Some absolutely pointless Friday questions.

I stand down by the shed, with the red mare’s head on my shoulder, talking of life and complicated families and the odd twists of human psychology. The sun thinks about coming out, and then changes its mind and goes sullenly away. The mare is covered in mud and growing her teddy bear coat for winter. She is content. I love her very much.

I think about the oddities of the things that make one human happy, and the things that make another human sad. I think particularly about the small things. Poor Matthew Parris just wrote an article about what a furious mass of crowd rage he had uncovered when he dared to write something disobliging about UKIP. He is an old school, one-nation Tory, rather courteous and thoughtful, and the intemperance of the Kippers made him despair. Underneath his article, all the furious people came out and were ruder than ever. It’s all ad hominem with them, although they could not see the irony. This fury on the internet gets a lot of press, and there is an odd herd mind which takes hold on message boards. I don’t know why it astonishes me that the readers of those two old grand ladies, the Speccie and the Telegraph, leave by far the rudest comments. They are much more polite over at the Staggers, and much funnier at the Guardian.

I do mind the rudeness very much, but just at the moment I find myself fixated on the absurdities of the unimportant. I really do mind about the absolute lack of spelling and grammar. It’s not just on news sites, where some of the crosser comments use English which looks as if it were randomly selected by a bot. It’s on every forum I visit. Breaks for brakes, should of for should have, you’re for your. I like playing with the language, and will merrily split an infinitive so it damn well stays split. I will rashly end a sentence with a preposition, and sometimes invent new words. (I do not think that wibbly is found in any dictionary, although it is the only satisfactory adjective for the soft lower lip of the glorious mare.) I make typos and sometimes completely forget how to spell.

I know I’m a writer, and it is my job to use the English language. I know that I am a nerd, and it is my obsession. But it’s so easy to write simple, clear English. Anyone can use a full stop, or put a capital letter at the start of a sentence, or understand the apostrophe. I find the trashing of such a beautiful resource almost physically painful.

Once I’ve got onto this hobby horse, and galloped off in all directions in the manner of a Daisy Ashford hero, I become fixated on tiny expressions which drive me batshit nuts in the head. It used to be jargon which had this effect. For no known reason, I grind my teeth every time someone says they are going to grow a business, rather than a pot of mint. Now, it is growing wider than dead management-speak. Today, a government minister said that the world needed to ‘wake up to’ the problem of Ebola, and instead of fretting about a fatal pandemic, which would have been the correct reaction, I grew furious over that unlovely phrase. In a similar manner, I want to throw things every time a person says ‘it’s down to you’. It used to be ‘up to you’. Where did this awful ‘down’ come from? Even Lord Fellowes has smuggled it into Downton Abbey. Don’t even get me started on ‘end of’, or ‘TB’ for thoroughbred, or ‘hun’ as an abbreviation of ‘honey’. They fly like stinging arrows to my idiot mind.

My old dad always said that once you got the irritation there was nothing you could do about it. Some poor hapless person would annoy you in some way, and, after that, they could say nothing right. They could be the nicest person in the world, but every word out of their kind mouths would be nails on the blackboard from then on.

It’s so irrational. How on earth can it matter, when the world is so oppressed, whether someone chooses to say end of, or TB, or use he as the universal pronoun? (I get particularly livid when people do this with horses, as if they are writing off ALL THE MARES.) Talking of generalisations, I find the universal we even more distressing, particularly when it comes to women. We all want to lose half a stone; we all obsess over shoes; we all crave the latest must-have. What is this we of whom you speak? And while I’m on the subject, ‘must-have’ causes me daily offence. It is wrong on about eight different levels.

On the other hand, there are lazy tropes and worn phrases of which I am fond. I rather like ‘back in the day’, which drives one person I love demented. I use ‘old-school’ far too much. Almost every single one of my metaphors has an equine aspect. (There is a lot of galloping, and many, many prairies.) My skies are almost always the colour of some pigeon or other – doleful, despairing, or desperate. Practically everything is dear and old – Scotland, the weather, Blighty, TS Eliot, the hills. I’m always ransacking the most obvious parts of Shakespeare – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the sorrows not in single spies but in battalions, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. When I was editing the manuscript of the book, I found myself shamingly unable to kill all the darlings that should have died. I have developed awful little tics and twitches, and indulge them far too often.

Taste is so odd. Why do I love green but hate yellow? Why does it drive me mad that everyone has started using the redundant So to start every single sentence? Where did my adoration of Scott Fitzgerald come from, when I cannot wear Nabokov? (This is particularly wrong, since Nabokov is supposed to be the ultimate writer’s writer.) Why do I worship Nina Simone, but find myself left cold by Michael Jackson?

Those are my Friday questions.

Now I’m going to watch the racing. It has not only the great beauty of the thoroughbred, but also a glittering language all its own. I love every single racing expression. Racing has a lingua franca which stretches across nationalities and cultures. It is tribal but not exclusive. It is the sound of my childhood, the voice of my father, and it never ceases to thrill me.

 

Still no time for the camera. Just this dear old face:

As I have made the complaint about bad English, the irony gods will ensure that there shall be at least three howlers in this post. I’ve read it through twice, but my eyes have gone squinty. I rely on the Dear Readers to point them out and save me from myself.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are.

The good body and dry stone walls.

So sorry I have been away. My body suddenly went into spasm and that was that.

I felt most inadequate. Where was my stoical spirit, my great buggering on? My father was endlessly breaking things and dislocating things and getting back into the saddle. My body, it seemed, was made of weaker stuff.

The pain, which appeared to have been ebbing, got the bit between its teeth and decided to make an attack on several flanks. It amused itself by wondering which part of the frame it would settle in. It tried the neck; ran up and down one leg; explored every inch of the back. At one point, I was unable to put on a pair of socks, which was absurdly dispiriting.

Bloody hell, I thought, furiously, it was just one slow fall onto soft turf. Actually, I think there must have been a twist, so that things got wrenched, as if nerves and muscles have been pulled slightly from their moorings and this soreness is the re-attaching process.

As I lay, immobilised, for two days, I thought about pain. I know quite a lot of people who live with it daily. My mother does, although she rarely speaks about it. My father did, towards the end of his life, his bent physical self exacting payment for all those racing falls. At HorseBack, I work with people who know its every mean strategy, and have to do battle with it in long sleepless nights.

It made me think about freedom, and privilege. People are writing a lot about privilege at the moment, mostly because of rising economic inequality. There is that terrifying statistic which is going the rounds, about the top 1% of Americans being richer than the next 3 billion world citizens combined. A rich person in the liberal West is probably the freest and most privileged person on the planet, and it is right that commentators get exercised about the awful gap. But I started to wonder whether privilege is being marked on the wrong scale.

What really counts is agency. Fine accoutrements only get you so far. If you live in pain, so acute that even the drugs don’t work, then all the traditional privileges count for nothing. Your good body becomes a trap and a snare.

As I slept and slept, trying to heal, coming back to the old, old wives’ notion that there is nothing a good night’s sleep cannot cure, I wondered what would happen if sleep would not cure. I looked, foggily, at the internet, with its flashing banner about that 1%. I thought of those very rich. I did not envy them. The person I thought of, the beau ideal who kept coming back to me, was a dry-stone-waller I met once whilst staying with the Beloved Cousin in the south. He was a gnarled old fellow, and walling had been in his family since memory began. He could create a thing of beauty out of that Cotswold stone, and he was teaching the art to his son, who was teaching it to his son. I saw the three generations at work one sunny morning, and it was such a delightful sight that I had to try and restrain myself from doing the lunatic grinning which can frighten people.

That man, I thought, as I tossed and turned, has the real privilege, in its best and truest sense. Forget your fancy schools or castles in Spain or fine wines; forget your contact lists and private jets to Davos and seats at the top table. That man, whose name will never be known outside his quiet part of the country, has a good body which works, so that he can create something of use and beauty in the world. I would almost guarantee that he is happier than all those 1% billionaires put together. He is who I want to be, still out in all weathers in advanced age, still physically strong, still of the earth.

The pain is fading now, so that I can think again, although my mind is still a little battered and fogged, and a veil of soreness hangs over me.

Spinach, I think, and soup, and all manner of green things, so the poor body can get back to fighting strength. I see people whose physical selves have been shot to pieces. They still prevail; they ride horses and climb mountains and do jobs and make jokes and brighten the world. They do not complain or give up, but they have to strive. The thing that so many people take for granted, that I sometimes take for granted, is a body which works without hurting, and that is the privilege which cannot be matched.

 

Have taken no pictures this week, but this person has been the best of good companions, and put all his lurcher-ish instincts on hold to sit and gaze sympathetically at my weakened self. Not a hint of reproach in his dear eyes:

And a kind friend stepped in to make sure that the red mare was beautifully looked after:

Just thinking, as I finish this, of another kind of privilege. It is being able to write, without thought: ‘a kind friend’. The other thing, apart from the 1%, which has been doing the rounds in the news is an apparent epidemic of loneliness. I’m always wary when people start leaping on these kind of bandwagons; there is often a lot of hyperbole and why oh why and not much empirical working. But there does seem to be some evidence for an increasingly atomised society. I think there are people who do not always have a kind friend, and certainly not one who will step into the breach at a moment’s notice. It is another gift.

Don’t take anything for granted, say the serious voices in my head. Not one single thing. Riches come not in bulging wallets, but in the good body and the human heart. 

In which I hear the hubris angels flap their feathery wings.

I start the blog today with pictures, instead of words. You will see why as the story unfolds. To start with, all you need to know is that I was offered a ride on a most excellent Anglo-Arab, and ended up leading a posse up the hill. A great privilege and a great pride.





















As you can see, by the end I was feeling pretty cocky and pleased with myself. I am not very good at riding Western and have only had three lessons in the discipline. Although I like to think that I use a combination of English and Western as I ride the red mare, really what I am doing is riding English in an English saddle, which is what I grew up with. The two Western techniques I use are keeping my leg off and my seat quiet, which I like very much, and what I think of as inviting steering. This is where, instead of tightening the rein and bending the horse’s body round your inside leg whilst applying the outside leg behind the girth, you simply lift your hand and open the door. The horse then steps through that door. It feels like a Jane Austen gavotte to me.

In full Western, I realised my absolute novice status and tried to adapt and remember what I had been taught. It really is a very different beast from what I am used to. ‘Archie can occasionally be a bit grumpy,’ I was told with a laugh. And certainly, at the beginning, he did look askance at my amateur methods. But going up the hill, we got into a rhythm and he pricked his ears, and I thought Yeah, yeah, Green Grass of Wyoming. I had just ridden the red mare, and she had gone so softly and kindly and beautifully that she had infected me with love and confidence. I can do anything, I thought.
Wait till everyone sees this, I thought. My friend Jay has just got back from a week in the Rockies, rounding up cattle in the high places. He was riding behind, and I thought: I’ll be cutting cows too, before you can say knife.

At which point some young cows in the sloping pasture started rushing about to the right, and to the left a pheasant flew up right under my fella’s feet. He’d been distracted by the cows, getting a little wound up, but I was so punchy I had not paid enough attention. I was, I am ashamed to say, showing off. As the pheasant rose with its warning whirr, Archie jinked in alarm. And, dear readers, I FELL OFF.

One minute I was on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine; the next, I was flat on my arse, in front of a crowd of witnesses. I walked home, chastened, limping like an old crock.

The lady in the chemist was very sympathetic as she sold me a bumper pack of Ibuprofen. ‘I don’t suppose you have a pill for bruised pride?’ I said.

I draw my usual lesson from this. Whenever those wings of hubris start flapping, beware. Don’t get careless, because you think you are all that. Pay attention.

The lovely thing it did make me realise is how well I know that red mare and how safe I feel with her. She can still have a little spook from time to time, and she occasionally remembers her racehorsey past. Her majestic thoroughbred blood rises, and her ancestors call to her. But I know the signs so well, I can take action. I know every twitch of her dear ears, and every tiny tighten of every single sinew. Each morning, as I get on her, I can feel from the energy rising from her mighty body what her state of mind is. I know when she is at home with herself, easy in her skin. This morning, she was so relaxed and comfortable that I could take my hands off the reins, and let her stretch out her sweet neck, and know that all was well in her world. She is my person, and I am hers, and sympathy runs between us like starlight. Her thoughts are my thoughts, and mine are hers. That astonishing telepathic sense which horses have surrounds us with harmony.

Archie is a lovely horse, but he is not my horse. It was only the second time I’d ever sat on him, and I did not know the signs. I like to think that my meditations on herd behaviour make me able to read horses in general, and in a limited, basic way, I can. But really what it means is that I can interpret the mare, from all those hours of work, all those mornings of observation, all those weeks of devotion.
When I get above myself, I secretly think I’m a bit of a horsewoman. The truth is, I’m not. I’m a red mare woman. She gives me the astonishing gift of making me feel much better than I really am.

And finally, as I sit, a bit sore and a bit shivery and put firmly back in my box, I think again of my admiration for the Champ, the man of steel that is AP McCoy. He crashes at thirty-five miles an hour, onto hard racing turf. He’s taking a couple of days off just now, after a kaleidoscopic fall at Worcester in a novice hurdle. ‘He got me good,’ he wrote wryly on Twitter. He lay on the ground for fifteen minutes afterwards, but then, in true AP fashion, walked to the ambulance. That’s all part of his daily job. I fell off at a walk onto soft grass. It bloody hurt. It was a rude shock to the poor body. The thing happens so quickly. One minute you are on top of the world, the next you are flat on your back, staring at the ruthless blue sky. How these jocks do it never ceases to amaze me.

PS. I may have overdone it on the Ibuprofen. Not only should I not operate heavy machinery, but I should not be in charge of the English language. There will be typos. Forgive me.

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:

Beauty.

After the storms, Scotland looked very, very beautiful today.

The paddock now has a little loch in it:

But Herself is all muddy and happy and calm again, now those crazy winds have stopped blowing and she can get her rug off and have a good old loaf in the sunshine:

From the garden:

Focus is all over the shop in this next series, but it’s a sweet little photo essay. Red was doing her Minnie the Moocher walk to come and say hello, whilst Stanley the Dog was sunbathing. I just love Stan the Man being so preoccupied with his serious stick that he does not notice a HUGE RED MARE right behind him:

Also, what makes me laugh is that the duchess can’t be fagged to go round, but insists that the young shaver gets out of her regal way.

Also, for those of you interested in herd behaviour, and I know that number runs into legions, the red mare is giving a perfect lesson in pressure-release. Ask once, gently. If there is no response, ask again, more firmly. THEN REALLY MEAN IT. At once release the pressure when the desired result is achieved. She’s been watching her Warwick Schiller videos. Clever girl.

Weather.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

Are from before the rain:

Forgive me.

I had planned to start blogging again this week, but I found myself rather drained after my deadline madness, and there was a lot of work to catch up on at HorseBack UK, and I gave myself the gift of extra time with the red mare. (Who has been so delightful and sweet and angelic in the last few days that I need someone to invent a whole new thesaurus with novel words for glorious in it.)

I also found that, in order to retrench, I wanted time off from the internet. I adore the internet and do not join in with the cheap chorus of doom which reduces Facebook and Twitter to narcissistic vapidity. I think there are many things of worth to be found there – good jokes, poignant slices of real life, moments of arresting wisdom, and shining photographic beauty. But its constant clamour can be wearing for an introvert like me, so, apart from the odd post and random racing Tweet, I’ve been mostly reverting to the slow Scottish world of fields and mud and trees and hills.

Also, my dear mum has been in the hospital again. She is home now and on the mend, but that immediate aspect of real life has claimed me.

I do love this funny little space and the kind readers who come here, and I shall be back to full speed on Monday.

In the meantime, here is some Stan the Man loveliness for you:

Pause.

So sorry, my dear Dear Readers. There will be no blog for a week as I have too much book and too little time.

It’s not the writing. It’s the thinking.

The very fact that I used the word ‘thinking’ in relation to this blog will, I hope, keep you laughing for the next eight days until I return.

A new theory.

1885 words written. Five hours of editing. Horse ridden. Farrier welcomed. Dog walked. Kindness on the internet. Breakfast cooked for mother. Spirited political discussion with stepfather. Admin tragically left undone.

A fairly ordinary, good-ish day, in other words.

I was thinking today about enthusiasm. I am an enthusiast, and because of this I attempt to convince myself it is an unmitigated good. Today I contemplated the possibility it may have a dark side.

This was because, I am ashamed to say, I heard the voice of a very enthusiastic man, so jigging with can-do that I wanted to first punch him in the nose and then lock myself in a darkened room and do nothing for the duration.

How could this be? I am supposed to be a fairly nice person. This poor gentleman had never done me any harm. He was just being enthusiastic, which is something I myself am. Where had this visceral and rather beastly reaction come from?

I remembered my two most hurtful blog critics, one lady and one gentleman. Both of them said, in varying shades of rage – enough with the bloody horse.

The gentleman said it made him sick.

I remember at the time being entirely baffled. She is just a horse, and I love her. What could be more benign than that?

Perhaps it was the unbridled enthusiasm that drew such fury. I wonder if, allowed to gallop about in all directions, it becomes a rudeness, a reproach. I wonder whether it is a narcissism. Look at ME with all my passions and delights, whilst you are stuck in the corner channelling your inner Eeyore. Is it almost a reproach? Does it lack empathy? If someone is in a shitty mood, the last thing they need is a bloody enthusiast, leaping about the seeing the best in everything.

I think of the people who convince me. They are not the evangelists. One fanatical gleam in someone’s eye, and I go cussed and run off in the other direction. A bit of diffidence and self-deprecation, and I am sold. Some uncertainty – I suspect, I guess – and I am caught. I think of the voices on the wireless which entrance me. They are not the fast-talking, loud voices of utter conviction; they are the quiet, slow voices which allow nuance and doubt.

I think: is there sometimes an element of bad manners in enthusiasm?

I don’t want to turn into a stale jade, but I wonder perhaps if the dial might be turned down, for the sake of tender sensibilities.

It’s a new theory and I’m still working on it. I love a new theory.

 

Today’s pictures:

Hmm. Three pictures. Dog, horse and farrier. Three enthusiasms. But at least I did not put JAUNTY CAPTIONS.

For the horse people. Or, the red mare teaches me a hard lesson.

It is a Sunday and I don’t usually write a blog on a Sunday, so I think this one can be as self-indulgent as I like. You know that when I write the horse posts I try to put in a bit of good life lesson there, so that the non-horse people can enjoy the things. Today, this really is about the horse. It is for the horse people. It goes to you with love, because you will understand every word.

 

This morning, at 11.02am, I lost my temper with my red mare.

My red mare. The love of my life, the beat of my heart, the transcendental gift that stops me going bonkers.

‘Fucking HORSE’ I shouted. ‘Do you have any idea how much I think about you and work on you and write about you on the internet? Do you know how much money I spend on those Warwick Schiller video subscriptions so that you can have a happy life? Do you know that I sent myself right back to school so I would be good enough for you? Do you know how many times I had to embrace humility and admit that I was not good enough, and go right back to scratch? Do you know that I taught myself a whole new way of horsemanship, for you? AND NOW THIS????’

She snorted at me and rolled her eyes. She did not give a bugger. She is a horse, after all.

We had gone out for a nice canter. We’d been doing such nice canters in the last week that I had been boasting about them on the Facebook. I don’t know why I did not hear the hubris klaxon go off, but I didn’t. I’ve had a lot on my mind.

It started off light and floating and glorious and I whooped into the air. And then she suddenly did a half rear, a right plunge, a left plunge, and finished it off with a great, snaking, head in the air yaw. I almost fell off.

All the beautiful, soft harmony was wiped out, and the light stride broke up, and there was a wild, uncollected creature underneath me, as if a friend had turned into a stranger.

I was a bit frightened, I must admit. That was why I shouted. I was also humiliated, even though there was nobody there to see. Did this mean that everything we had done over the weeks and months was worth nothing? Had I been fooling myself all this time?

There is a certain school that would say – ha, typical thoroughbred. Typical mare, typical chestnut, typical ex-racehorse. Naughty monkey, that school would say; taking the piss. Kick on and try a martingale.

The new school I have embraced says, sternly, firmly, that there is no such thing as a typical horse, and that it is not laughing matter, and throwing kit at the problem will do nothing. This school says that it is almost always the human who is wrong. I had to look to myself, which is quite a tiring thing on a quiet Sunday morning.

The mare was by now hopped up on adrenaline, and throwing her head about, and had lost all focus. My adrenaline was high too and the first thing was to take a deep breath and bring it down. Temper would solve nothing, only pour down the reins as tension and convince her that there were mountain lions in the woods.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought. We are going to have to do some work. Sunday, Schmunday.

Slow transitions – halt to walk to halt; walk to trot to walk, three steps at a time. Back to lateral flexion. Looking all the time for the soft,willing place, which I had lost.

No, no, no, said the mare, still star-gazing. There is a man with a dog over there. AND CYCLISTS. In lycra. (She does not approve of lycra.)

Hey, hey, hey, I said; they are none of your business. Listen to me.

More transitions. Endless changes of direction, to get her focus back. Oh, she said, there you are. I had forgotten about you. Yes, you bloody well had, I said.

Turn turn turn; stop, walk, stop. Flex, flex, flex.

It was the canter we had lost, so I was determined to find it again. But to do that, we had to work up through all the gaits, starting with a perfect, gentle stop. That took half an hour. Finally, I thought we could risk the canter again.

Rush, rush, rush.

Back to the beginning.

And then, at last, the glimmer of something. Relax your shoulders, I told myself, and give her the reins. I had to be brave enough not to hold onto her. I started to think that adrenaline had been the problem, and that had to be banished, so the only answer was to show her that going into canter was not a tight, tense thing, but a lovely, open, loping matter.

I gave her the reins, prepared to find myself halfway to Inverness.

Oh, she said, all right. I don’t have to panic.

We did canter to walk, canter to walk, from voice. We did canter to halt. Lots of lovely loose walking on a long rein in between, so she could stretch out her neck, and remember that she did not have to be a racehorse, but could embrace that dear old cowpony incarnation which I love.

At 12.17pm, we hit the sweet spot.

Ah, I said, there it is.

Yes, she said, nodding. There it is.

I was exhausted, mentally and physically. I had ridden my arse off. I had thought my head off. We were united again, moseying back through the long grass on the buckle, as if none of that craziness had happened.

What was it? I wondered, as I brushed her down and put her to rights and let her out in the field.

I’ve been very grateful to her lately, because she does keep me sane. I’ve been writing a lot about how lucky I am to have her, and how she soothes my troubled mind as I rush up to my book deadline.

The problem is that gratitude is no good to a horse. In the wild, herd leaders are not grateful to the rest of the pack, as they fall in behind. They essentially say: follow me or die. Survival instinct is perhaps the defining element of a horse, because it is a prey animal. It does not want soppiness and outpourings of love; it wants safety. Perhaps I had gone soppy and allowed little things to slide without even realising it. She does not want me to fawn over her; she wants strong boundaries and consistency and sureness. She damn well does need me to step up to the plate. Maybe, just maybe, all that plunging and yawing was her way of saying she was starting to feel insecure.

Ruefully, as I read myself this stern lecture, I thought: what would my horsemanship mentor, the most excellent Mr Schiller say? He would say: how is your groundwork? Are there holes? he would say.

Sometimes I think I am one big hole.

I thought I was being so clever; I was certain that I was, as the great old cowboys who perfected this kind of horsing would say, taking Square One with me. But maybe I had left it behind, let it get raddled round the edges, blurred the outlines.

There is a lovely paradox at the heart of this way of thinking of horses. The aim is to find softness, to work off feel, to make everything easy and light. The horse becomes an extension of you. You think something, and the horse does it. There need be no yanking or pulling or kicking. But to achieve that, there needs to be toughness at the beating heart of it. There must be rigour. You have to be tough with yourself, keep checking motives and mental processes and physical techniques. Those good boundaries must be maintained. It needs slowness and patience and repetition. It is love, but it is tough love.

Back to the beginning, I think. Or, more accurately, the beginning never ends.

We did find a good note on which to end. I did not give up. We did have a canter on a loose rein in a rope halter. I did not fall off. The hubris demons laughed their mocking laugh and my temper got lost and my pride got bruised, but we are still partners. That mighty red mare taught me another of the forty-eight life lessons that she teaches me, every single damn day – don’t take things for granted, don’t get sloppy, don’t get cocky, never, ever, ever give up. Glory does not just fall from a clear blue sky; you have to work for it. You get back what you put in.

A thoroughbred is one of the greatest creatures on this green earth – fine and powerful and fleet and brave. Respect is due. The puny human game must be raised. Or at least, the game of this puny human.

Facing the void.

At 7.26am, the telephone goes. I struggle to consciousness. ‘Are the horses out?’ I mutter.

It is either that or someone has died.

My brother’s voice comes down the line, thin and high, from Bali, where he lives.

‘Hold on,’ I say. ‘I’m on the scratchy phone. I’ll pick up the good one.’

I go downstairs and settle myself on the sofa and watch the morning sun rise.

The brother is having a bit of a crisis. We are all having a crisis, because we are all going to die, and only two monks and the dogs in the street know what to do about that.

‘But you have your horse,’ he cries.

‘I do admit she is my perfect Zen mistress,’ I say, watching the yellow sun muddle in through the slats of the blinds. ‘Without her, I should probably run mad.’

‘All those hippies,’ he said (he is a bit of a hippy himself) ‘I see them, sticking their left toe in their right ear, trying to quiet the fear.’

‘They should get a horse,’ I say staunchly.

‘I’m not sure that everyone does with a horse what you do,’ he says, very dry.

We laugh for quite a long time.

He reads me Clive James’ poem about his daughter’s maple tree, and the gently falling rain. It is about those things. It has a faint air of ee cummings about it. (Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.) It is really about death.

‘Facing the void,’ says my brother. ‘That’s what it is all about. If only everyone could face the void, then they’d stop being so cross.’

I think about the poem. I shout, suddenly, down the long transcontinental line: ‘LOVE AND TREES.’

‘Yes,’ says my brother, slightly less doleful.

‘That’s what Clive James has come to. Love and trees,’ I say. I laugh and laugh and laugh, from sheer pleasure. Me and Clive and the beloved brother in Bali; we shall face the void with love and trees.

‘I do find the void frightening,’ I say.

‘And yet,’ says the brother, ‘we are just going back to where we came from. We were nothing and we go back to nothing.’

‘I thought of Dad last night,’ I say. ‘I wondered where he went. I mean: where has he gone?’

‘He came here,’ says the brother. ‘I got drunk on gin and told all his old jokes. I haven’t told those jokes for twenty years.’

‘Ah,’ I say, oddly relieved. ‘That’s where he went.’

We talk a bit more about death and love and the void. By this time, we are slightly hilarious, and the thing no longer seems so frightening. We are ironical about the void, and make jokes at its expense.

‘I love you,’ says the brother.

‘I love you,’ I say. ‘This is one of the best conversations I ever had.’

‘I did want you to know,’ says the brother. ‘In case I am run over tomorrow.’

‘Mind those buses,’ I say. ‘I’d rather you weren’t run over just yet.’

One of our grandmother’s oldest friends was actually run over by a bus. He had spent his entire life looking into the void, with an exhausted, comical melancholy. He was the saddest and funniest man I ever knew. He wrote one perfect book, under an assumed name, and then gave up.

‘Love you,’ the brother and I yell at each other.

Love won, today. Love beat the void. And now I’m going to ride my mare.

 

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