should be grateful for any free bit of software, and I do not take it for granted that I have a nice blogging platform for which I do not have to pay. But it really was devised by sadists. Quite apart from making all formatting and the inserting and sizing of photographs fiendishly difficult, it forces you to redo all your paragraphing if you ever want to edit a single line. So much as press the edit button, and you see all your lovingly-placed gaps removed, as if by an evil, mocking hand. Why would anyone do that? At what meeting did everyone sit down and say: oh, I know, THAT’S a good idea?

PPS. As one of the Dear Readers has astutely noted, I am madly writing two books at once. I keep telling everyone, from HorseBack to my family, that soon I shall be back to normal and not rushing everywhere with a manic glint in my eye, fighting time, and it never quite happens. I would not recommend writing two books at the same time, especially when both of the early drafts have come out ludicrously long. At the moment, I am wrangling 154,000 words and 120,000 words. One book is very nearly ready to be seen by publishers; one may take me beyond Christmas. The agent is excited, but flinty, discerning humans, keenly aware of markets and demographics and trends, will still have to say: yes, please. It’s kind of a nutty way for a grown-up to make a living, but, apart from touch-typing at eighty words a minute, it is my only skill. And, as I have said, I do love it so. Even on the bad days, when my shoulders are up around my ears and I can’t see a way through, I still love it.

Friday.

The work starts to shift. People sometimes wonder why it takes so long to write a book. I wonder why it takes so long, especially when I can bash out fifty words a minute when I’m really cooking. It’s not the word count. That’s not even a sliver of it. It needs a lot of gestation, after the initial words are down. You carry it with you and think and think and think and think. The 153,000 are there, far too many of them, but you can’t see which ones must die. So you walk and gaze and ponder. Then, one morning, you think: ah, the mother must go. So it’s hasta la vista, Mama.

There’s also a ruthlessness which takes time to arrive. At the beginning, the precious manuscript is like a baby bird, every passage coaxed out with tenderness and gentleness. It must be done in a safe private place, with no cruel editing eyes to see.

Then, you get a bit tougher in the second draft. You are coming out into the light.

Then, you have to get absolutely bloody. It’s because of the Dear Readers. You can’t write a book with a readership in mind, thinking I’ll crack that market. If you do that, all authenticity is lost. You have to write the book you want to read. But as the drafts go on, the actual Readers swim into view. They are busy. They do not have time for your self-indulgent flourishes. They want a good story and some good prose and perhaps a little bit of universal wisdom or human condition. They like a laugh. They are not there to watch you do acrobatics.

I’m reading a book at the moment by a very famous writer whose editor is clearly too afraid to wield the blue pencil. Page after page of showing off prose dance before me. A scene which could have taken ten pages rolls on for three chapters, with some very, very writerly writing. I shout in my head: what’s wrong with a good old declarative sentence? If it goes on like this, I’ll never have time to ride the mare.

That’s when the ruthlessness comes in, and why. It is the least the Readers deserve. Oddly, by this stage, it is really not all about you. But this mental shift too takes time. I’m just reaching it now. I feel my sinews harden and my resolve shine.

In ordinary life, I make breakfast for my mother, and go down to do the horse. My sister arrives and walks round the block with us. The red mare is delighted since this means that she does not have to do schooling or transitions or anything fancy, but can just mosey along without reins, my hands scratching her withers as she drops her dear heads and sighs with pleasure. We are going so slowly that she can stop and say hello to some children on the avenue. She adores children. She loves the sound of human voices too, so the low rhythms of the Sister and I chatting are her deep delight.

I have no interest in Halloween, but the great-nieces and nephew are coming round later and I make them a chocolate fridge cake. I know they would prefer commercial sweets, but I think of them getting loaded up with sugar and additives and decide that, for the sake of the grown-ups who will have to put them to bed afterwards, some nice black chocolate and nuts and honey and raisins, with no terrifying E numbers or artificial colouring, might be better. I swish about, doing my domestic goddess schtick, making some soup at the same time, something I have not had time for in ages.

The radio is on. A Day in the Life comes on. The first part of it was written about my uncle. He died in a car crash and my father got the call very late and had to drive up the M4, through a black, frigid December night, to identify the body. He left my mother, eight months pregnant with me, at home. He never spoke of that midnight drive. I can’t imagine it. Sixty bleak miles, with a dead brother at the end of it. And then the sight of the body on the slab, that beautiful golden boy whom everyone loved, all the life and promise smashed out of him. My grandmother never really recovered. I’m not sure my father did either. The beloved name was rarely spoken throughout my childhood, as if the very sound of it was too much to bear.

I think of what my dad survived. Not just near-fatal falls on horses, back and neck broken twice, shoulders dislocating like clockwork, an ear ripped half off, but a grief so dark that it could not be put into words. And yet, somehow, he managed to be the life and soul of every party, bringing light with him wherever he went, so that people’s faces lit up and they stood a little taller, basking in the glow of his funny, idiosyncratic charm. It was only at the very end that the demons got him, when he was too battered and tired and defeated to defend himself.

I think of the slow, gentle, private life I live, in these Scottish hills. It is what I can manage. I don’t want to ride in the Grand National or be a shining star. I just want to write some sentences and think some thoughts. I want to watch Stanley the Dog with his stick. I want to walk round the block with my sweet red mare. Lucky for me, that is what she wants too. She was bred to be a champion, but it turned out she did not have the character for it. She is a tender soul. She loves the slow quiet as much as I do. It’s a sort of miracle that we found each other.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from the week. They are not the best in terms of photographic quality. But they show the sweetness and that is what I want today.

So muddy and scruffy and happy:

A very ordinary story.

Somewhere, on a train in Germany, my agent is reading my book.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.

She has to like it. She may have notes. I shall make changes. Then she has to like the changes. Then she will sell it. Then an editor will edit it. Then the subs will have a bash. Then, just as everyone takes a deep breath and thinks it is all over, I will decide I must do a semi-colon edit. After that, there may be a cliché edit. I once did a cliché edit followed by a platitude edit. You can’t beat belt and braces. (See what I did there?)

All this is something over which I have no control.

Actually, that is not quite true. I can control the clichés, when I get to them. What I cannot control are the subjective judgements. I have to do that awful thing: letting go.

People are talking about Europe sliding back into recession. Perhaps, by the time the editors get to thinking about my book, nobody will be buying books any more.

Books are such fragile things. They require time, and engagement. Someone has to want to buy one, find the time to sit down quietly to read, have the mental space to give themselves to the text. In the crazy modern world, it seems a miracle than anyone still reads at all. Yet books are also sturdy things, still there, in all their papery analogue old-school glory, holding their corner against the flashing electronic Johnny-Come-Latelies of the internet and the Kindle.

I sometimes think that writing them is a very odd job indeed.

To take my mind off all this, I go out for a long ride on the red mare. The little Paint comes with, and the two good companions stretch out their dear necks and point their toes and move in time, along the burn, past the hills, through the trees. They adore riding together and it really is one of those moments when the world grows still and makes sense.

A charity sale is going on at an old cowshed near the house. We decide to go and look in the window and see what is going on. Groups of ladies come out and exclaim over the horses. ‘Oh, you are so beautiful,’ they say, first to one and then the other. A small boy is brought out to see the mighty creatures. Several of the women are clearly rather knowledgeable. ‘You ride in rope halters?’ they say, impressed. Then, to the mares: ‘You good clever things.’ (At which point, I practically fall off with pride.)

One exceptionally elegant lady tells us that her son has just ridden in the famous long-distance Mongolian Derby, a thousand kilometres of unforgiving terrain on strange ponies. That really is proper pride, I tell her. She smiles. ‘He is in the Household Cavalry,’ she says. I think of the complex emotions this must produce in a mother. There must be that pride, on many different levels, and perhaps a sliver of astonishment too – that is my boy – and trepidation and fear too. It’s a hell of an office to go to. All this is in her voice, and our eyes meet and some very human sympathy runs between us, as if we are not strangers at all. Horses, I notice, often facilitate this bashing down of barriers. People often tell me amazingly intimate stories as I sit on the red mare, and she drops her head and dozes, and they stroke her strong neck.

More people arrive to see the equines. The mares, who have not had a crowd like this since their sell-out tour to Peoria, are in their element. They blink their eyes and hold out their velvet muzzles to be stroked and impress everyone by standing like dignity on the monument. The Paint filly gets so excited by her adoring public that she goes looking for new humans who will give her more love. ‘It’s not often,’ said one woman, beaming, ‘that you get to see such beautiful big animals up close.’

I write a lot about the beauty, of the red mare in particular, and of her pretty friend; of the thoroughbred in general, which, for my money, is the most ravishing breed ever invented. Most of the time I think it is my own monomania speaking, a hysterical confirmation bias run mad. But there were other people seeing it too. It lit up their faces and made them smile and stand up a little straighter, in the cool Scottish air.

As the tickertape of world news flickers past, filled with the big and the terrifying, here was the very, very small and the very consoling. It was a moment of keen sweetness. It means nothing, and it means everything.

‘Good girl,’ I say, putting my little heroine back in her field. ‘Clever girl.’ I rub her sweet spot and she ducks her head in acknowledgement, and then I let her go and she wanders off, swinging her hips a little as she goes.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just time for a couple.

This is another of my not-very-good pictures. The light was wrong and the focus a bit off, but I put it here because it shows the dearness of the two friends:

This one is better. Stanley the Manley, with his basilisk stare. He does not really enjoy posing for pictures since it takes up valuable time when he could be hunting for mice or looking for really, really big sticks, so as well as the Scottish sky in those eyes, there is the ruthless gleam of deep reproach:

A little bit viral. Or, the kindness of strangers.

Yesterday, at 10.47pm, I went viral.

It was absolutely terrifying.

I only went a little bit viral. I was not trending on the internet. But Stephen Fry retweeted the piece I wrote about Robin Williams, and for about ten minutes it felt like all hell was breaking loose.

A smashing packet of emotions broke over me. First of all, I was wildly excited that Stephen Fry, a man I admire keenly, whose books I have read, whose comedy has made me laugh since I was a raw teen, even knew who I was, let alone liked something I had written. I had been awarded that finest prize, the Fry challenge cup, and in my mazy mind I did a cantering lap of honour, all flags flying.

Then, complete strangers started saying kind things. My heart swelled and warmed. I was Sally Field. They like me. They really like me.

The strangers soothed me, because I had been fretting about the whole shooting match. I worry always when I address any serious subject, and I twist myself up into a pretzel about the rights and wrongs of writing about the death of a stranger. The fear is that it is an intrusive, even rude, thing to do. The danger is that one is doing the empathy tap dance. Look at me, caring. It should go without saying that everyone who admired Williams and who laughed like a drain at his comedic brilliance would feel sad. I had not let it go without saying. I had said, as if somehow I was important.

Then, just as I was smiling in astonishment, the terror hit.

I inhabit a very small, very private part of the internet. I have a tiny, gentle group of Dear Readers, who know all about my equine obsession, the ludicrous voices in my head, the enchanting Lurcher antics of Stanley the Dog, my ardent love of these blue hills. They put up with me with gentle grace, and seem to understand and forgive my shortcomings.

Now, someone had thrown open a door onto a huge new world, with a crowd of unknown people in it. They would expect something. I could not just tell them about the dancing canter I had this morning on the red mare, as the swallows practised their low flying in the hayfields, so that I whooped with joy into the bright air. They would want their money back. Mare, schmare, they would say; give us the good stuff.

The fact that this whole odd phenomenon happened on Twitter was even more worrying. I suddenly had a boatload of new followers, on the strength of that post on death and depression and the frailty of the human heart. But I use Twitter almost exclusively to indulge my passion for racing, with the odd grumble about people not answering the question on the Today programme. I had sold these new arrivals a pup. They would go back through my timeline and be baffled to find endless musings on the 3.30 at Kempton, intemperate shouts of joy about the beauty and power and grace of Kingman, and wild expressions of love for the genius that is Ryan Moore. Ryan what? they would say, scratching their heads.

The last tweet I posted before the Twitter storm hit was this: ‘Quite adorable. Royal Connoisseur, 2nd and 3rd in virtually all his races, pricks his ears in amazed delight as he sees the winning post.’

Royal Connoisseur is not a famous horse, for all his rather grand name. He is a bay gelding who has never won a race. He was running in a maiden at Thirsk, on an unremarkable cloudy evening, with £3000 going to the winner. I was particularly taken with him, because when he saw the winning post coming towards him, a wide sward of green turf before his eyes instead of the equine hindquarters he was used to looking at, he really did lift his head and prick his ears in triumph. A look of delighted amazement spread over his handsome face.

Horses are like humans in one way: confidence can make all the difference to them. They can grow demoralised if they are always the bridesmaid. Once they’ve got their head in front, their old herd instincts call to them, and they grow in stature. It’s a touching thing to watch. But it’s not exactly life and death and the whole damn thing. Those poor new followers, I thought. What will they think?

I had, for those ten minutes, a fleeting flash of what it must be like to be famous. I’ve always thought fame was something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Years ago, John Updike wrote that it was a mask that eats the face, and that hard line has haunted me ever since. You are no longer your own person, but belong to the world. People suddenly have a sense of entitlement, and an odd intimacy, as if they know you. The famous are quite often put into a box, and if they dare to jump out of that box they are ruthlessly punished. They are judged, and found wanting. Even if they are adored, the adoration comes with caveats: the expectations must be met. They are tall poppies, and every armchair critic is sharpening the scythe.

Luckily, the internet moves at warp speed. It soon settled down and went to shine its light on someone else. I could return to quiet normality.

I was also very lucky because the sudden rush of people responding to the post did so with lovely humanity and generosity of spirit. I met only kindness, in that frightening new space. It was as if they were all saying: it is all right, we come in peace.

The caravan will move on. It is already trundling off into the middle distance. I shall go back to tweeting about the 2.15 at Hamilton, and writing of the dearness of my red duchess, and offering goofy little slivers of my very ordinary life.

The fear subsides. It was, looking back, rather a lovely moment. I wrote something heartfelt, and unknown humans responded from their own good hearts. Out in the brave new world, I found all the same kindness of strangers that I encounter in the old world. Fortune smiled. I smile back.

 

Today’s pictures:

Stan the Man and Red the Mare, with tractor:

Goofy face:

Noble face:

Serene face:

She really was light as thought today, all willingness and generosity. I hardly had to ask. She just gave and gave.

Then, after the ride, I went up to do my HorseBack UK work. I watched veterans who are missing limbs learn to ride. This is always a useful corrective, not just because of the Perspective Police, but because they find me, in the nicest possible way, slightly absurd, and mob me up with glee:

Then, as if the universe was making sure that I did not get above myself, after my glancing moment in the sun, Patrick the Miniature Horse asked if I would scratch his quarters. This, it turns out, is his dearest wish. It would have been rude to say no. So there I was, on my knees, with a tiny arse in my face, which seemed about right. ‘I know my place,’ I shouted, as the shutter clicked:

The flappy wings of hubris have no chance, faced with that.

And one final word - of thanks, to all of you who came to this quiet space yesterday, and generously wrote your own words, and made me smile and smile with your kindness and grace.