Where the heart is; or, the friendly ghosts.

When I was two and a half years old, I fell head over ears in love with a gentleman called Eddie Harty. He had just won the Grand National on a horse called Highland Wedding when I first met him, but I knew nothing of that. I was far too young to be starstruck. I just knew that, of all the people who came to the house, and there were many because the front door was always open, he was the one who made my heart want to burst.

Whenever he arrived, I would run upstairs and put on my best party dress. ‘We sometimes had to wait for you,’ my mother says, drily. Apparently, I would give strict instructions that nobody was to do anything until I was properly dressed. Then I would run back downstairs, cast myself shamelessly onto Eddie Harty’s knee, and gaze up at him in adoration.

Forty-six years later, I still think of that most excellent gentleman. He was not a classical beauty, which apparently gave my mother great heart. She thought that I would not grow up to be led astray by a pretty face. Even at such a young age, I was all about the character. He was brave and dogged and determined and a great horseman, from a dynasty of great horsemen.

I think: it’s funny what one remembers.

When I get on a thoroughbred, I feel as if I have come home. My red mare carries with her the ghosts of all those mighty equine athletes among whom I grew up. I remember many of them too. My favourite was the grey Dolge Orlick. My father had a lot of horses who were named after characters in Dickens, which is quite odd, since he was famous for never reading any book except the form book. Lovely Dolge could not have been worse named, since, far from being oafish and evil, he was bright and bonny and kind.

The mare carries the ghosts too of the great racing men who illuminated my childhood. Quite often when I am riding her I think of Fred Walwyn and Fred Winter and Dave Dick and John Lawrence. She carries the spirit of my old dad, although he would have laughed out loud, in a characteristic mixture of puzzlement and pride, if he could see me riding her in her rope halter with one light hand on the reins as if she were an old cow pony out in the American prairies. My favourite set of books when I was eight was The Green Grass of Wyoming trilogy, and every morning, as we lope around the emerald fields of Scotland, I think of that, too.

She defies the laws of physics, acting as a kind of equine worm-hole, collapsing time and space.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, leaving my childhood home, going through ramshackle, gypsy teen years when we were always packing, having an antic London life in my wild twenties, before finally putting down deep roots in an adopted place which had nothing to do with racing or Ireland or horses or any of the things which were part of my young days. Scotland came about through whim and chance, and yet it is here that I belong. The mare, I suddenly realise, was the last piece in the puzzle.

Some people find thoroughbreds alarming or mysterious or incomprehensible. Some people really don’t like them. Yet every time I sit on that noble back, I am in a place I know and love, a place entirely familiar and easy. No matter how much is going on in my life or in the world, no matter how jagged and jangly I am, the moment I get into the saddle, I am home. It’s a tiny, workaday miracle.

 

Today’s pictures:

The dear Dear Readers gave me such a glorious welcome back to the blog that I feel quite bashful. (I am British, after all.) I can’t thank you all enough. You have put a huge and rather surprised smile on my face. I know you love the pictures of Scotland, so here are some more of Queen’s View, especially for you.

The Rat Man.

Today, the rat man came.

Thank goodness for the rat man, or I don’t think I’d ever have written this blog again.

I went away on holiday, to the enchanted island of Colonsay, and the sun shone and I saw old and dear friends and Stanley the Dog charmed everyone and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

Then I came home and various things were a bit fraught, so I thought I’d leave the blog for a bit until life settled down.

This was fatal. I started thinking about the blog. The first rule of the blog is NEVER THINK ABOUT THE BLOG.

The moment you start thinking about it, the internal conversation goes something like this:

I’ve got to come back with a bang, because the Dear Readers have been waiting. At which point, the Critical Voices, who are already on their second martini, laugh with so much derision that their hats fall off. Waiting for what? they scoff, wondering whether they should move on to a Gibson.

But, continues the dialogue, the world is getting madder and madder and sadder and sadder and there are huge tragedies unfolding and what price my absurd, tiny life and my flimsy, flaky thoughts in the face of all that? Can I really talk about love and trees and Stan the Man and the perfect cowgirl canter the red mare did this morning, in the face of outrage?

It should have wisdom, says a determined voice, suddenly. That’s the ticket. Rework the whole concept. Every day, give them one paragraph of wisdom. You’ve lived life, you’ve been round the block, you know a thing or two. Be useful.

But I have no wisdom, wails the hopeless voice, who is feeling a bit beleaguered and does not really know how anything works.

The Critical Voices at this stage have gone into a huddle and are bitching about something called a Kardashian.

Might as well give it all up, says the hopeless voice. Nobody needs to know what you think about the world. You have two jobs and three secret projects and a horse and a dog and family obligations. There is no time. There’s no point doing a daily tap dance, saying look at me, look at me.

Then the rat man came. I’d just finished working the mare and she was dozing outside the feed shed. Stan was sunbathing at her feet. The rat man and I talked about rats, and voles, and working dogs, and pointers, and evolutionary biology, and inter-species communication, and trust, and anthropomorphism. If I did not have work to do, I’d be talking to the rat man still. If I had the choice between talking to a rat man or a philosopher, I’d take the rat man every day and twice on Sundays.

And then, I came home and wrote this. Some odd Occam’s Razor had come and slashed its way through the nonsense.

It’s just a thing. Some people are disdainful of it, and that is their right. It hides in its little, poor, obscure corner of the internet, and nobody is obliged to read it. It does not need a reason, or a justification, or a validation. Any daily writing is good discipline; a free exercise of prose helps my fingers and my brain and my muscle memory. It is exactly what it is, no more and no less.

I bless that rat man, and all who sail in him.

 

Today’s pictures:

A small collection from the last couple of weeks:

Queen’s View, near my house:

Stan the Man:

The Younger Brother and me:

The beat of my heart, who, through all my recent grumps and groans, has remained magnificent. I need new words for magnificent:

Rare photograph of all four brothers and sisters together:

Stanley on holiday:

Colonsay:

Holiday.

I’m giving myself a little summer holiday. One manuscript is polished and sent off. One still needs work, but I’m putting it aside for ten days. This feels very wicked, but my brain is buggered.

I’m having three days off at home and then six days on the glorious island of Colonsay, one of my favourite places in the world.

The dear old Red Mare will continue, because it is all holiday when I am with her, and she is interesting me so much at the moment that I have to write it all down.

If you are so inclined, you can find her here:

https://www.facebook.com/RedTheMare?fref=photo

In the meantime, I hope you are all having a lovely August.

Back in the saddle on the 20th.

Too much cricket.

There is far too much cricket today for there to be time for the blog. I took the opportunity whilst the players were at tea to do some writing. I could do this, or do the Red Mare. I chose the mare, ruthlessly. So the only prose I have for you today is here:

https://www.facebook.com/RedTheMare/photos/a.380960165440392.1073741827.380953402107735/446719242197817/?type=1&theater

The right reasons.

Today, I had twenty versions of the blog running round in the mazy corridors of my mind. Some were grumpy, some were confessional, some were, I am ashamed to say, a tiny bit passive aggressive. I have a truly dreadful habit of expressing subliminal anger under the guise of sweet reason. (People sometimes say to me: don’t be so hard on yourself. I agree that pointless lashing is pointless. But I also think one must look one’s flaws in the whites of their eyes and get their measure. And the phoney sweet reason is a flaw that must be stared down.) One was certainly self-indulgent, which will surprise nobody.

Then I had a hard ride. I don’t mean it was difficult, but we were doing some serious work so I had to concentrate. I had to call on all my powers. I was thinking about balance, and softness, and feel. I was very conscious of my body, and my centre of gravity, and letting my physical self go in harmony with the mighty thoroughbred body underneath me. I was in, I think, that wonderful state called flow, where everything drops away, and all that matters is mastering something that is very slightly beyond your capability.

All the stupid things dissipated into the bright air.

There was an authentic, beautiful, funny, clever creature, in a green field starred with clover, being her own true self. That was all that mattered. This time and this place were all that mattered. She really is a mistress of Zen, that mare.

And then my wise old owl voice, which doesn’t often get much of a hearing, because it is steady, and low, and does not shout, said: always do things for the right reasons.

That, my darlings, is my thought for the day. Good old owl. I should listen to him more often.

A price worth paying.

You don’t have to tell them everything, say the wise voices in my head.

Yes, you do, say the reckless voices.

The reckless voices have a thing for candour. They like getting everything out in the open. Say the thing, they shout, giddy with delight. They have a theory, which might not be that wide of the mark, that if all the human stuff is out there, then it has no power to wound or frighten. Shame and doubt hate sunlight. Tell your story, bawl the reckless voices, and then you need never be afraid. Let people judge, as they will.

Sometimes I wish I did not listen quite so much to the reckless voices. On about six different occasions in the last few months I have yelped and squealed about book deadlines. I have sat up all night to finish a manuscript, and, transparent with relief and triumph, spread the news on the Facebook, on the Twitter, on the blog. There is a terrible side of me which must do a tap dance. Look at me, Ma, with my jazz hands.

Then the reality bites, and the agent has questions, and kind suggestions, and frets. So even thought I’ve hit the deadline I have to go back to the drawing board all over again and do the sober, stolid work, which does not make a good story for the social media. It’s just grind.

I loathe editing. All the joy and freshness has gone from the book, and the criticism and nit-picking must start. Darlings must be killed. The bloody pile of corpses sit dolefully in their special file, all those happy phrases and dancing paragraphs, all those words which were once written with such delight and now will not do. They do not fit, or they are self-indulgent, or they are just not quite good enough for the pitiless spotlight of the world.

Today, I finished yet another draft. I met, almost, another deadline. (This one is a bit late, which is unlike me, but my girly swot self, the one that always has an apple for the teacher, has apparently run off to join the circus.) I did not howl and yelp on Facebook. I did not stay up all night. I just sighed a long sigh, and wrote a serious appraisal to the agent, and sent the damn thing off.

I thought, as I trudged down to give the mare her tea, what an odd job writing is. It is entirely dependent on the approval of others. The agent must like it, and then a publisher; then an editor, then the marketing people, then the booksellers, then the putters-on of festivals, then the reading public, then the critics, then the beady compilers of the Amazon lists, then goodness knows who. There is no fixed mark; no objective standard. Every word I write is a shot in the dark.

I get to do what I love, and I get to set my own hours, and I have the luxury of being able to ride a horse and say that I am working at the same time, because of course I can do a sitting trot and think deep literary thoughts at the same time. I can’t complain. But tonight I felt a little weary in my soul, as if my sense of self was being worn, a little, by all the judgement on which I depend.

Richard Hughes, an exceptional jockey and an interesting man, who retired from race riding last week, was asked by Clare Balding how he dealt with the not eating. He has not really eaten for twenty years. He weighed himself fifteen times a day. Every morning, his eyes strayed to his watch, to see how loose it was, as that would tell him whether he could make the weight. ‘How did you do that?’ said Balding, almost in a whisper. He smiled. ‘Every job has its sacrifices,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t take the underground to work every morning.’ No more could I, I thought.

He smiled again, with a combination of rue and delight. ‘It’s the horses,’ he said. ‘I’d cut my arm off to ride the horses.’

I would write even if I were not paid for it. I do write even though I’m not paid for it. The damned old language of Shakespeare and Milton has me in its crocodile grip. There’s nothing I can do about that. The price I pay is constant uncertainty, a very British embarrassment every time I have to speak to my accountant, and a vague tiredness of the spirit, from time to time. It’s a price worth paying.

You really did not have to tell them everything, says the wise voice. You told them everything, shout the reckless voices, triumphant.

 

Today’s pictures:

No time for the camera at the moment. Here are my two beauties, from a few days ago:

No words left.

I worked really, really hard today, and that work was rewarded. This does not always happen. Sometimes I put in a huge effort and buggery bollocks is the result. But this morning, it all came together. I could see the way. A small green shoot of hope sprouted. It was a lovely feeling.

Since I have wrangled with words for many hours, I have none left now. Sometimes my brain is a finite thing.

Before I sat down at my desk to do the work, I took the red mare out into the wide, open green spaces. It is in just such a space that a thoroughbred is popularly supposed to go crazy. All that flat grass, no fences, nothing to stop her; how could she resist? She resisted. She put on her best dowager duchess hat and gave me a composed trot of such poise and grace that I could hardly believe it. It was as if she were dancing to some internal music. She needed no reminding, no instruction, no correction. She picked her own graceful gait and kept to it. With each step, she grew in confidence and conviction. I could feel something like pride flowing out of her. Perhaps it was even pleasure. I try not to ascribe human emotions to horses, but she seemed delighted with herself.

You can see some of the majesty in this picture. She does have majesty, and it grows in her, day by day:

A good day.

Sometimes, I fall into a defensive crouch. I put so much pressure on myself that I go into a kind of awful tunnel vision. It is dark in the tunnel, and the critical voices in my head like it in there and use it as a kind of echo chamber. Magical thinking, which I try to resist, lifts its head and senses its opportunity, and tells me that I shall never come to any good.

As I wrangle and struggle with my book, I see only the things which are not there. It will never be good enough, I am not good enough to make it good enough, the agent will know it is not good enough and will have to tell me so.

Then a shift in perspective comes, and I go back to the beginning, with clear eyes. Today, my eyes were clear. I started the editing all over again. I could see very well what needed to be done, and I did it. And I found, to my astonishment, that some of it was really not bad.

Just because I think it is good does not mean other people will too. Writing is a subjective business. One is always dependent on someone else’s opinion. There is no certainty, and this is part of what wears away at the troubled, questing, hopeful mind.

But today I know that all the work I have done is worth it, even if I do get rejected. That counts for something.

In the morning, before work, before thought, I ring The Beloved Cousin. At the very sound of her voice, I know that every single thing will be all right. She has that miraculous effect.

Friendship, I think, as I ride out later into the mild Scottish day, the air gentle against my face, never gets the press it deserves. It’s always romantic love which has the classic novels written about it, the songs, the poems, the plays, the films, the sonnets. But friend love, for me, is the one that saves your life, lifts your heart, restores your sanity, confirms your sense of self.

The Beloved Cousin understands every single word I say, laughs at my jokes, unpicks my troubles as if they were her own, makes me feel like a better human, remembers all the things I have forgotten, does not mind whether I am up, down or round the houses, expects me to be nothing but my own flawed, flaky self. She just gets it. (In this case, It is everything.)

As if determined to continue the love and loveliness, the red mare was at her absolute, shining, glittering crest and peak. She rode like a dream, was funny and dear, and showed off her dressage diva trot all the way down the lime avenue, with no reins and no stirrups. She seems to find it mildly amusing that I kick my feet out of the irons and wave my arms in the air, and boxes along in her best self-carriage whilst I laugh with delight.

And then there was the good work and I backed a ten-to-one winner at Goodwood as the ravishing Malabar, the only filly in the race, put the boys in their place, kicking away and streaking down the straight, her beautiful bay coat gleaming in the sun.

There are bad days, and good days. I like to record the good days, because when the shadows come, I find it soothing to look back and remember what the light is like. Today was all light.

Airy somethings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace the Rain.

I think again about choices. It’s pouring with dreary old rain; the sky is like dirty washing-up water. Even Scotland’s great beauty cannot survive this weather. The place looks defeated and drowned. The field is muddy and filthy and its usual feeling of hidden magic is muted.

I could fight the rain. I could hunch my shoulders and get furious and moan about the horrid Scottish summer. We quite often have summers like this – relentless wet and a paltry ten degrees. Spring and autumn are the seasons of sunshine and beauty. I never understand why people come to Scotland in August; it is our cruellest month.

Even though I know this, I could let it infuriate me. I could think of all those happy people in the south, who have brightness and lightness and reasonable temperatures.

On some days, I do. Today, as I run up and down to the mare to put the rug on, take it off, and then return to put it on again, I decide I am going to take the second choice. I’m going to accept the rain. I’m going to embrace the rain. I put my hat on and make my peace with the fact that I am going to get wet, and that I shall be slightly damp for the rest of the day.

Even as I write that, I laugh to myself. Slightly damp really isn’t the end of the world, is it? If you asked yourself – What is the worst thing that can happen? – and the answer came that you might get slightly damp, you really would think that you could deal with that. In a world of problems, that is a very, very small glitch.

Slightly damp is a killer when it goes along with an existential chorus of other damps. If the sorrows are coming not in single spies but in battalions, and then it rains on top of all that, it can seem as if nothing will ever come to any good. It is a temporal stamp on the passport of despair. Everything has gone to hell, and even the weather is against you.

Today, I’m not doing cartwheels, but I’m not down-hearted. The rain and I are old friends. It is what makes the grass grow and the trees thrive. I would not be without it.

The mare, catching my mood, lifts her head and gives an enchanting whicker, as I go down to put her raincoat back on. Sometimes, when the weather comes, she shuts down and goes into bare-bones survival mode. In that mood, she has little use for humans. I am merely the bringer of hay and the putter-on of rugs. Today, however, she is light and bright. She is pleased to see me. She rests her head on my chest and lets me scratch her sweet spots. I chat to her for a while and she blinks her eyes. When I go to leave, she follows me, so I return and give her some more love. It’s just rain, she says; I’m still here.

PS. Particularly lovely comments yesterday. Thank you so much for them. My secret wish is that, at least once a week, this blog might prove useful. I sometimes laugh at myself for this, and think it grandiose. Sometimes I say to myself: you don’t have to tell them everything. Take a step back, I say; make it light and objective and not so searching and serious. Protect yourself, I say, because revelation makes you vulnerable. But the part that wishes to be useful knows that revelation does the trick, because I think that humans crave communion and connection. Every time a Dear Reader says ‘I’m so glad I’m not the only one’, I feel as if a light has gone on or a happy klaxon has sounded. Conversation is always better if it has an ounce of confession in it. One can build the castle walls and hide behind them and that’s fine, but I think that it is better to take a risk, to lower the drawbridge and come out into the open. Here I am, with all my frailties and flaws, and there you are, too.

PPS. I’m doing a new thing with the pictures, putting them into the post rather than leaving them until the end. Can’t work out if this is better, or worse. Today’s pictures are obviously not of today, because it was too wet for the camera. They are of sunnier times.

One day, I’ll get the hang of it.

A joke amount of work today. My fingers were flying. Sometimes, when I have a lot to do and deadlines to meet and pressure is mounting, I take tension into the very act of writing. My shoulders go high and tight and I forget to breathe and I frown and frown at the demanding screen. Today, I took a deep breath and sat back and very consciously did the thing in a state of physical ease. And out came the words, without rush or fret or forcing – as if they had been there all along, waiting.

As I worked the red mare, I thought some thoughts about life. Much of the time, I concentrate so hard on her that I don’t contemplate anything else, but sometimes she puts me in philosophical mood. I thought about the waste of emotional energy. Even though I know, from endless experience, that people are never thinking what you think they are thinking, I still fall into the elephant trap of putting notions into their unknown heads. I grow convinced that someone is cross with me, or disapproving of me, or upset with me. I have done something BAD, and they are furious or disappointed about it. Even though I know better, I create an entire mini-drama in someone else’s mind, when in fact they are almost certainly thinking about something quite else, like what to cook for supper or whether they are going to get that report in on time or what is the answer to the Universal Why.

This is the most stupid of stupid wastes. Even if they were thinking what I think they are thinking, my chewing over it like a mangy old dog with a ratty bone is not going to achieve a single thing. As it is, they are surely not thinking half the disobliging thoughts I impute to them, and the entire shooting match is utterly pointless.

Theory and practice, I think, and the gaps in between. I know what is true and I know what I should do and I understand about the waste, yet still I fall back into bad mental habits.

I returned to my best and sternest rule. This is the giving of two discrete choices. You can, I say to myself, as if I were a slightly dim child, go on obsessing about things you know are pretty much sure not to be happening, because you’ve gone down the rabbit hole for whatever reason, or you can just stop and do something more useful.

I did something more useful.

The mare did her new, floaty canter. I ran up to HorseBack and did my work there. I galloped back to my desk and wrote hundreds and hundreds of words. I got things done, instead of working myself into a state about things which are only spectres in my fevered mind.

Life, I think. One day I will get the hang of it.

One day, it will be all cantering with no reins.

A guy with a boat.

Today, I met a guy with a boat.

This kind of thing sometimes happens at HorseBack. My friend The Marine says, as I’m leaving, ‘Oh, there’s a guy with a boat coming.’

I know better than to ask what guy and what boat.

This morning, I get a message saying: ‘The boat arrives in fifteen minutes.’

I drop everything and drive down the valley.

There is the boat.

She’s not just any old boat. She is a boat. Boat is not a good enough word, and all the other words don’t do her justice. I don’t think she is a vessel, or a craft. Actually, the word that sounds best for her is skiff, because that gives a sense of her sleek, athletic, cutting self, but a skiff is a small rowing boat for one person.

This is the biggest ocean-going rowing boat in the world.

The guy with the boat is a veteran of the Royal Navy. He smashed up his leg so badly that his femur was poking out of his hip. He had two years lying in a room to think, as he put it, about what would really make him happy in his life. Quite soon after he got up, he went down to a harbour near Edinburgh and saw an ocean-going rowing boat, and that was it, for him.

So now he has Avalon, and she’s already broken the Indian Ocean World Record, the fleet, flying darling, and now she’s going from Thurso to the Faroe Islands to raise money for HorseBack.

My goodness, the Interesting People.

The sun shone and I was so happy about the boat, and the guy, that when I went down to do the mare, rather later than usual, I stood with her in the field for about ten minutes, just scratching her ears and thinking about men and boats. She liked this plan very much. Partly because it gave her time to put in some practice for the Standing Still Olympics and partly because she really does like having her ears scratched.

We did some gentle work and then we did some more standing. There are days when she is antic and bright, days when all her thoroughbred blood runs through her, days when she is high and comical, days when she is dedicated and active. Some days she is a dancer, some days an explorer, some days a dressage diva, some days a dowager duchess.

Today, she was all Zen Mistress. The sun was glancing about and a quick, dry wind was blowing in from the east, but she had, at the heart of her, a low, spreading calm. It is a peace that comes up from deep within her, and ripples out in waves, something so actual and visceral that I can feel it flowing from her body to mine. When she is like this, she gives me the gift of time. She anchors me in the moment. Most days, I am thinking always an hour ahead. When I am doing anything, I am thinking about the next thing, and the thing after that. It’s a terrible habit, and I’m going to try to train myself out of it.

When the duchess is in her Zen mode, she stops the world. I actually think: it does not matter if I die now, because everything is here, in this moment. All joy and goodness and peace and love is here. All life is here.

I don’t think they mention that in Horse and Hound.

 

Today’s pictures:

This morning.