The ordinary.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

A good day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

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

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

Different fields.

In complete contrast to yesterday, I wake up determined and galvanised. I have huge amounts of work to do, and I’m running at full stretch. There is no time for moods.

The day goes well. I do a long stretch at HorseBack. There is a film crew there, making a short feature about the rehabilitation of Brook the ex-sprinter, and the parallel journey of our veterans. I want to cover every angle, so instead of my usual time-starved gallop in and out, I clear the day. Amazingly, in my lunch break, I run home and manage to fit in an incredibly productive stint of book. This reminds me that quite often the more you have to do, the more you can do. I have a shining feeling of achievement, instead of my more accustomed muddly sense of never quite having enough hours in the day.

I feed the mare and apologise to her for my absence this morning. (A kind friend did the early shift, as I was off with my camera.) She is forgiving and does not hold it against me. I mix her up an extra special tea and give her some love and stomp off to the shop to buy my own food.

In the shop, on the front page of one of the newspapers, is a gleaming picture of Amal Clooney, with a headline saying something like Queen of the Golden Globes. She is immaculate – beautiful, elegantly dressed, carrying that indefinable air of intelligence. Her many accomplishments are listed in the field of human rights law.

In the old days, I would have looked down at my own hands, filthy from feeding time, and plucked the little wisps of hay from my scarf, and contemplated my catastrophic hair day (on account of being out in wind and snow) and felt entirely inadequate. How could I, so scruffy and goofy and perennially trying to canter about in forty different directions, ever compete with such a composed, brilliant creature? I would have compared, because that is what much of the media encourages women to do, overtly or covertly. We poor ordinary females must look at the famous, glittering, magazine women, and wonder why we fall so short. (And there is an answer, say the avid advertisers – buy our miracle cream, and you too can marry George Clooney and save the world.)

Now, I don’t compare. I have my field, which is a literal, muddy one, and the dazzling Amals of the world have theirs. Comparisons are almost category errors. The part I really like about getting older is understanding that there are dreams which can be gently, quietly let go, without regret. I’ll never learn to dress like Ava Gardner or write like Scott Fitzgerald or be an expert in human rights, and that is quite perfectly fine. I need to find my own small field and plough it well.

Not comparing does not mean not striving. I strive like buggery. I want to get better – at prose, at horsing, at life. I want to learn more, open my mind more, comprehend more. I want, perhaps most of all, to gather the art of growing comfortable in my own skin. I can admire the brilliant women then, without being intimidated or diminished by them. I can be truly glad they are there.

The regulars amongst the Dear Readers know that I swear by the perspective police. Today, I listened to two veterans, telling their stories. These tellings were not grand-standing or show-boating. We were all going about our work, and the tales came out, naturally. One was about service in the Balkans, and the things seen. (I can’t actually write them down; they were too bad.) One was about being blown up by the Hyde Park bomb. Two minutes later, we were making bad jokes and shouting with laughter, because that is what these men and women do. They see the unseeable, experience things which stretch the civilian imagination to its breaking point, and then they make jokes about it.

They don’t like it when I write that I look at them in awe, because awe is not what they want. They want, I think, simple, ordinary humanity. But all the same, they have my awe, and they remind me constantly of the virtues of stoicism and resilience and damn well getting on with it.

 

Today’s pictures:

HorseBack runs a Youth Initiative, with which some of the veterans help out. It was this virtuous circle that was being shot in the afternoon, after Brook was filmed in the morning. One of the things I love most is watching people being really, really good at their job. This crew was good. I don’t know much about film, but I could see their qualities - from their concentration, their attention to detail, the way their minds never stopped working.

Despite my tremendous resolution about not making fruitless comparisons, there was a moment when I observed the stills photographer, with her years of experience and her good eye and her proper bit of kit, and felt a tremor. I ruefully looked at my own camera, with its ingrained mud from falling in the field, and its cracked screen from the time I dropped it from the horse, and thought of my own lack of technical skill. I love taking pictures, but I don’t really know how to do it. Every so often, I get lucky, and capture a moment, but it’s sheer chance.

And then I decided not to mind. My pictures are not for exhibition. They are not professional. They are idiosyncratic and sometimes a bit out of focus and the light is nearly always coming from the wrong direction, but I love them because they are mine, and they record those small things which bring me joy.

Here was the scene today:

This is what I mean by capturing a moment. This photograph has no technical merit. It’s all over the shop. But the smile on that young person’s face is worth more than rubies to me:

Moody Monday.

I rarely have moods. I get happy or sad, excited or frustrated, delighted or furious. These emotions usually have a reason behind them. I can deal with most of them reasonably well, most of the time. What I have no defences against are random moods, which come out of a clear blue sky, and stick in the gullet like a stone.

I managed to get my work done and plaster a smile on my face and act like a fairly responsible adult. Inside, I was yelling fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

It may be too much news. Someone I love very much does not watch the news. I sort of think that a grown-up should, but she may have a point. There’s so much one mere human cannot do, in the face of the endless gaudy parade of tragic world events. Does my opinion matter, when all the furious commentators are howling again about the clash of civilisations, and how this is a war which shall never end?

I do my work and put in a call to the Perspective Police (the line is out of order) and attempt to concentrate on the small things and think, just like Scarlett O’Hara, one of my least favourite heroines in popular culture, that tomorrow is another day.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one, from Saturday. The one that says: how can you be grumpy when you have a beauty like this in your life?

Her loveliness knows no bounds. Her beauty is internal and external. I’m going to think very, very hard about that.

Weathering the storm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

Posh face:

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

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

Work.

Author’s note: I’m not sure whether this makes any sense or is much to the purpose. I wrote it instinctively, without thinking, after long hours of editing and rewriting my book, my brain blank and empty from the effort of concentration. I’m going to leave it, as it came out, and hope it means some small thing.

 

Work is the answer.

Work is the resumption of normality, the balm for the troubled mind, the bulwark against uncontrollable events.

This morning, I worked my mare, steadily, and with concentration. She repaid me with sweetness and softness and willingness. My heart expanded in the golden Scottish light.

I worked my book, and that too seemed to respond as if it were an animate thing. It rose to my fingertips, as they tap tap tapped on the keyboard. My mind was active and engaged.

I’m sometimes not quite sure where my work ethic comes from, and then I remember my parents. My mother taught me that a tired pony had to be bedded down and fed a lovely warm mash and brushed off before I could come in and have my own tea. If we were lucky enough to have ponies, we had to look after them well. That was the deal.

My father rose before dawn every day of his working life, and mucked out three racehorses and rode out two lots and fed and watered and settled his good equine companions. He is remembered for being a roisterer and a boisterer, but at heart, he was a worker. No matter what he had been doing the night before, no matter how many songs he sang or drinks he drank, he would be up at five-thirty and would walk out into the dark, to see to those horses. They gave him speed and strength and heart and honesty, and he gave them the care they deserved in return. That was something he taught me without ever saying a word. It is the legacy he left. It is one of my truest things.

 

A postscript. In which there are words, after all.

It turns out I do have some words, after all.

Every day, because I live in a liberal democracy, I take freedom of expression for granted. I may write whatever I wish, without fear of the secret police knocking down the door, or the state censoring me, or a theocratic power stoning me to death. Every day, I may throw the language of Shakespeare and Milton up into the air and watch it fall.

Today’s outrage in Paris strikes a chord for many reasons, but one of the most jarring is that it is so dissonant. A friend says, bleakly: ‘Things like this are not supposed to happen in Paris.’ Paris, in the popular Western imagination, is the city of culture and beauty and wit. It is the place of wide boulevards, of the Rive Gauche, of the mighty Seine; it holds echoes of Hemingway and Beckett, of Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï, of Monet and Picasso, of Camus and Sartre. It is, in many ways, the city of words.

Not to be able to use words, on pain of death, stretches the imagination to the point of snapping. I am not sure what a natural human right is; the philosophers still argue over that, as they should. But words feel like a birthright, a most precious human gift, a miracle of synapses and cerebral cortexes and neurones.

As person after person comes on the BBC to declare that the fight for freedom of expression will never end, insisting that no act of violence can quell it, as the banner Je Suis Charlie takes over my timeline, I feel profoundly moved. This liberty, part of the liberty, fraternity, equality stitched into the French consciousness, is not something that can ever be taken for granted. It is a shining mark, a defining freedom. It should belong to every human soul.

 

No words.

As I start to write this blog, I see the last sentence from yesterday’s post. It says:

The word was love.

That feels both perfect and meaningful, and entirely empty, all at the same time.

The day started off in quietness and affection and normality. My oldest brother is here, with his best beloved, and they and my sister and the red mare and I went out for a walk in the mild Scottish air. We looked at the trees and the hills and talked and laughed and caught up. The mare, who adores the sound of happy human conversation, moseyed along on her loose rope with her sweet donkey head held low, entirely at ease with herself.

I went to my desk and got a lot of work done in a fast time. This happens sometimes. Although I always think I should spend hours at my desk, if the work comes quickly then the best thing is to stop and spend the rest of the day on other things. The editing is still not as ruthless as I would like, but I’m secretly delighted by the slightly magical story I am telling. I have not written a novel for many years, and this one is quite eccentric, but it takes me into another world, one I invented from scratch, and there is something almost miraculous about that feeling. I can see and feel and know characters who did not exist until I conjured them out of the privacy of my own head. I never take that for granted.

I was sitting with this slightly magical sense, letting it settle in me, when I flipped on the internet.

A friend on Facebook was saying that his husband was fine. I did not understand. As far as I knew, the husband was not ill or in a war zone. They live a most civilised life in Paris.

I went to Twitter, where all the news breaks. I looked for Paris. And that was how I found out about a mass shooting, and gunmen on the loose.

My body was already humming from the shift the fiction had brought in me. Now it started jangling in horror. I quite often have very strong physiological reactions to strong stories. When the veterans at HorseBack tell me of their experiences, I stand very quietly, but I can feel the atoms of my physical self rearranging themselves. I felt this now. I feel it as I write.

There is no good response to this. People are responding; arguments are already breaking out on the internet; interested parties are putting in their two cents. I have no cents. I don’t know what to say when there are such horrors. I love words and believe in words and use words every day of my life. Words are my business and my passion. But in the face of outrage, I feel, in an act of heresy, that they are paltry and thin. I believe that language is illuminating and healing, consoling and true. But with this, what do you say? Meaning flies away, on black wings.

Outside, the cloud is low, the sky the colour of doves. The bare trees stand, old and eternal, along the horizon. Everything is quiet and unchanged. Quite soon, I shall go down and give the red mare her tea, and make sure she has enough hay, and settle her for the night. The normality of my life in this sheltered place flows on, like a river. Out there, across the Channel, in a glittering city of light, there is death and hatred and grief and loss. There is no sense to it, and there are no words.

 

One word.

As I wrote yesterday, I don’t have resolutions, but I do have goals this year. I really feel quite absurdly adult every time I write that down. One of them is to improve the blog. Unfortunately, I have no idea how this may be done. I already give it pretty much my best shot, in the time I have and the mental capacity available to me. (As some of the Dear Readers know to their cost, this can be quite limited, especially on the days when the brain goes phhhttt at around tea-time.) I’m not quite sure where the improvement is going to come from.

Yeah, I thought, like one of those old hipsters who still wear jackets with fringes, I’ll snap up my prose and say things about life, man.

I’ll get snappy altogether. I’ll stop winding on and galloping off on tangents and saying the same thing in five different ways. I’ll bring in a bit more of the world. I shall put on my serious hat and address the Matters of the Day.

Most of all, I’ll stop banging on about the red mare. I hope you noticed that yesterday she did not get a mention.

And just this moment I thought: absolute buggery bollocks.

This is not supposed to be a great, shimmering, public achievement. It is the musing of an ordinary middle-aged woman, who happens to have the great good fortune to live in an extraordinary place. It’s not supposed to be life-changing, or profound, or philosophical. If it has a purpose, which I sometimes doubt, it is to raise a spirit, here and there. I swear I have become such a love and trees hippy that I think if I have made one person smile today, then my work is done.

I think: why did I decide that it must be better? Am I vamping for recognition or yearning for compliments or pleading for prizes? I don’t want to be that damn seal, begging for fish.

The lovely thing about a blog is that it is entirely voluntary. This is not your favourite newspaper, where you cannot avoid the idiot columnist who drives you batshit nuts in the head. It is not the prescribed book on the curriculum which you must summarise. If people hate it, they can read something else.

The mare exists here because I love her and I want her recorded. When she is no longer with me, I want to take down this book and slowly read. She is the great life event of my middle years, and she teaches me true things every day.

Today, she taught me something about stillness. I was rushing about as usual, up to HorseBack for work and a meeting, back to my desk with many pages of book to edit, thinking already about what I would write here, trying to catch Scotland with my camera as the most glorious sun dazzled down on the blue land. In the middle of all this, I went up to the field. The mare was hanging out with her little Paint friend, eating her hay and basking in the light. She stopped eating when I arrived, and stood next to me, her head over my shoulder, dozing gently as I scratched the special place on her cheek that is one of her sweet spots.

There have been a lot of articles lately about how mediation can save your life. I can’t meditate to save mine. My monkey mind monkeys around and I get cross and frustrated when I try to still it. As I stood under our favourite tree with my great, beautiful, powerful creature, harmony running from her mighty body to my puny one, I suddenly realised that I do meditate, just not in the usual way. The horse is my existential fulcrum.

She was a study in stillness, even as Stanley the Dog danced about her legs and staged his own running races. We were utterly still, together. She was not thinking about the book she had to write or the email she must send her agent or the time management she must attempt to enforce. She was just being her good, kind self, which is her special subject.

I put my head against hers and thought how people have a single word when they meditate. I chose a word. I filled my busy head with that word. I felt the word run from her self to mine, stitching us together, making us whole.

The word was love.

 

Today’s pictures:

Hello GIRLS:

(The awful thing is I can imagine him doing a Leslie Phillips voice at moments like this. Ding dong.)

And here he looks like a Ten Best Dressed Man from Tailor and Cutter, circa 1959:

It is amazing to me how two such elegant, beautiful mares can sometimes look like a caricature of Farmer Giles:

Watching Stan the Man run his race:

Special Scottish sheep:

The view south over the Dee valley, from HorseBack this morning:

An improving book.

I felt catastrophically stupid today. I don’t have new year resolutions, but I have set some goals for 2015. Even writing that makes me feel a little cringey, as the setting of goals is something I idiotically associate with gimcrack self-help gurus, or those asinine magazine articles which promise to transform your life in seven easy steps. However, there is quite a lot of empirical evidence to show that the discrete setting of goals is a good and productive thing, so I gave it a shot. I wrote them down and everything.

Oddly, already it has had a salutary effect. Reading improving books was not one of my goals, but as if galvanised by my three main aims for the year, I found myself doing exactly that today.

The improving book was How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. I would love to know how the mind works, and Professor Pinker is a brilliant and engaging writer, cleverly bridging the gap between the academy and the ordinary person. Or so I thought. I am now so bogged down in the weeds of his erudition that I actually have a physical response to it. My throat aches and my head feels as if someone is pressing down a large metal plate on it. Just now, I had to look up the word ‘transitivity’. I genuinely had no idea what it meant, not even a guess.

The dictionary definition is: a key property of both partial order relations and equivalence relations.

I have no idea what this is. I’ve never heard of a partial order relation. I would not recognise an equivalence relation if it came up to me and said ‘Hello, I am an equivalence relation’ whilst wearing an equivalence relation HAT.

At the party in the south, I was introduced to a charming cardiologist. ‘I sense you are a polymath,’ he said. (This was before I almost told him the entire story of the Repeal of the Corn Laws.) I felt stupidly proud. ‘I am a polymath,’ I cried, shining with delight.

Actually, I’m not. I am a duffer, because I don’t know what the buggery bollocks an equivalence relation is.

As I take a deep breath and calm down, I realise that I am probably not that stupid. There are lots of things I do know, like how to put on a poultice and how to pick the winner of the 3.00 at Musselburgh. But I really, really felt stupid.

It’s not the prof’s fault. All this is like ABC to him. I imagine that he could not truly visualise anyone not understanding what he was on about. It would be like me explaining to someone how to make chicken soup. I expect I shall bash on with the improving book, but it made me realise that I think books should be like friends. They should make you feel cleverer and brighter and better than you are. They should get the wings of your finer angels beating.

You don’t need fancy words and abstruse jargon. A book is not a proof of brilliance. It is an offering. All you need to make it fly is the simple declarative sentence, and a little syncopation. And probably a sprinkle of fairy dust.

 

No time for pictures today. Here is an archive shot of Stanley the Dog having fun with a tremendous stick. He too has no idea what an equivalence relation is, and the lovely thing is HE DOES NOT CARE:

Thoughts on love and loss.

I’ve written quite a lot about the old friends lately. I think it has to do with motoring towards fifty. I shall be forty-eight at the end of this month and there is a feeling of taking stock and counting the years. The love for the old friends hums in me, and there is a sweet comfort in all the history we have together.

I love them all in different ways, and they bring out different parts of me. One of them is a very dear man with whom I have always had a very straightforward relationship. We’ve never had a cross word or a falling out. We smile and laugh when we see each other. The ineffable fondness pours out, like starlight. I’m in Scotland now and he has done dazzlingly well in his chosen profession and is often travelling for his work, so we don’t see each other for long stretches of time. But we pick up just where we left off, beaming at each other in delight. It’s a friendship of absolute ease.

Today, I got an email from him telling me that his mother had died. I wrote back, a long, winding essay, all about that profound and shocking grief when a parent goes. It is like nothing else. I told him of my feelings for my father, when he died, and how I could not make sense of the world and how I had to lie down on the Scottish grass and hold onto the earth because I feared I might just fly off into space. I hoped that knowing he was not alone might help, although I am keenly aware that words are paltry things in the face of such oceanic sorrow. I have to write them, but I feel inadequate in every line.

In the end, after all the scribbling, I just sent love. Call if you need to talk, I wrote.

I thought of the long process of grieving. It is a process and it has to be done. You can’t cheat it or skip it or find a shortcut. You have to plunge into it and damn well do it. I kept thinking I was done, with my dad, and then I would find myself on the floor, weeping Railway Children tears.

I feel now the sharp serpent’s tooth of loss. I am sorrowing for my dear friend and his adored mother and his broken heart. As I do that, I remember all over again that tearing loss, that awful realisation that my father, that vivid, laughing titan, that man who risked his very life over huge fences (the docs told him to stop; he ignored them) no longer existed in the world.

I was talking to another of the old friends, a few weeks ago. She too is one of the most straightforward, love and admiration and affection growing between us like flowers in springtime. I said, rather out of the blue: ‘I’ve found a place to put Dad.’

It’s taken three years. He exists now, safely, in my heart. He lives with me. I think of him every day. I write about him quite a lot, here, on the Facebook page, in my Twitter feed, where there are many racing people who still remember him. He is with me every time I put on an improbable bet (the unlikely accumulator was one of his trademarks) and every time I go down to my mare. I did not realise it at the time, but I bought that mare to be closer to him, because he was a horseman to his bones.

Reading of my lovely compadre’s bereavement makes me think of the vastness of grief. Every ordinary human has to go through it, and, at this age, one starts to face more funerals than weddings. It is part of life; it has to be woven in. It is ultimately expected and natural and yet it feels as if it tears apart the very fabric of being. The missing never goes. You just have to find a way of folding it into yourself, so that it does not overwhelm you. I’m still not quite sure how I did that. I’d love to say I was very clever about it, and that the whole process was seamless. It was not. It was messy and painful and I got it wrong quite a lot of the time.

But in the end, I did find a place for him, my darling old dad. The really lovely thing is that I get the very best of him. That is what is left, it turns out. He was incredibly funny and charismatic and brave. People’s faces lit up when he entered a room. He had the happy gift of making people feel that the world was a slightly brighter place when he was in it. But he was also very naughty and irresponsible. As a father, he could not be relied on. He hurt, without even knowing that what he did was sometimes painful. Yet all that has flown away. I don’t even have to forgive it. It does not factor. I am left with him in all his glory – the idiosyncratic, beloved, mighty man, who threw his heart over a fence and whose horses would follow him to the ends of the earth.

Loss is loss, my sister once said to me. I was having trouble grieving for my dog, finding it hard to make sense of the depth of heartbreak for an animal when humans had been buried not long before. Loss is loss, and must be honoured. I miss my Dear Departeds, and that never goes away. But they exist within me, stitched into my heart; antic, shining and curiously alive.

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today. There was snow and sleet and gales when I went out this morning. These are from a Bobby Dazzler a few days ago:

We are not in Kansas any more. Or, an unexpected day of loveliness, and the first life lesson of 2015.

A very kind friend offered to feed the horses this morning and I was not booked to cook my mother’s breakfast, so I had the most fabulously luxurious lie-in, catching up on my December sleep debt. I never lie in, as horses do not understand about weekends or national holidays. It was the most glorious start to 2015.

Then there was a feast of racing. Many of my old friends were out, and some new ones too, celebrating their birthdays. (All thoroughbreds are like the Queen. They have two birthdays. Their actual date of birth, and the 1^st of January, when they all turn an official year older.) I was beside myself. Everything in the garden was as lovely as human and equine wit could devise.

Then I got an email.

The red mare was lame.

Despite the fact that Rock on Ruby, one of my favourite fellows, was about to dance up the Cheltenham hill, I threw aside everything and rushed down to the field. Sure enough, there was a very doleful girl, head-bobbingly lame and extremely needy. She buried her head in my chest as if I could make it all go away.

I hate lameness. I feel it as if it is my own leg that is damaged. I also hate seeing all that majestic power and strength hobbled and confined.

I set about some equine detective work, feeling for heat, running hands down tendons, examining the sole of the hoof. We did hosing, stretching, and gentle experimental walking. The dolefulness increased. There were little pleading creases of worry and plaintiveness above those liquid eyes.

Whilst I had a little think, I decided to cheer her up by giving her a full body rub. She is a duchess and deserves nothing less. I’d also been inspired by a fellow horsewoman to experiment with the pressure of the rub – good, firm, no messing versus light, feathery fingertips.

I got so carried away I did this for an hour, until she fell asleep. That should help with the serotonin levels, I thought.

In the end, I decided abscess was the most likely answer, so I got poulticing. The moment she was all wrapped up, my little drama queen lifted her head, gave me a cheerful look, and went off for a browse in the set-aside, still a little footy, but a hundred times better. Thank you, she seemed to be saying, that was what was required.

Then I made her the most delicious feed on earth, with mint and nettle and dandelion and Echinacea for her immune system, and lots of extra treats, and left her contentedly eating under her favourite tree, all fixed up.

There is something almost holy in putting a sad horse to rights. She just wanted her human, and she got me, for two whole hours. It was not what I planned for today, but it turned out to be an oddly lovely start to 2015.

I write a lot about love being actions, not words. Anyone can spout fine words. I spout fine words like nobody’s business, my trusty thesaurus by my side. But proper, real, earthed love is doing, not talking. I did love today, and my good mare reminded me of the importance of that. So, it turns out that the first day of the new year began with my best beloved professor reminding me of yet another profound life lesson. She is so clever.

As I came back into the house, smiling and contented myself, Judy Garland was singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I could hardly believe it. It felt like magic.

I had rushed out in such a hurry that I’d forgotten to turn the television off, and The Wizard of Oz had succeeded the racing. There was adorable Judy and enchanting Toto, and we were not in Kansas any more.

I’m watching it now, as I write this. Stanley the Dog is dozing on the sofa. He got incredibly bored during the whole rubbing and poulticing process and had buggered off to pay a new year visit to my mother. (On account of his ability to open every door he has ever met, he just lets himself in, and my stepfather rings up to let me know he has arrived and then I go and collect him, like a mother picking up a child after a party.)

The Munchkins are now singing Follow the Yellow Brick Road. I’m not sure a day ever turned out more serendipitously perfect.

I hope that all the Dear Readers had a dazzling start to the year. Perhaps you too got a great gift in an unexpected package.

 

Today’s pictures:

I’d love to say that 2015 started off with this glancing sunshine, but in fact it was overcast, with gales and threatened rain. These sunny shots are from a couple of days ago: