THE SMALL THINGS

For a moment, my life grows complicated. I look at the complication and think I can make this as Byzantine or as straightforward as I ...

I get one of those telephone calls which is like a blow to the heart. It contains, at second-hand, carelessnesses and unkindnesses from...

Sometimes I see things which are not small, which must be written down, which must be remembered. I think: I want to put this in my me...

  The sun shines like a proper, blazing thing. It shines so hard that it cuts through the hard cold of the frosty night and brings warmth...

It is a gloomy Monday with surly rain falling from a sky the colour of disappointed pigeons. A cross voice in my head says: don’t writ...

Today was a day of about twenty-seven halves. I had slightly bad news about one of my mares but decided I would remain stout of heart ...

The red mare’s new friend came to the field today. Isla is eleven years old, and she has the natural instincts of a born horsewoman...

I walk in the trees. I look at the trees. I wonder at the trees. Someone planted these. Two, three, four hundred years ago, some...

The day starts in low cloud and incipient rain. Then the sun shoulders its way through and gets cracking. The autumn landscape is lit u...

In two days, I think, it will be the anniversary of my mother’s death. Anniversaries are stupid things, I think; you don’t need a special...

I finished my big polish and have no more words and no more brain left. The sun shone. The autumn leaves are suddenly growing vivid and...

Today, I have been going through a manuscript removing the words ‘however’, ‘only’ and ‘just’. As in: however, just concentrating on t...

  Two small, illuminating things happened today. I overslept. I’ve had a massive attack of sciatica and have been on the hard-cor...