A small choice. And the universe is kind. And The Ducking Stool wins at Yarmouth.

As the afternoon lengthened and ran away from me, I had a choice. I could stop and write a good blog, or I could do something nice for a young fellow who is devoting every moment of his spare time to helping other people.

The something nice turned out to be knotty and time-consuming, mostly because of some internet glitches and my own lack of organisation. It involved photographs, and going through the archives, and because I rarely prune, the archives are like vast, rambling basements of some mythical British Photographic Society, winding through the subterranean spaces of an endless city.

Actually, in the end, the choice was no choice. The good young fellow won. So now it is almost time for The Archers and I have my usual brain stop.

The funny thing was that the universe generously rewarded me for listening to my better angels. (I did almost send a procrastinating email.) In amidst the long day’s work and the wrangling with the unwieldy mass of pictures and the dashing to the field to see to the little herd, I took a couple of moments to watch a couple of races.

My darling old favourite The Ducking Stool, a chestnut mare with a white face, not a million miles from Red in looks, beat off all comers to win at Yarmouth. I’d backed her at 10-1 from sheer sentiment, and she should not have won on the book, but her good heart and her love of the seaside carried her home. Even better, it was one for the girls, as she is trained by Julia Feilden and was ridden by a 19-year-old apprentice called Shelley Birkett, who beat off several older, race-hardened men in a strong finish. (The sisterhood in me loves this kind of thing, especially in an industry where the colts and the gentlemen still often hold sway.)

Then, another pair of my favourites, Wicklow Brave with the brilliant amateur Patrick Mullins on board, put their very noses in front in a thrilling, storming dash to the line and triumphed in a close photograph. I am so vague that often I forget I have done bets in the morning, and put them on again in the afternoon. It turned out I had goofily backed Wicklow Brave FIVE TIMES, and also had him in three delightful trebles. So I can now pay for the winter supply of hay which we must get in for our own dear girls.

It felt like a little reward for not giving up on the knotty problem and finally managing to send the good young fellow what I had promised.

But it means that there is nothing left now for you, except this rambling and quite possibly miss-spelt little story. (I always make howlers when I am tired.) Still, the Dear Readers have been extra dear lately, and I know you will understand.

As for photographs, I have nothing for you, but this most beloved, most blinky, most beautiful face:

No blog.

I had a rant all ready to go for you. But then I realised I am far too fragile for a rant. The fragility comes from tiredness, which comes from still not having worked out how to organise my time seamlessly and effectively. I will get there. I have not got there yet.

And the reason that one needs to be robust for a rant is that it invites responses in kind. When I am this tired, my skin is thin as paper. (It is not very horned and hide-ish at the best of times.) Someone would get furious, or take something I said the wrong way, or merely get a bit ranty themselves, and I would want to weep. Then I would castigate myself for being so pathetic, when I spent the morning with people who have no legs. So you do see.

Actually, my current favourite member of the walking, talking perspective police is a gentleman who got shot in the head. He had to learn everything again from scratch. Now, you would not know. He occasionally looks at the sky and searches for a word, but other than that there is no sign that he had to rebuild himself from the beginning. Imagine that. The horses adore him. Despite having been one of the most brilliant of brilliant fighting men (he was in a crack regiment and people who know of his service speak of him with awe) there is something rather gentle and earthed about him. So that is why the voices in my own head tell me that the very least I can do is butch up a bit.

However, tonight, butchness is unavailable. That app may not be downloaded at this time.

Instead, I went and sat in the field and read and looked at my horse. I have already lost Virginia Woolf, so I took Lytton Strachey instead.

I’d forgotten how much I love him. I love him with my whole heart. He is so funny and clever and unexpected.

The light was astonishing, the thickest, most golden, most ancient yet this year. It was like that line in Leonard Cohen: ‘and the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbour.’

The horses ignored me and went to graze. They are happy; they have no need of their human just now. Stanley the Dog, who had been off sniffing for pigeons, suddenly appeared by my side. I was intent on the lovely black prose on the old yellowed page in front of me when I felt an insistent nose pushing at my arm. Up, up, up, it went. So I lifted my arm and draped it over his strong body and scratched his ear and went on reading about the corpulent Prince Regent.

 

Today’s pictures:

This morning:

This evening:

In which I continue to wrangle with the computer; or, Windows 8 is an evil genius when it comes to the art of time suckage.

Another entire day is lost as I tangle and wrangle with the computer and the satanic quicksand that is WINDOWS 8. (You need to say it in that special Coming Soon voice that the gravelly old fella on the trailers always used at the cinema. You know the thing: it was a time of DOOM, it was a time of TERR-ORRRR, it was a time of DARKNESS. 

Well, this is the buggery time of WINDOWS 8. Clearly invented by someone for a bet or some twisted revenge scenario on the entire computing population.

There is the thing which always happens, which is the awful realisation of how completely dependent I am on a functioning machine. There is the blind rage which comes from expecting things to work and not know what to do when they do not. There is the old-school banner-waving resentment at the vast, faceless corporations, who care nothing for individuals driven mad by conflicting software and hidden glitches and an utter lack of any kind of instruction. Oh, do send us a report, they say insincerely, but we can’t guarantee that we shall reply. In the echoing hells of the Facebook forums, I find the wailing voices of people who ran into insurmountable problems four months ago and still plaintively await even the acknowledgement that they exist.

But still, you know, I do have my opposable thumbs. I can type. I’ll get up early tomorrow and go at double speed and somehow claw the hours back.

The good thing was that in the midst of all the tech rage, I spoke to an interesting and kind gentleman. I read a bit of Jung in my youth and he was very keen on those kind of coincidental happenings which he described as synchronicity. When the old hippy is in me, smelling the flowers and saying hello sky, I think that perhaps the universe does send one stuff at the exact moment one needs it. I don’t mean literally, of course, but in a figurative sense; in a there’s more in heaven and earth sense.

The interesting man happens to have the same interest in horses as I, and a skill which I do not have, but need. He seems amazingly willing to share this skill, just at the time I am most feeling its lack.

So there was goodness and kindness to act as balm for the rage.

And the evening sun is out, shining in that thick, amber, Italianate way that it does at this time of year, and in a moment, I’m going to go and mooch about with my red mare. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being still with horses, and watching them, and reading them, and being sensitive to them and getting in tune with them. I read something this morning which said that sometimes they just need you to be there. That’s all. I liked that very much.

The interesting man has a fascinating concept about the power of merely sitting with a horse. It’s quite hard to do. It’s like meditation, when the mind starts leaping about; every time you try to empty it, it fills with even more antic notions than usual. So it is with the sitting. At once, the temptation is to do things. Humans like to do things. I like to do things. Sitting, oddly, is a discipline. But I think I’m going to try it. I’m going to take a book and sit in the field and see what my funny old duchess thinks about that. Better make sure it’s proper literature, at any rate. She would not like it if I pitched up with a cheap thriller. No Dan Brown for her. I shall have to choose very, very carefully.

Today's pictures:

The herd this morning, with the wind up. And the first signs of autumn:

 

No Stan the Man today; he was galloping about too fast for the camera to catch him. And I have not yet downloaded all my photographic files onto this new computer. I do, however, have some of the archives available, and I found this old glory, of the Duchess and the Pigeon. I miss them still:

 

I wrote this earlier, then went to the field, came back starving, made a chicken pie for supper and only now am finishing it off, as the night grows black outside my window. I DID go and sit with my book in the field. I took The Crowded Dance of Modern Life by Virginia Woolf, which I thought was very appropriate. I waited for something momentous to happen. I waited for anything to happen.

Nothing happened.

I think that was the point. I sat on my log, under the big tree, and read. The girls gathered in a row by the fence and dreamt of their tea. Stanley the Dog got bored and buggered off looking for rabbits. It was just four sentient creatures in a quiet field, being. I think that may be the point of everything.

 

Rage against the machine. Or a new computer brings me fury and joy.

The computer stutters and quivers and goes strange colours (sometimes it is like a fog has descended.) A vast amount of the time it will not do anything. Every time I scan it, it finds thousands more errors. This morning, it ate half a chapter of book.

I think, plaintively: but I never, ever open those emails asking me if I would like a more erect erection. (I think the people who send these are a little muddled.)

Just at the moment of terror and despair, the door goes and Stanley the Dog barks his head off and I find a kind gentleman with a box. ‘Oh Stanley,’ I cry, gazing at the gentleman with pitiful delight. ‘Don’t bark. It’s the lovely man from John Lewis.’

(I needed some linen and a nice shampoo and various other things at the same time, so I got it all from John Lewis, which is never knowingly undersold, and delivers in about half an hour flat and does not discriminate against me because I live north of Watford.)

The man from John Lewis looked slightly surprised, but took it in his stride. Stanley gave up barking and went to inspect his van.

‘He thinks you’ve got Bonios,’ I say, conversationally. I am giddy with relief and so quite chatty.

‘Fish and chips,’ says the gentleman, not seeming to mind.

‘Oh careful,’ I say. ‘He’ll have that. He’s a lurcher.’

We part in mutual fondness. Or it may be that the happy look in his eye is simply because he is managing to escape before I start telling him about Red the Mare and how the great filly Treve danced all over her opponents at Longchamp yesterday, quckening miraculously off a slow pace and shooting courageously through gaps that were not there. I swear at one point she just shouldered her way past two other horses as if to say: out of the way ladies, girl’s coming through.

And so, the day is saved. I am passionately glad that I shall not lose everything. But the day is also lost, in the temporal sense, because of the endless, grinding, convoluted, sadistic process of setting up a new machine.

What about the old ladies? I find myself thinking. I’m not a techie, but I’m under fifty and reasonably well-educated. I got email half way through my twenties, although at the time I only knew one other person who had it, and we used to send merry exchanges across the Atlantic Ocean, in a slightly self-conscious early adopter kind of way. I admit I did have to type both my first books on a typewriter. But still. I am of the technology age. Yet it took six hours. SIX. What about those people who grew up with pens and paper and dial telephones? My mother actually spent her childhood driving around in a pony and trap because it was the war and there was no petrol. How would that generation manage?

It is the most lovely, sleek, beautiful machine. It is all shiny and fast and new. But it has Windows 8 on it. Windows 8 looks frantically sexy and is the work of Satan. Well, they always say the devil will have the best lines. It’s all touch-screen and trying to be Apple, and I don’t really like Apple. (That is a very subjective judgement. I realise it is brilliant. I just like typing and clicking.) It is filled with meretricious buttons which it calls Apps, in a dad-dancing kind of way, trying to get down with the kids.

What about the old gentlemen? I think. Do the silver surfers count for nothing? How shall they work all this out?

It has lots of commercial things stitched into it. I don’t want shopping applications and the ghastly Norton and an Ebay button and various things which insist I must scan my registry this very minute. I like choosing my own. Free market, I snort, the old lefty in me suddenly singing the Internationale. Not very free, if you ask me. I feel as if I am being press-ganged.

So I bash my way through my first world problems and think how absurd all this new technology is, and feel glad that I may get a lovely new machine but also furious that I have to, since obsolescence seems to be built in.

I’d like one good item onto which I could put all the nice software which I have chosen and which contains all my writing and all my photographs of Red the Mare and Stanley the Dog and all the old tunes I adore and for it to last for ten years. But that, apparently, would not please the grasping cabal of computer people, who clearly don’t give a bugger about landfill and just want me to have to replace the poor tottering creatures every two years. It has happened with every machine I’ve ever owned, no matter how much anti-virus I put in, or firewalls I erect. They just start to die. (Except, I do admit, there was one which I slaughtered myself, with Diet Coke.)

Still, I must count my blessings. The thing is very pretty and it works. I may write my book and do my work. I just need a little strong liquor for the regulation new computer rage.

 

No time for pictures. It’s after the Archers, even. I don’t know what I’m doing really, sitting here writing a blog at this time of night. But I do know that these three don’t give a bugger about technology, and I find that rather soothing:

Feels like flying.

JUMPING.

Jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

Actually, I tell a lie.

We were not jumping.

We were FLYING.

You’ve seen these pictures before, but there was no photographer on hand this morning, and they are the only ones which come near to expressing the joy.

Initially, I did not intend to do any crazed leaping. It’s my first proper day back riding after falling off The Other Mare. I was very, very sore; at one point I became convinced I had actually broken my tailbone. Sensibly, I thought I’d get back into the swing with a bit of gentle walking. On top of which, Red was a bit spooky and resistant when I got on, staring at ghosts and throwing her head about.

I don’t get involved when she does things like this, which she doesn’t very often. I just change the subject. Let’s go this way, I suggest, politely. Let’s do some figures of eight and some transitions and some fiendishly twisty little circles. At which point she stops being a drama queen and gets her mind back on the job.

(Incidentally, ‘change the subject’ is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given about riding.)

And then, I don’t know why, I just thought bugger sense. And off we went. Zoom, zoom; whoop, whoop. She loves it so much it makes me laugh. She pricks her ears and picks up her delicate feet and leaps over our tiny, home-made obstacles as if she were at Hickstead. She’s got a hell of a jump; I can almost physically feel the air whooshing underneath us.

I just concentrate on staying with her and keeping her straight; I let her find her own stride, which she does, impeccably, every time. I think she really is a natural. She was wasted on the flat; they should have sent her over hurdles and she would have been a champion.

As we canter out into the wild grass, with me standing up in the saddle, leaning forward over her neck as if I am riding cross country against the clock, it never occurs to me that this great, powerful thoroughbred does not even have a bit in her mouth. She’s excited, but steady under me, all her early skittishness gone. For precious moments, it’s just me and my horse, in glorious, rhythmic harmony; there is only this great, rushing feeling, of joy and union.

The Horse Talker witnesses the last two great leaps. She says the nicest thing anyone could have said. She looks at Red, and looks at me, and says: ‘You look so....’ She pauses, thinks. ‘Together,’ she says at last. ‘As one.’

And afterwards, as I put the happy mare back in her field, and she heads straight for the shelter where the other girls have gone to gossip in her absence, no doubt to tell them of her great adventure, the HT adds: ‘You really trust that horse, don’t you?’

I smile. It’s the truest of the true things.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I damn well do.’

In which everything almost CRASHES. And, of course, Red the Mare saves the day.

The day, which started off on a blast with good HorseBack work and 1378 words of book, went into a spiral at about 3.30pm as my computer began to exhibit signs of catastrophic failure.

You all know this. You have all had the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. I jabbed pointlessly with my finger, booted and rebooted, prayed to the non-existent technology gods, grew tearful, shouted at myself for being such an idiot for not heeding the warning signs earlier, and reflected bitterly on my absolute dependence on this machine. All my work is in here; all my pictures, music, communications. I have, for once in my life, backed up the most important files, but even then, if the thing were to go phut, which it was threatening to do, I am left with nothing but a useless black box and I live forty miles from the nearest computer shop, and that is the eighth circle of hell that is PC World. I would almost rather pull out my own fingernails than go there.

As I was wrestling and swearing and weeping and praying, I thought I might ask the Horse Talker to do evening stables tonight. I would have to stay shackled to my desk and curse the ghastliness of the modern electronic world. Then I thought: bugger it. I managed to shut down the computer. I’ll just give it a little rest, I thought, and go and put on Red’s raincoat, since it had started pelting with rather cold rain. She is a thin-skinned thoroughbred. Unlike native breeds, she needs a little protection.

When I got to the field, she was sheltering under her favourite tree, with her small herd gathered safely around her. The moment she saw me at the top gate, she led them all the way up, in Indian file. I dashed in, tense and furious still from the computer frenzy, flapping the rugs about in a most unhorsewoman-like manner.

My darling old duchess stopped stock still and looked at me seriously as if to say: yes, I suspect it is the moment for the lightweight waterproof. She ducked her head and stood like a statue as I fumbled about with the straps. She sighed a little half-suppressed sigh, as if not wanting to be rude. (We do, after all, put a high premium on manners in this field.)

Autumn the Filly then did the same. My angst fled. I was so overcome with the goodness and sweetness of these two clever equines, who presented themselves politely in the middle of a violent rainstorm, with no need for a halter or a rope, and did not appear to mind how cack-handed I was as I fiddled about in a way calculated to irritate a sensitive flight animal. Myfanwy the Pony, being a hardy mountain breed, does not need rugging, and merely stood to one side, watching the proceedings with a sage eye.

Red blew down her nose and rested her head against me and I stroked her sweet spot and chatted to her for a bit and felt my knotted shoulders come down. Every damn time, she gives me the gift of peace. Then she whickered gently to remind me that it was time for her tea.

When I got back, restored, I turned the shaky contraption back on. There was no BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, but it was all glitchy and scratchy and mostly unresponsive. Finally, I got some kind of scan to work. It turned out that I had 7099 catastrophic errors. My poor old computer, I thought; all that time I was berating it and cussing it and jabbing it, it was doing its best. I had let it get clogged with junk and nonsense and fragments.

The good old cleaner chugged away, and suddenly, miraculously, it was working again. So I write this with grateful fingers and think that never again shall I let the poor machine get in such a mess. And I reflect, as always, how miraculous it is that even in the midst of a crashing tech fail, that great red mare can still calm my troubled mind.

Almost time for The Archer now, so just two quick pictures, of the little Zen mistresses who hold my sanity in their dear hooves:

(Don’t you love that little Myfanwy face in the background? Whilst the big girls come to the gate at feeding time, she stays staunchly under her favoured tree, until the bowls come out and it is time to line up at the fence. Makes me laugh, every morning, and every evening.)

Bonus Post: Best Beloveds

I suddenly realised that I had not put up the traditional Best Beloved pictures. I thought: but today is September 11th. If that day is about remembering anything, it is remembering love. I know that sounds strange, but I still think that love conquered hate that day. You can’t bring down love with jet-liners, you can only destroy buildings. People sent messages of love, helped each other for love, mourned each other with love.

So then, in a kind of frenzy, I thought: I must put up all the Beloveds. I must trawl through the archives and find all my humans.

Finding all my humans, it turns out, would take forever. Which feels sort of symbolic of something, I’m not sure what. A good thing. My heart has a lot of humans.

So I’m just giving you the animals, as usual.

And then I thought: perhaps that is better. Animal love is so simple and easy. Everyone can love a glorious dog, or a beautiful horse, or a sweet pony. Every person can say, as some of the Dear Readers sometimes do: oh, but how I love Stanley’s handsome face.

That’s the clever thing about animals. They are universal. They are the generous receptacles for all that good, human love, even when you have never met them before.

And now I really am rambling. It’s been a long day. I’ll stop, and let you enjoy The Beauty:

A good rule for life. Or, in which I swore I would not go off on tangents; in which I failed.

Not so very long ago, I had to disappoint someone.

It was awful. I hated it. It was also entirely my fault.

I had, in a moment of excitement, made a rash suggestion which turned out to be logistically impossible. More than that, it was not in my gift. So I had to revoke it, and create a state of disappointment in another human.

I think I may have a rather horrid self-regarding fantasy that it is quite charming, just to speak out loud what comes into your head at the moment you think it. It’s all those words that people like: spontaneous and real and expansive. It’s the very opposite of the thing which made Ian Katz, the editor of Newsnight, tweet that Rachel Reeves was ‘snoring boring’. Rachel Reeves was excessively dull on Newsnight. But she was dull for a very particular reason, which was a calculated suppression of all spontaneity.

She did the thing, absolutely on purpose as so many front-line politicians do, of sticking doggedly to her talking points, so robotically on-message that there was no room for wit or whim or improvisation.
I am almost certain that in life she is not boring at all. John Major, for instance, caricatured to death for his vapid, grey dullness, is by all reports rather dazzling and naughty in real life. Even in his recent public pronouncements, now he is freed from the confines of office, he is interesting and sage and often unexpected. I never, ever thought that John Major would turn into the sort of person I would stop everything for when he comes on the radio, but he has. (Alistair Darling is another who has followed the exact same trajectory. Trucker’s Weekly voted him most boring MP twice. Now he may roam around the backbenches, liberated from the shackles of the Message of the Day, he is suddenly fascinating. But then I’ve always had a most peculiar love for Alistair Darling.)

All of which is another of my absurd tangents. The point is: I’m not sure this wild shooting from the hip is all that charming. Of course one cannot police every word; of course freedom of expression is a lovely thing; of course a syncopated verbal riff is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. But words matter. Some people may think you really mean something which in fact is just a dancing, glancing thought. I often start hares running with no idea where they are going. I have a tendency to hold ideas up to the light and examine their facets. I come up with outlandish plans which sound delightful one day, and idiotic the next.

Not that long ago, I told the Horse Talker that all I really wanted to do was get on Red the Mare and ride to Skye. Ride to Skye???? What was I thinking? Imagine how cross and wet and lost we would get. Both of us hate camping. (Or at least, I am assuming that my grand duchess would not like roughing it at all. She is very particular about the correct time for tea, and gives one de haut en bas looks if it arrives late.) But for at least two days, I believed that was the sole purpose of my equine life.

I think my point is that the mark of being an adult is composed of two parts: understanding that actions have consequences, and taking responsibility for those consequences. I remember coming up with this idea at a moment when I was very, very cross about the privileging of romantic love above all things. The idea was, still is in certain foolish quarters, that love excuses everything. If you are truly in love, you can break up families, wound the blameless, uproot bewildered children, all because you must be instinctive and spontaneous and real and follow your stupid heart.

I think this is arrant nonsense. I remember crying at that moment in Brief Encounter when the conventional old husband says to Celia Johnson something like, ‘You’ve been a long, long way away.’ I cried not because she was leaving dashing Trevor Howard, but because she had done the right thing. That was where the pathos lay.

I think that is why in the future I’m going to be a little bit more careful in what I say. I make the rather arrogant assumption that people will understand the difference between the things about which I am convinced and serious, and the ones which I am rashly or whimsically trying on for size. Think before you speak is not such a very bad rule for life. Sentences, like actions, have consequences; one must be responsible for them. The feckless, heedless part of  my brain tends to run faster than my mouth. I’m going to take it aside and have a very, very stern word.
 
Today’s pictures:

Are actually from today, for once. Sheep and hills and trees and coos. Something very peaceful about them all: 

























It sounds a bit odd, but as I write this I’ve only just taken in the fact that it is September 11th.
I never know what to say on that anniversary.

I suppose that perhaps today’s subject is appropriate, since it is about actions and consequences. The odd thing about terrorist organisations, from Al Quaida to the IRA, is that they never take responsibility for their actions. Someone else always made them do it: the evil Western imperium, the corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Americans, the British government, God. They never say: we wanted to blow a lot of people up, and we did. They use weasel words and oddly childish excuses. They point fingers of moral equivalence and say: but they did it first, or worse. I don’t think one can ever have respect for any organisation that deals in death, but one might at least take them more seriously if they told the truth.

A fairly rambling Thought for the Day.

At HorseBack, a man says to me: ‘Tania, come in here. There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s doing things with women.’

We go in. I am introduced. The HorseBack man says: ‘You are a raging feminist after all.’

I smile proudly. I say: ‘I am a raging feminist.’

The other gentleman also smiles, with no trace of fear.

I’ve never understood the thing of not being a feminist. Why would you not want men and women to be treated equally? Why would you privilege one group of humans over another, simple because one set has ovaries and one set has testicles? (It’s a dick thing, shouts the puerile side of my brain. But then, I’ve never really understood that either. Oh, and while we are on the subject: PENIS ENVY IS A MYTH.)

I think the problem is that people get muddled. Category errors canter about like spooked horses. The idea somehow got put about that feminists refuse to acknowledge difference, that they want men and women to be the same, that in order to achieve this evil plan they must emasculate the gentlemen and butch up the ladies. This is the category error. Men and women are not the same, although one has to be a little careful here, since the male/female brain is on a spectrum, as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has so lucidly shown. Not all men have very male brains, and not all women very female ones. But that’s a whole other story. The point is that however different humans may be, they should be afforded the same opportunities. That’s the equal part. Not equality of self, but equality of dignity.

However, that is not the gist of this story. The point of this story is that it turned out that I got to meet another of the fascinating men. Without a second’s pause, we were off to the races. We galloped over courage, motivation, confidence, belonging, the basic human needs, societal fears, war and any other animal we could get our hands on. By the time the HorseBack man came back in and asked about the women, I said: ‘we’re way beyond the women, we’ve done the whole human condition.’ (I’m also ashamed to say that I bellowed, in quite a small room: ‘SO INTERESTING.’ I have a tendency to shout when excited or riveted.)

What I thought, as I drove away, again stimulated by being in the presence of such an active and thoughtful brain, was a comically simple thing. It is: there are an awful lot of good people, doing an awful lot of good things. They don’t make the papers, they are not followed by the paparazzi, they don’t provide rich fodder for the tabloids. Quietly, unheralded, they go into the places where the broken people are, and do their best to repair shattered lives.

This particular interesting gentleman works for an organisation which helps everyone from addicts to young offenders to children in care. His current project is working with female offenders (hence the women). Prison is stuffed full of women who come from shattered backgrounds and grinding poverty; they often take to drugs, which in turn leads to prostitution. They find themselves in the grip of a pimp or an addicted partner, who may push them onto the streets in order to pay for a double habit. These are the difficult people, from whom society turns its eyes. This interesting gentleman helps them pick up the pieces, and find hope in the wreckage. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to take off all my hats.

The interesting gentleman I met last week also works for a charity, doing similarly vital, good, often unsung work. I thought of these two clever people, making a damn difference. I get a little despairing sometimes, when I think of all the sorrow and the pity. The barrage of bad news from Syria, that most knotty of Gordian knots, with no good solution or easy answer, can make one want to give up and hide in a hole until it is all over. Sometimes, if one pays attention to the news, it is tempting to think that the whole of the human condition is poverty and fear and prejudice and injustice. We are all for the dark, and there’s nothing in our puny plan which can counter it. (You see that I am so exercised that I have used my hated Universal We. Forgive me.) But there absolutely are rays of light. These good individuals, fighting their own good fights, are the glimmers in the darkness.

The other trap that I sometimes tumble into is the idea that all these organisations are too small, up against the hugeness of the wars and dictators and terror organisations and blank walls of hatred. But then I think of the thing that was quoted in Schindler’s List, when Oscar Schindler was berating himself for not saving more people. Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. It is a small, difficult truth. But it is a truth, and it is a light, and it is my thought for the day.

 

Today’s pictures:

The Remarkable Trainer came and continued Red’s jumping education:

She actually did a BOUNCE. This is when you put up two fences without a stride in between. The horse must land and then immediately take off. It’s pretty difficult. This is only her fourth serious jumping lesson. She did it perfectly, twice. The RT and I whooped and threw our arms in the air. Red looked at us both as if to say: Yes, well, of course.

Clearly telling her best friend all about her own utter brilliance:

Look at this collection. She is starting to learn to carry herself like a dressage horse. Rather amazingly, it is not done with contact or even any obvious aids, but the power of thought. This sounds bonkers, but, as the RT explains, if you just think upwards, the horse will rise up to meet you. It’s a completely different gait, the most lovely, rolling trot. Red is so, so clever I can’t really get over it:

I love this intelligent face. And the ear, of course:

We haven’t had a beech avenue for a while. Here’s one with a galloping dog in it:

The hill: