Mr Know It All. Or, the mote in my own eye.

I heard a Know It All on the wireless today. It was not my normal time for listening and I turned on a programme by chance, and there he was, Mr Know It All.

My hands, I must confess, were clenched in fists of rage.

Mr Know It All got more and more knowing. There was a tone in his voice I could not quite identify, so maddening that I wanted to punch someone in the nose. There was an underlying of course to everything he said, and a faint plaintiveness. I could not quite work out what that was about. Was it because nobody could really understand what it was, to know everything? The heavy burden, the heaving brain. There was something else that was driving me nuts. I finally understood was it was.

It was pity.

I loathe pity in all its forms. I find it ersatz and patronising and bogus. Empathy, even sympathy, yes, but pity, no. Pity is a distancing device, and has superiority running beside it like a prancing carriage dog.

There is a subset of Know It All which does the pity voice like no other. These are the conspiracy theorists, who are the worst snobs in nature. They look down loftily on the rest of us, the drones, the rubes, the sheeple, who believe what the Establishment says, who do not see the hidden hand of the Bilderbergs or the Freemasons or the Black Ops, or whoever it is that week who is running the world. Mr Know It All had a little tinge of conspiracy to go with his facts. But it was percentages and reports and statistics which really set his boat crossing the stormy sea. He reeled them off, giddy with self-importance, until I felt battered into submission.

In the middle of my crossness, I stopped myself. For heaven’s sake, I said. Why should not the poor fellow know things? Knowing things is good. I adore knowing things. When I was young, I gathered facts like amulets, as if they could keep me safe in an unreliable world. I still feel like that.

I did not go to Hampstead for ten years for nothing. I turned at once to the most likely culprit, which was projection. There is a classic psychological device which suggests that the things you criticise most severely in others are in fact the things of which you are guilty. This does not always obtain. I get very cross about bigots, and I do not think I am prone to bigotry. But if the criticism and crossness are disproportionate, then it is often well to look to oneself.

I don’t do the pity voice and I don’t look down on people who did not have the schooling I did, but I am, I am afraid, a tiny bit of a Know It All myself. I was a girly swot, and I had to become the class clown to divert attention from those top marks in tests. I still, at almost fifty, can be tempted to tell people at parties about the Repeal of the Corn Laws. I drop all kinds of classical and historical and literary references into what I write. This is partly because I love references. I find them beautiful and soothing and as familiar as old friends. But it is partly a remnant of that little girl who used to get up and tap dance, saying Look at me, look at me.

I don’t scold myself for this, but I must think it, on a subconscious level, a little bit vulgar. Otherwise I should just have laughed at Mr Know It All, and let him pass on his way. I love people who wear their knowledge lightly, and perhaps that is what I would like to learn to do myself. There do not always have to be proofs, and brags, and prizes.

I think of this all the time with my red mare. I was working her today, hard and well. We upped the ante and had some breakthroughs and even broke out of our customary pootle to some serious schooling. I felt very proud of her, and I learnt a lot. As we rode back to the shed, on the buckle, I immediately started to put it into words. I would write it here or post it on one of the horse forums I love. I had to tell everyone about those serpentines in the lovely dowager duchess trot she has been achieving lately.

Then the Sensible Voice made its pitch. Why not just write it privately, said the Sensible Voice. You don’t always have to boast. You don’t have to prove a point. Write it down for yourself, so you can look back and smile at the progress. Nobody else need know. It is what it is, between you and this strong, ravishing, sentient creature, in your hidden field. It does not have to be on display.

The hubris demons, very flappy and disconcerted, did not like this at all. They wanted everyone to know how high we were flying. They wanted to describe the close glimpse of the sun. Are you mad? they shrieked at the Sensible Voice. Everyone must know; the thing must be marked.

And then I went in and heard Mr Know It All and wanted to punch his silly nose.

All writing has an element of Look at Me in it. All prose is a bit of a tap dance. I suspect that I need that drive to show myself and prove myself and stretch myself, otherwise I would never write a book at all. But perhaps that little moment was sent along to remind me that I don’t need to do the dance all the time. Sometimes, I can just write the thing for my own private record, and not beg the crowd for its approval. I can know something, or a little, or a part, or even nothing at all, and that is quite perfectly fine. I do not need to Know It All, and, most especially, I do not need to attempt to prove this on the wide prairies of the internet. Sometimes, it really can just be me and a sweet horse, in that hidden field. Literally, and figuratively.

 

Today’s pictures:

The sweetness in the hidden field:

My two sweethearts, browsing in the set-aside. I love it when they are both grazing together:

The duchess is at last losing her winter woolliness, so that I can see her again. She’s come through the winds and the weather wonderfully well. I’m very lucky because she is what my old dad would call a good doer. She is always well in herself and eats up like clockwork, and I never take that for granted:

An ordinary life.

Quite often I think: I must give them something.

The ‘them’ means you, the Dear Readers. I am sending something out, for you.

We make a grand bargain, you and I: you give me your time, and I give you some prose. I try and make the prose good, because that’s sort of the point of me. Sometimes, as you know, I indulge myself a little, when I am overwhelmed with one of my loves or enthusiasms. I feel an odd combination of guilt and defiance about this. The guilt is that I may be boring you; the defiance says it is my place and it’s free and nobody has to read it. The guilt usually wins. (Be more interesting, damn you, shout the critical voices, who have been drinking Negronis and are getting punchy.)

Today, after my morning mediation in the green field with my red mare, I suddenly thought: sending out is the wrong idea. By which I think I mean: it should not be a presentation. Here, have this, on a nice silver tray. I suddenly thought that the whole wonder of the internet is that it gives snapshots of other voices, other rooms. Not so very long ago, people who lived in the country hardly knew anyone beyond the next village. Even now, I know a gentleman who, until a year ago, had never travelled beyond Stonehaven. (About forty miles south, on the coast.) The internet lifted the curtain on a huge, gaudy play. I think that is its special gift.

I like the news. I like that I can watch Rachel Maddow and understand the intricacies of American politics. I like the pictures from NASA and the reports from my favourite training stables and the rolling updates from the BBC. I adore the photographs of the Household Cavalry and the beautiful landscape shots of Scotland’s hidden islands. But perhaps what I love the most are the small bulletins from the ordinary humans, living ordinary lives. An artist here is teaching old people to draw; a gardener there has spotted the first snowdrops; an amateur photographer here has captured a tiny owl on a stone wall.

I like seeing the world through other eyes. I take my own eyes for granted. The things I think, the things I value, the things I love are grained so deep in me that they feel natural and obvious. I am aware of my goofinesses and oddities; I know that not everyone is obsessed with red mares and lichen. I understand that I plough a fairly lonely furrow with my one-woman battle against the dangling modifier and my adoration of the semi-colon. But generally, I secretly believe my feelings and beliefs are fairly universal. (I think this springs from my great hope that there is more that unites the human heart than divides it.)

In fact, I am a creature of a very specific set of cultural markers. I am British; I grew up in a farm and a stable; I was given books to read from my earliest childhood; my first serious school believed in Shakespeare and poetry; my father was one of nature’s gentlemen and my mother insisted on good manners at all times. All those laid down foundational imperatives that run through me like Brighton through a stick of rock. I think I was born with innate optimism and cussedness, and those produce a confirmation bias of which I am hardly aware, even though I try to avoid confirmation bias like the plague.

The internet reminds me that although there are universal human truths and unities, there are millions of individuals who have very different cultures, very different perspectives, very different priorities. They are not just interesting, these other lives,  they are salutary too. They stop me falling into tribalism or fear of the other or complacency. They open me up, rather than closing me down.

All of which is a very long way of saying that perhaps the point of all this is that it is one of those glimpses. Here is an ordinary woman, living in an ordinary country, making an ordinary life, holding ordinary hopes and fears and dreams. Just like you, and yet completely different, all at the same time.

I realise as I write this that it is mildly absurd. Why does there even need to be a point? But my mind is like the questing vole in the plashy fen; it likes answers. It is not very good at letting things just be. (This is why the mare is so good for me, because when I am with her that questing mind falls still, and I am in my most elemental, physical, present self, feeling the Scottish air on my face and the powerful animal under me, searching only for harmony and communion and softness. I ask why later, when I think about her and how her mind works. But when I am with her there are no questions, only the moment which has the two of us in it. She is like a miracle physicist, who can stop the space time continuum with her bare hooves.) If I can work out the point, then I am happy. Today, I have decided that a snapshot of an ordinary life is enough. Tomorrow, no doubt, I shall have lighted on something quite else.

 

Today’s pictures:

More from the road. There really are rather a lot. I fear I may be posting them until every last cow has come home.

This adorable blinky person not only did the perfect collected trot with the bend in it again today, she did it in both directions. Yeah, yeah, she was saying, whistling a little tune under her breath, I can do it this way, and I can do it that way, and would you like me to do it the other way? BECAUSE I CAN. I did not think that I could love her any more than I already did, because the love is already turned up to eleven, but it turns out that I could. Ha. There is always, always room for more love:

I also love that the sweet Paint filly has her show pony face on, as if to say we can’t all be blinking our eyes and wibbling our lips; some of us have to be ready at all times for our close-up.

One perfect moment.

Author’s note: I did of course have wonderful plans for the first post back. I’ve been out in the world, and I was going to tell you about that. I had stories to tell. I’d been thinking many, many thoughts on the long drive back. I was going to be like the Ferrero Rocher ambassador, and spoil you. Then the red mare did something so lovely that I could only write of that, because I could only think of that. (There really is not enough room in my mazy brain for more than one thing at a time.) So I’m afraid this is very, very horsey, even more horsey than usual. I’ve put in some extra Scotland photographs at the end, in a tragic attempt to make up for it.

 

Back after a very busy, very wonderful and very emotional week at Aintree. I was at full stretch, doing all my HorseBack work, and now have hit the wall and need to sit quietly in my room for a while.

As I drove home through the snowy mountains, I thought of my dear red mare. She is the thing that pulls me home. I may have been seeing some of my most beloved racing stars, some of the most elegant, beautiful and elite athletes on the planet, but the face I miss is that of a muddy, woolly duchess, who never won a prize in her life.

I got on her back this morning after not having sat on her for six days. The popular wisdom is that in springtime, with the new grass and the twinkles in the toes, thoroughbreds should not really be leapt on like that. I did about ten minutes of groundwork first, just to check her state of mind and remind her that her good leader had returned, and then, off we went.

Because I’ve been learning a completely new way of working with horses, we haven’t done any advanced or technical riding. I’m still trying to figure out how to do everything correctly on the ground, to get her and me to the place we both need to be. My version of schooling in the saddle consists of two daily exercises, both unbelievably basic.

The first is called Where do you want to go? I get on the mare, let out the reins, and allow her to go where she will. If she gets stuck anywhere, like the gate or the feed shed, I work her there, and then let her go again. It’s a fabulous exercise and it fixes about eight different things and I love it and it makes me laugh. But it’s not exactly technical. It mostly consists of me waving my arms in the air or scratching her withers whilst asking: where do you want to go? I’m always curious to see where she chooses, and wonder what is going on in her dear head whilst she makes those navigational decisions.

Then we move on to the Left Right exercise, which is about balance and straightness and light steering. If the horse goes left, you steer it right, and vice verse. It’s really that simple. So you see, we are not exactly doing collection or flying changes.

We were working on these today, doing our ABCs, and she was a little tense and tentative and I was bringing her down until she relaxed. We were looking for softness, which is our holy grail. And then, suddenly, in a ravishing collected trot, she started going in perfect circles, with the most beautiful bend in her body, using every inch of that duchessy thoroughbred self. She used to be quite stiff, and she would drop her shoulder, and she would lean on me, and her body would go out of alignment. I have not worked on any of that specifically. I’ve just done this wonderfully basic work on the ground and under the saddle, trying to teach myself as much as her, concentrating on getting each small step right, sometimes feeling like a fool because I am still muddling about in the foothills when everyone else is galloping over the mountain peaks.

But there, out of the blue, she described a balletic, poised, perfect circle, with everything in the right place. When that happens, you can feel it, like someone has thrown a switch and the whole world has changed. And the really lovely thing is that I was not doing anything. She was doing it by herself. That’s the point of all this work, to give her the confidence to carry herself. I simply point the way, ask the question, and then let her alone. There is no nagging or correction.

I was so amazed that I dropped the reins and let her go, simply moving my body with hers. And she kept right on going, in her delirious dressage diva circuit, everything in harmony. Every inch of her body, every muscle and every sinew, was working in time, each moving part going smoothly with the other. I’m not sure I ever felt anything like it.

In a daze of delight, I said whoa, and she stopped on a sixpence and I leapt off and covered her in strokes and rubs and kisses, wishing I could express to her the brilliance of what she had just done. She stood like a statue, with her head low, her ears in their dozy donkey position, her lower lip wibbling in the suspicion of an equine smile.

Did she know? I hope she knew.

She made me cry actual tears of joy and gratitude.

There is something sometimes frustrating about putting myself back to school, about having to learn humility and patience and rigour, about having to go over and over and over and over the very, very small things, until I have them right. I’m quite a slow learner, and sometimes I think: oh, bugger it, let’s just gallop off into the middle distance and forget all this. But what it does mean is that I appreciate the smallest things as if they are dazzling diamonds. I shouldn’t think many other horsewomen burst into tears today because they did a slow sitting trot in a circle in a green field. They’d probably think: right, that’s done, let’s move on to transitions. But for me, it was like winning that damn Grand National.

The older I get, the more I believe in the small things, in all areas of life. The red mare teaches me so many life lessons, and returns me to earth when I become idiotic or hubristic, and shows me the value of the plain virtues. She is the Empress of Small Things, and I can never thank her enough.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are actually from yesterday. The road home:

And the faces that greeted me:

Quite often, when I get back, she’s not that bothered. There’s a bit of – yeah, right, whatever. But this time she came straight over for love, and then followed me round the field when I went to leave. I do fight anthropomorphism every single day, but I swear this face is saying: where have you been?:

Meanwhile, Stan the Man was very happy to be back in the feed shed, hunting for RATS:

Away.

Going away for a few days. Back on the blog next week.

This is the sight that greeted me when I arrived at the gate this morning. This is the sight I shall miss:

An Easter present from the red mare.

It’s a Bank Holiday Monday and the place is as quiet as a cathedral. The sun shines down and I decide to take a day off.

I don’t always take off weekends and national holidays. That’s the thing about writing; it expands to fit the space available. And I like to write every day, even if it’s only ten lines.

But still, to take a day off when the rest of the nation takes one makes me feel stitched into the social contract, which is a feeling I like very much.

Down in the quiet field, in the sunshine, the horses show their spring fever. The Paint drops her belly to the ground and gallops, ventre à terre, as if she is hearing her ancestral voices from the wild frontier. The red mare, much more upright, as poised as a ballet dancer, tail flying like flags, snorting like a steam train, gallops beside her.

The beauty is so elemental that I stand and stare, rooted to the good Scottish earth.

Then we do some work. The mare forgets her snorting and her Spanish Riding School of Vienna and her spring fever, and drops into her soft place, all her attention on me.

For the last few weeks we have been losing the trot. It’s there, and then it’s gone. Her stride breaks up, ragged and uncoordinated, she puts her head in the air and begins to rush. In the old days, I would have thought this perfectly normal for a thoroughbred ex-racehorse. I would have sat tight and kicked on. Now, if I do not have a soft horse, I have nothing. So I’ve been searching and searching for that softness, endlessly going back to the beginning, looking for the places where I have made a mistake.

It’s a practical thing – bending to a stop, doing lateral flexion, working up through the walk – but it’s a mental thing too. If I do not always have that good, true starting point with me, I am lost. This kind of horsemanship, so new to me, is all about rigour. If I have one stride that is too snatched, too quick, too tense, then the whole thing will fall apart. If I do not correct that stride but let it go, then I shall have trouble later on. No detail is too small to be ignored.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. It’s taken two years, learning this new approach, and I’m still working on the trot. Sometimes I get cross at my slowness. My great mentors, Warwick Schiller and Robert Gonzales, could fix that trot in a morning. TWO YEARS. What have I been doing?

The answer is: I have been making mistakes. Unlike those two mighty horsemen, I do not have the work of a lifetime locked away in my muscle memory. If I did not make the mistakes, I could not learn anything. There’s still a part of me which is livid that I could not just get it, and gallop off into the horizon. But learning is not a matter of furious will and snapping of fingers. One can understand something in one’s head, but still find it has not quite percolated down into the gut. Over and over again, every day, I have to practice, getting it right, getting it wrong, until it becomes second nature.

I learnt to write because I did it every day. I learnt to write by being really, really bad at writing. My first books were so rotten that I still feel embarrassed when I remember them. But if I had not been rotten, I would never have got good, because I would not have had to try.

Today, in the silent sunshine, there was the lost trot. We had found it. I’m not quite sure how. I’d been breaking things down into their constituent parts, going back and checking that every small thing was good. If the yielding of the hindquarters was even a little off, I went in until that great, powerful body was at the exact angle I had asked for. There is a sternness to this way of thinking that I like. This is no place for the slapdash. It’s for the exact same reason that I shall go back through a tenth draft, and remove a single semi-colon. It’s a tiny thing, but it makes a difference.

And through all that rigour, all that attention to detail, all those small steps, comes absolute freedom. When we found that beautiful, contained, easy trot, we were set free. I did not have to worry about anything, or ask her anything, or tell her anything. She was doing it all on her own, and I went with her, and we were part of the moving world, shimmering in harmony. We were going as slowly as two old dowager duchesses, but inside we were flying.

 

Today’s pictures:

Happy Easter -

After the ride, she had a little doze. This is the same mare that an hour before was hoolying around the field like a crazy horse:

It has taken a long time, and I do castigate myself for being slow and stupid, but in that long time we have built something very precious. We may not be doing flying changes, but we are a partnership. I am the senior partner, because that kind horse needs a good leader so that she may feel safe. But we are, truly, in it together. It has taken a long time, but perhaps it needed to take a long time. Perhaps it should take a long time. It’s not, as I remind myself every day, magic beans. It’s building something enduring and true, and the foundations must be dug deep and each brick put on the one before. That does not happen overnight.

All you need.

I had quite a lot of thoughts in my head today, jostling about like crazed shoppers outside a Boxing Day sale. Now I only have one.

It is this:

Sometimes, all you need is someone who is good and kind and funny and wise, who is wry and pithy and cuts through the crap, who notices. Then the good and funny and wise person says lots of good and funny and wise things, and your shoulders come down so fast that you actually think you are going to fall over. You suddenly realise you had composed yourself an exoskeleton made of fret and angst and bits of twig and binder twine. You totter a bit as it falls to the ground. And then the good and funny and wise person makes you laugh so much that you really do fall over.

That’s all you need.

Oh, and one of these:

And perhaps one of these:

Well, that, and a damn good recipe for Irish stew.

In which I want to be horrid and decide to be nice.

I was going to do something perfectly horrid today.

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

So, I wrote it down.

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

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

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

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

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

Adult humans also make choices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Today’s pictures:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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