Where the light gets in

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Yesterday was a day of great delight. A big race just happened to coincide with the meeting of a book deadline, so I could legitimately take the day off. I could spend all morning getting revved up about it, watching old videos of the 1000 Guineas, reading all the views from the Bridge of Experts. (The very uncharitable part of me thinks how foolish the people who said Frankel was over-rated after the St James’ Palace must feel now.)

A thing I very much wanted to happen, happened. I hoped that it might be a once in a generation spectacle, and it really was. The crowd at Goodwood knew that too; they actually clapped when Frankel went to post. I have never seen that in the forty years I have followed racing. Even at Cheltenham, where they roar as the tapes go up, and roar again as the horses pass the stands on the first circuit of the Gold Cup, I have never heard applause as the horses go down to the start.

Nothing had yet happened; the champion was not yet confirmed as the champion. It was as if they were saying: however it goes, you are a magnificent creature, and we salute you. It was oddly moving. And Frankel, who can be temperamental before his races, seemed to sense it, and cantered past his admirers with his ears pricked, bouncing over the turf, nicely on the bridle, as cool and collected as a show pony.

It was, I suddenly realised, the first moment of pure, undilute, raw joy, I have felt since my father died. There were no ifs or buts; no shadows or hauntings. I stood up, in my room, watching that glorious sight, as the mighty horse flashed past the post, and shouted: yes, yes, yes. Go on, my son, I yelled; go on, you beauty. The Pigeon was jumping up and down like a cartoon dog, all four legs off the ground, barking her head off. The volume was up to ten, and Simon Holt was shouting from the television: oh, he’s a brilliant horse.

It was perfect.

‘We were lucky to be alive to see that,’ my mother said, later.

But the piper always must be paid. Last night, I watched the race again. I thought: oh, Dad would have loved that.

One must not sentimentalise the dead. He would have loved it, but he would also have grumbled. He was a betting man to his boots, and he would have groused and groaned about the horse being odds on. No way to have a good punt there. He taught me not to back favourites, as if it were cheating, no glory in it. He was always looking for value. Thirteen to eight on, he would have said; that’s no kind of price.

But still, I wished, suddenly, urgently, that he might have been here to see it. Again, I felt a slight rupture in the universe, a tiny tear in the fabric of being, at the realisation, which comes each time as if it were new, that the world exists without my father in it.

It is a tiny chime of dissonance, very faint, so that only my ears can pick it up. It is a high, distant feeling of wrongness.

Even three months on, it can still leave me breathless. Just as I think I am returning to the usual, it can come along and punch me in the stomach. It brings violent, streaming tears, as if I have just heard the news. There are nights when I am fine, and then there are nights when I say out loud, like a child: I want my dad back. And: I want my dog back.

Joy, and grief, I think, today, as I sit under a quiet Scottish sky, and listen to the swallows sing their song outside my window. And all the spaces in between.

I think, for some reason, of that line from Leonard Cohen, that goes something like: there’s a crack in everything; it’s how the light gets in.

I look out on the mild drizzle, and wonder when summer will come. I think of Shakespeare: the rain, it raineth every day.

I think: but tomorrow there will be sun. One way or a damn other, there will be sun.

 

Today’s pictures are a view from the pot table. I have moved the phlox, which were never very happy confined to terracotta, and needed to be planted in the good earth. The table is now devoted to cuttings, which I am doing for the first time ever, planting seeds (radishes, so far, but there will be other things), and a couple of rescued lavenders and sages and thymes, which got hit by the last winter, and which I am coaxing back to life, partly by feeding them, and partly by staring at them with love.

It rather enchanted me today, although it’s a bit of a mess and a muddle. It’s not a perfect, Martha Stewart, magazine type of pot table. It’s my own little imperfect version, but I love it anyway:

Rescued lavender:

Mystery thing which seeded itself:

One tiny flower, just holding on:

My first ever sedum cutting, about three weeks old now, which really has started to grow:

Happy sage:

I put this cotinus cutting in yesterday, with some lovely new compost, and am keeping my fingers crossed:

A little mint cutting, which seems to be working:

Lavender and sage, with the mauve smudge of the marjoram flowers in the background:

Tiny pots, waiting for seeds:

The whole, glorious, muddly thing:

Marjoram flowers:

More sedum:

I had the idea for the pot table last summer. It existed in my head, but I had no idea how to go about it. Then my sister just gave me the table, and all the old pots, which she had sitting in her garage, and now look:

Apple mint cuttings:

Then, because I was feeling rather whimsical, I made the poor Pigeon pose as if she were growing out of a hydrangea:

She is not at all sure about all the absurd posing, because she would much rather be chasing rabbits, but she does it with tremendous good grace:

And today’s hill, stately under the heavy sky:

Bonus post: Continuation on a theme.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It’s a very good thing that Sarah is out of the country, so she cannot see what I am doing to our blog.

Some very clever person has put up a video of Frankel’s race on the YouTube already. It appears to have come off RTE, so one gets the added bonus of the glorious Ruby Walsh commentating after the race. I’m very fond of John Francome, on Channel Four, but there is no one quite like Ruby.

Here it is:

Pure poetry

Note the excellent calling of the race by Simon Holt. He is not nearly as famous as the great Peter O’Sullivan, but he gets better and better at rising to the big occasion. He has given me goosebumps in the past when calling Kauto Star home. And he did it again today.

 

If you want to see the thing in a slightly larger format, follow the link here.

Update: HE DID IT

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Ten minutes ago, the beautiful, glorious, mighty Frankel stormed over the green grass of Goodwood, and into racing history. I screamed, I shouted, I physically jumped up and down; the dog barked at the top of her lungs; and the lovely, genuine, talented horse won his race. It was a wonderful thing to watch.

And Henry Cecil, that old veteran of the turf, had a tear in his eye.

In the end, I don’t know why I was worried. In the end, he made it look easy.

The Titans

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The manuscript is sent off. This is only second draft time, so there is still a long road to go. I need to do more reading, and then there shall be third and fourth and fifth drafts. But the main donkey work is done. I am going to take two days off and watch the ponies.

I call my mother and shout at her about the racing for a bit. (I always shout when I get excited.) It is Goodwood, which is always a lovely meeting, but it is also one of the most anticipated races of the year, as the two best milers we have seen for a generation go up against each other. People are dividing into camps: are you Team Canford or  Team Frankel?

‘I want Frankel to win,’ I yell.

‘I want Frankel to win,’ says my mother.

As always, I must justify my loyalty. I can’t just be saying things.

‘I love Canford Cliffs,’ I say. ‘He’s a really good horse. He was extraordinary at Ascot. But Frankel, Frankel is a…’

I almost say freak. But that word has too many negative connotations. Frankel is a titan, a mighty masterpiece of nature, an emperor. He has never been beaten. But it’s not only that; it’s the way he runs. When he won the Guineas, he charged off in front, more like a wild brumby than a finely tuned racehorse. This happens sometimes in smaller races; the lovely Hungarian Overdose did it all over Europe a few years ago; but you almost never see it in a classic race.

In the big classics, there are tactics, and waiting games, and clever positioning. Jockeys time the race to the second.

‘Do you remember what they used to say about Steve Cauthen?’ I ask my mother, indulging in a moment of nostalgia. ‘They said he had a clock in his head.’

In top races, horses do not generally roar off into the lead and stay there. On that blindingly sunny day at Newmarket in April, Frankel not only stayed there, he kept accelerating. It was almost as if he were breaking the laws of physics, just for fun.

Of course, he did not always do this. When he was a baby, he used to start off at the back of the field, saunter along for a couple of furlongs, and then blast past five horses in five seconds, with the sort of acceleration that made it look as if someone had thrown a switch. It was a wonderful, paradoxical combination of the galvanic, and the entirely effortless.

He has another thing that the truly memorable horses have. It is a particular kind of action, very hard to describe. It is as if, within his great, raking stride, he has an extra leap. It’s the only way I can put it. He skates over the turf, legs extending and extending, until in the end it is like a great dancing motion. It has some extra, indefinable thing in it.

And, beyond all that, he has something more. It is not just the will to win. Many horses have that; they are pack animals, after all, and the desire to gallop to the front is bred into their bones. It is as if he thinks, in his horsey old head, that he has the right to win. Not in an arrogant way; he is not one of those showy, head-tossing horses. It comes across as the simple belief that there is no other place for him except for the front. It is as if the winning post is his spiritual home.

Frankel is a champion,’ I shout at my mother. ‘And you know how I hate to see great champions brought low.’

Of course, anything could happen. It is racing, after all. Brilliant horses get beat. I still don’t quite believe, almost thirty years on, that Dancing Brave did not win the Derby. He was another mighty horse who made your heart pirouette in your chest.

Last time out, at Ascot, Frankel’s miraculous, raking stride looked slightly ordinary for the very first time, in the closing stages of the race. He won, but not in the streaking, roaring, imperious way he had won before.

Canford Cliffs is a very, very good horse indeed. He is in his pomp. It could just be his day. Or, all the prognostications could be proven wrong, and one of the two outsiders could spring a mad surprise.

‘And Henry,’ says my mother, with a dying fall.

‘And Henry,’ I say.

We ponder the imponderable genius of Henry Cecil for a moment. No one can really say for sure why he is as great as he is. I call him Henry in the way that you call people you admire by their first names, even if you have never met them. My mother calls him Henry because she knows him. She lived in racing for thirty years, after all.

‘Something extra,’ she says, musing. ‘Some mysterious thing.’

‘They say horses just run for him,’ I say.

My mother thinks for a moment.

‘He loves his roses, you know,’ she says.

I think: you won’t get that kind of information in the sports pages.

I think: it would be lovely if Frankel could do it, so we could see a brilliant horse and a brilliant man get what they deserve.

I say to my mother: ‘I’m not sure I can watch.’

 

Here are the beauties:

Canford Cliffs:

(Photograph by the Press Association.)

(Photograph uncredited.)

Frankel:

(Photograph by Alan Crowhurst.)

(Photograph by Edward Whitaker.)

(Photograph uncredited.)

Frankel’s sire, Galileo:

(Photograph uncredited.)

Canford Cliffs’ sire, Tagula:

(Photograph uncredited.)

And the great Sir Henry Cecil, Frankel’s trainer:

(Photograph uncredited.)

There are many reasons to admire Henry Cecil, but one of them is that he is a sporting gentleman. This is what he told one newspaper, ahead of today’s race:

‘This race, it's important the best horse wins. If Canford Cliffs beats him fair and square, I shall be the first person to go up to Richard and say “Well done”.’

Richard Hannon, trainer of Canford Cliffs, returns the compliment:

‘Henry knows what he is doing. He’s one of the all-time greats…It's going to be a hell of a race. If there are any weaknesses in our fellow, I haven't found them. And Frankel is rated the best in the world. But one of them has to get beat.’

(Photograph by the Press Association.)

Clash of the Titans, indeed, between two glorious horses and two great racing men. And don’t forget the jockeys, Richard Hughes and Tom Queally. Today may turn on tactics as much as raw talent:

(Photograph from sportinglife.com.)

Let us hope that the day lives up to its billing, and does not turn out to be a damp squib. Let them all run their race, and come home safe.

If you want to see more of the majestic Frankel in action, there are two excellent videos here, and here.

 

And since we are talking about beautiful creatures, and a post would not be a post without the Pigeon in it, here is my very own little champion:

And now I really must stop, before I drown in a sea of anthropomorphic whimsy. If one can have a sea of whimsy. Which I’m almost certain one cannot.

In which I had absolutely no intention of ranting

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It’s odd, the way that the blogging mind starts to work. Or perhaps I mean my quirky, sometimes clogged, rather vague blogging mind.

Each morning, I wake up. I think about the book. Then I think about the blog. Sometimes I think about them both together. The blog is a welcome thing to go in tandem with my paid work, because it is immediate, and not so daunting, and the readers say kind things, almost at once. The book just has a big, scary, amorphous floating Editor which I have conjured in the theatre of my head saying: this is not what we paid for. (My actual editor is kind, smiling, polite, and charming, and would never utter such a sentence.)

The blog also is about mood. I check my bones, metaphorically, each morning, feeling for breaks. Death lingers; the missing does not go away; the fragility is better masked now, but it is still there. Mortality walks beside me like a docile old horse. I think of the readers. I think: how much do I tell them?

Sometimes it is simple. Sometimes there is a vast issue of the day, which cannot be ignored, or the sun shines and that is all I can think of. But sometimes I think: should I really say that?

So, this is a three-day-old fury, which I was not sure I should write.

When the Norwegian news broke, I felt shock and grief. Norway feels very close to us. It is geographically not far away, just across the North Sea. I often think it is not so very different from Scotland, a country of wild scenery and clean air. I have dreamed for years of the fjords.

Every year, the Norwegian government sends the most magnificent Christmas tree to the people of Blighty; it stands proudly in Trafalgar Square, in thanks for what the British did in the war. I know that Norwegian campaign well; it is a part of the second war that I studied. There are ancient ties between the two nations.

Then, as I watched the news coverage, I started to grow amazed and furious. I wanted to write something about this, but then I thought: no, no, it’s not the time, let it go. But it haunts me, and I can’t let it drop.

So here is my big, fat, furious question: why does speculation count as ‘news’? I am genuinely asking; I do not know the answer.

The mighty BBC, an institution I love and defend, as the cross right-wingers accuse it of being a Stalinist plot, spent all afternoon covering the tragedy. I know that rolling news is really hard; I imagine being a newsreader in that situation is impossible. You suddenly have no script; you have appalling human suffering to report. But both presenters spent their entire time asking questions to which there was no answer. They found some baffled eyewitnesses, and asked them what they saw, and then said, over and over: who do you think did this?

It’s one thing to wheel in the terrorism experts, although they all ended up with egg all over their faces, as they sagely told us that it was Colonel Gadaffi, in league with Al Quaeda, in the study with the lead piping. It’s quite another to find some shattered civilian who has just seen her city go up in smoke and say: well, who do you think was responsible?

All the eyewitnesses, quite rightly, had no answer to that question. Of course they did not know. Even the damn experts did not know. Yet the newsreaders, in peculiar and rather aggressive auto-pilot, went on and on asking the same question.

At one point, the questioning took an even more sinister turn. Seeing that she was getting no joy from the who did it trope, one of the newsreaders started asking about the levels of security near the Norwegian government offices. She actually said something about it being nothing like the kind of security we see here in Britain. She went on, and on. The implication was that it was somehow the Norwegians’ fault, for being so lax and complacent. If only they had concrete bollards as they do at the House of Commons, then none of this would have happened.

Then the questioning moved on to people in official positions. The British Ambassador came on, followed by the Mayor of Oslo. Both were asked who did it. Both said, firmly and politely, that it was not the time to speculate. They said this several times. The mayor, at one point, said, in a despairing voice, that he could not possibly think about potential perpetrators, because he still had people in his city trapped in burning buildings. This did not seem to faze his interlocutor at all. She seemed rather cross and disappointed that he would not join in her orgy of unanswerable questions.

Then the security and diplomatic correspondents were wheeled on. They hedged a bit; they said we are not yet sure, and we cannot say with certainty. Then they, too, waded into the speculative swamp. Bodies were still being loaded into ambulances, and they were talking about the Danish cartoons. At this point, I actually shouted ‘What? What?’ at the television. Sweden was also mentioned. Added to the Islamist assumption was the notion that Jihadists cannot differentiate between different Scandinavian countries. It reached a surreal level of farce.

I yearned and yearned for a voice of reason. At last, on the Ten O’clock news, Frank Gardner, the articulate and brave security correspondent, appeared. His report was beautifully brief. It was brief, because still no one knew anything much, and he is too good and clever to spin phantoms and call them news. He reported the situation as it was then known. It took him about four minutes.

I love and trust the BBC. I turn to it instinctively in times of crisis. But that afternoon of reporting was disgraceful. I cannot say it enough. When something dreadful happens, I want news, not speculation.

The columnists and the bloggers, most especially Charlie Brooker and Andrew Sullivan, have made trenchant criticism of the stupidity of the anchors and experts going immediately to Al Quaeda and Jihad and Islamist madness. But in some ways, it’s not so much the fact that everybody got it wrong, except for one lovely, reasonable professor, whose name I sadly forget, who mentioned home-grown right-wing extremists. It’s the fact that everyone was asking the question before the bodies were even cold.

I think even if it had turned out to be a Jihad, so that the experts and the assumptions were proved correct, this would not excuse the instant speculative fever. My great bent is for utility. When smoke is still billowing, and gunshots are still ringing out, it serves no purpose to ask who is doing this and why. Analysis can come later, when the facts are in, and then citizens and governments may make some sense of the thing, and take preventative measures to avoid it happening again, if that is at all possible. Questions of geo-politics and cultural clashes may be asked, in time. At the moment of an atrocity, the news should be the news. Here is what we know. To ask someone on a burning street who they think set the bomb is not only heartless, it is useless. It serves no purpose at all.

 

Ah well, today turned into a bit of a rant after all. It did not start off like that. Sometimes I think perhaps one must go with the mystery.

Today is another drear and drack day. I have not the heart to take my camera out, so here are some old photographs from the last few days. I have put them into black and white, because we have not had any black and white lately, and that was where the whim took me:

I’m not quite sure if these work. Part of the delight of the garden pictures is the colour. Still, it is an interesting experiment, and there is no point in having lovely photograph software if one does not play around with it, once in a while.

The Pigeon, however, does suit monochrome very well, so she gets a little portfolio all her own. If the worst comes to the worst, and the book does not turn out well, I can always hire her out to Vogue:

(Is it possible to have too much beauty?)

Today, even the hill is in black and white: