The Hill

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today's hill, in the rain:

Philip Larkin was Right

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I used to misquote that line all the time about 'what is left of us is love'. I thought I knew what it meant. I'm not sure I quite did. I do now.

This is what he actually said, the old librarian, and he was right:

…and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

 

Dad:

 

It turns out that you dear readers have a bit of wisdom of your own. I could not have imagined a set of comments with more kindness, generosity, goodness, sense, sympathy, and even funniness than that which you have sent in the last day. I feel like printing them out and taking them to the doomier of the newspapers and saying See, see? The world is not going to hell in a handbasket after all. Not while there is this.

Thank you is too paltry a thing to say. But I do thank you, anyway. You have touched me more than you may know. The kindness of strangers; that is another thing which is true.

Magical Thinking

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I think I'm in that crazy time where I believe that if I can put up enough pictures of him, he will not really be gone.

He's the fellow on the far left. He is SMILING. No one smiles when going over steeplechase fences at thirty miles an hour. Looking at that picture, taken some time in the early sixties, I think: he was almost certainly up dancing the night before. So the smile is because he is getting away with it.

More of my dad

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

You know how they say that grief takes people in different ways? I always thought that was a little bit of nonsense. Until I found myself wanting to put up pictures of my dad, riding over fences, with his teeth gritted.

I remember that look of absolute determination. I put them here, because I want them to be remembered. I want him to be remembered.

There are people in the world who will say: what are you doing? I say: I want the recollection of a man at his cussed, booted best. I want that to stand. I want it to be marked that he was a fellow of tremendous physical courage. I want to remember that there was a time, in my twenties, when every single cab driver in London knew his name, because they had won money on him. There is a glorious, irrational part of my mind which says: if the cab drivers know your name, then you must be all right.

Requiem

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I wondered whether to say this. There are some things, after all, that are private. But it is already on the Racing Post website. It is not a secret. It is not something that just the family do know.

My darling old dad has gone.

I hate euphemisms, generally. Normally, I say a spade is a spade is a spade. But dead is suddenly a horrid bleak word. So I say: he has gone. I don't yet quite believe it, whatever word there is for it. I can't quite understand a world without him in it.

There will be words written about him, in the next few days. There should be words written about him. The racing people will remember him well. He rode horses and trained horses and backed horses. He was a crazy horseman, to his bones. My mother used to say: he bought these big, clumsy Irish horses with feet like soup plates, and I had to watch while they put their bloody great big feet in the bottom of the open ditch.

He broke his back and his neck twice, and the men in white coats looked at him sternly and said: you must never sit on a horse again. A year later, in quiet defiance, he was riding in the Grand National. A newspaper featured him in the leader column. It said: mad, you may say; reckless, you may declare; but there is one thing to add - what tremendous guts.

He had so many gifts. I remember meeting people who had encountered him only once, twenty years before. When they heard my surname, and put two and two together, their eyes would start to sparkle. Oh, oh, they would say; yes, yes, Gay. He had the capacity, quite rare in humans, to light up a room. He did it without even trying.

Maybe the thing I cherish most in him is that he was not conventional. It was not that he did not do things by the book, it was that he did not even know there was a book. That was the gift he gave his children. We all have gone our own way, because he offered us the rare present of no expectations. He did not expect us to have two point two children or work in regular jobs or sit up straight or even follow in his footsteps. He let us go our own way, which is a lovely bequest.

He taught me, without ever saying any of it out loud, simply by example, many things. I may write about some of those, in the days to come. But the one I value most, which I can say now, is this most important one:

He never judged any person by class, or cash, or colour, or creed. He loved people who made him laugh, and if they could do that, he did not care if they were dukes or dustmen.

That is a magnificent legacy. In the next days, there will be people who will remember the Irish songs, the naughty jokes, the eccentric drinking. He was very good at taking the young under his wing. A raw fellow would arrive in Lambourn, some assistant trainer, knowing nothing, and Dad would buy him a drink and make him feel at home. Some of them would go on and train a Derby winner. But my father would not really care about that. It was the laughter than he loved. That is the thing I shall remember.

I think of him now, laughing and laughing, until tears fell down his cheeks, at some obscure joke. Oh, he would say, wiping his cheeks, his shoulders heaving up and down like a cartoon character, oh yes.

My papa, my dad, my Fa: Gay Kindersley, 1930 -2011.

Tone

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is always a question of tone. People say that the internet bleaches tone, so that insults are taken where none are meant. This is especially dangerous on email and Twitter. Irony is a more delicate creature than one might suspect.

Tone needs care on the blog, too. Lately, I have not talked of the world, but concentrated on my own little patch: the blossom and the tulips and the canines. I sometimes think of this as negligence; sometimes I think well, everyone out there is shouting about the issue of the day, so I shall divert you with cherry trees. What I do not want is for it to seem like smugness. Oh, look at me with my bloody horticulture and my recipe for beetroot salad, while the world goes to hell. So, there are fine lines, everywhere.

I was going to do a bit of a random post today. I had not done one for a while. I was going to say: here are the things that I might have written about, which ran through my head like tickertape this morning. I was going to make a little joke about gold eyeshadow and questions for Thor and superinjuctions and how I have absolutely not one inch of interest in AV.

But I wanted too to say something about death. You can't just go from gold eyeshadow to the end of two lives. And sometimes one risks taking on that awful, sanctimonious, I'm talking about serious stuff now tone; the one that makes one seem somehow more important and caring and emotionally engaged than other, more frivolous people. A man did it just now on the radio and I wanted to throw things.

So I don't really know how to go from la di dah, this was my day, to Captain Lisa Jade Head and Tim Hetherington, without it being odd and jarring. But they were two quite remarkable human beings and I wanted you to be able to read about them. You can do so here, and here. I have an inordinate admiration for physical courage, and they both had it in spades. They are remembered well.

 

Pictures of the day are of the garden, again. I apologise if this is becoming a little repetitive, but I am obsessed with the sudden growing that spring brings. The lawn is full of blackbirds, and the bushes are enlivened by antic blue tits, and every time I go outside, I find something blooming that was not there the day before.

These tulips are so grand I cannot believe they are quite real:

My adoration of the euphorbia continues:

And of the hellebores too:

The little ornamental cherry has almost finished its blossom:

But the apples are in full fig:

I found the very first lilac buds today:

And the beginnings of the chives:

While the little blue clumps grow more delightful each day:

Canines:

And the hill, almost lost in the afternoon light:

A metaphor for what?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes I grow afraid of ground elder. It is not just that it spreads everywhere, at the speed of sound, like some terrifying extra-terrestrial being which has come to turn us all into pod people. It is that it lies there, a green carpet of reproach, proving to me that I am a lousy gardener. If I even look at it, I have to admit that I have no serious grasp of horticulture. As a result, I have a shocking tendency to avert my eyes, and pretend it is not there.

Today, I went outside to take some pictures of the tulips and the grape hyacinths. For the most excellent angle, I have to lie down. I decided I liked lying down very much (my lawn is lovely and mossy). The dogs, thinking this a tremendous game, came and lay down beside me, nudging me with their noses. The problem was that, in the prone position, I had a worm's eye view of the ground elder. There it bloody was, mocking me with its ruthless persistence. The lying down became less fun.

Suddenly, I had no more fear. The thing is: I am a lousy gardener. It does not matter. I am useless at tennis and chess and doing the crawl; that does not make me think that I am beyond redemption. Everyone has their talent and gardening is not mine. I'm not taking it personally, I thought, but I shall just pull up that little clump there.

I had forgotten the base satisfaction of pulling up ground elder. Unlike the horrid buttercups, which are absolute buggers, and break away in your hand, the elder comes away easily, and sometimes you get a whole root system, worming out from under the loose earth.

Yes, I thought. And that clump there. And that one. Ha.

Before I knew it, I was shuffling about on my hands and knees, under the hawthorn and the lilac bushes, pulling and pulling. What had seemed like an insuperable task only yesterday was now a thing of gaudy delight. You bastard, I thought, I will not let you strangle my ornamental cherry.

This must be a metaphor, I thought, as I was slaying the beast. This feels like a metaphor. I could not think for what. For a moment, I was frustrated. Then I thought: sometimes weeding is just weeding. And that is quite all right.

 

Photographs of the day are of the growing things in the garden.

I had thought these little fritillaries quite dead, but, amazingly, here they are:

The very first of the apple blossom:

The cherry blossom:

A festival of green, starting with euphorbia, in a pot:

Alchemilla:

Hellebores:

Grape hyacinths:

The brave little acer:

Tulip:

Dwarf euphorbia:

Shrub whose name I cannot recall:

Forget-me-nots with iris stalks in the foreground:

Most serious ladyships:

They have taken to putting on very grave faces for their photographs, I do not know why. In life, they are rather goofy and come as close as dogs can to grinning at people. Even the Duchess, for all her hauteur, has a flirty habit of staring up at people she likes with her mouth open in a smiley canine come hither, whilst she wiggles her bottom at them. She was doing it only this morning to the Brother-in-Law, whom she adores. But the moment they see the camera come out, it is as if they think they are posing for a latter-day Sir Jacob Epstein.

The hill:

PS. Extraordinary thanks for the kindness of yesterday's comments. The ability of the blogosphere and the dear readers to cheer one never ceases to amaze me. I cannot tell you how much you put a smile on my face.

In which I am wearing my crazy hat

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes I take off my sensible hat, which keeps the rain off and prevents the heat escaping from the top of my head, and put on my crazy hat. Is this a bit of a tortured metaphor? Yes. But I am going with it. Once I have the mad hat on, I am free to think all kinds of unkind thoughts about myself. Actually, maybe it's not a mad hat, but a mean hat. Maybe it's what the shrinks would call an introject hat. Anyway, here is what I say when I am wearing it:

Ten years since your last novel? Ten years? What have you been doing in that time? (At this point, for some reason, Backwards doesn't really count, even though it was a book and it did quite well.) Call yourself a writer, the hat voice goes on. Pah. If you were Joyce Carol Oates, you would have written twelve books in that time. You are just lazy, lazy, lazy. And good for nothing. And useless, pointless, feckless and hopeless.

At which point I tear the hat from my head and run screaming from the room.

I don't know why I think it has anything to do with a metaphorical hat, but there we are.

The point is that with or without the hat, there are days when I run into a failure swarm. I'm not sure where it comes from. Today was actually a good day. I wrote a really vulgar 1672 words, some of which even made sense. I read and did some notes. I took my library books back. (My love for the librarians is now quite out of control; I just stand there in my gumboots beaming at them like a loon.) I sent off my Polish contracts, only nine months after they were due, which is pretty good for me. The blossom is blossoming.

And yet, and yet. The voices in the head were jabbering on, filled with scorn and fury. The voices only see the dark side. I have to be very, very calm, and very, very reasonable to deal with them. I point out that I did write three novels in that time, it was not like I was sitting around eating Turkish delight. Yeah, say the voices, but no one wanted to publish them. This has the horrible merit of being true. Those were my wilderness years, and there is no getting round it.

I tell the voices that a bit of failure is good for the soul. I talk about grit in the oyster. I say that if it had all been rose-strewn paths of glory I might be arrogant and insufferable. I add that I do at least know an awful lot about American politics, which turned out to be my displacement obsession during the fallow time, when no publisher wanted me. At least I have something to talk about at dinner parties, if I ever went to dinner parties, which I don't, much.

At this point, the voices get bored, and go and have their party somewhere else.

I think: bloody hell, that came out of nowhere. I never quite know, for all my study of the human condition, where that not good enough riff comes from. I wonder if everyone has it. I wonder if it's not a bad thing. At least it drives me on. Without it, perhaps I would be smug and stultified. I cannot quite be sure.

I think: I shall go and take some pictures of the blossom now. Just as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Berman always had Paris, I may always have the blossom.

Here it is:

There are some lovely green hellebores, growing wild on my wall:

The lime leaves are spreading their wings:

The light was dull today, but the trees are green:

I like the little random clumps of daffodils growing in the wild places:

The dogs are in stately mood:

The hill:

 

Have been rather at sixes and sevens the last few days, so I have not been replying to comments. Thank you for them all, and forgive me for not responding. They are always so much appreciated and happily read.