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.

Some thoughts; no conclusions.

Some of the Dear Readers will be amazed to hear that I do think quite a lot about this blog. I think about it in a discrete way, often writing a post in my head as I brush my teeth in the morning. (These dazzling creations, so brilliant they hurt, dissipate like breath on glass by the time the actual day starts, leaving only a ghostly memory behind.) Rather as if I am feeding a family, and have to remember that we had chicken on Tuesday and little Wilf does not like mushrooms and dear Myrtle can’t abide aubergines but that still all the food groups must be represented, I think well, I banged on about the red mare on Saturday and I went on a tangent about racing on Friday and the Wednesday before that I was in a really bad mood and had a terrible old moan, so today it must be time for something pithy and uplifting. Or, possibly, a jeremiad against the dangling modifier, just to stiffen the sinews.

If I have been grave of late, I try to put some jokes in. (I am quite funny in life, although I never know whether it is funny peculiar or funny ha ha, but I find it really hard to be funny in print, and stand in awe and wonder of those people who can do it.) If I’ve been a bit mimsy, I try and have a rant. If I’ve been all hello clouds, hello sky, I may attempt to sketch a little acerbity. Texture and variety, my darlings, and changes in tempo. Or some such.

This is complicated by the fact that I am often tired by the time I get around to writing the thing, and I can’t remember what I wanted to say to you and I have no time to edit as I would like, or to polish the prose until it gleams. Since really the only point of this is that, when it comes to sentences, I can carry a tune, this is a slight pity.

I think about blogging in a general way, too. It is such a novel medium, and I find it fascinating to watch it develop and change, to stretch its wings or run into sudden cul-de-sacs. It strikes me that the micro-blog is the one that will conquer the world – little bulletins on Facebook have more heft, I think, than long, windy disquisitions on Blogger or Wordpress. I am terribly prone to windiness, which may be why I am not naturally suited to the medium. Even on my Facebook page, I often post perfect essays, complete with sub-clauses and semi-colon action, instead of the preferred three lines littered with exclamation marks and LOLZ. (That is going to be the first and only time I write that acronym. Even doing it in the spirit of illustrative irony makes me feel sad.)

All of which adds up to my usual conclusion, which is: I know nothing. There is no perfect template, no beau ideal. There is no one person, doing it the finest and the best, in whose trail-blazing footprints the rest of us may follow. I often think the point of it is to scatter a little cheer into a dim world. If people are exhausted after a long day, they might come here and look at pictures of trees and Stan the Man and the dear old duchess, get a shot of aesthetics, a breath of the hills, and feel a frown turn to a smile. That is when I think I should just give you the good stuff – something bright, or hopeful, or diverting. I must do a tap dance. I often think this in life, scolding myself if I feel I have not been on good enough form, as if it were my duty to be the life and soul of the damn party, as if I must always be on. I am terrified by the thought of falling into the mundane or the banal or the crashingly dull.

But sometimes I am in a rotten mood, trudging through the slough of despond, furious with myself for doing something idiotic, and I can’t put those ridiculous tap shoes on. Since I am hopeless at faking, I generally tell you that. The doomy part of me is shouting FAIL, FAIL, but oddly, it is often those messy, grumpy, scratchy posts, filled with human flaws and existential doubts, which really get the Dear Readers going.

It’s almost as if, by admitting my own moments of flakiness and hopelessness and fecklessness, I give you permission to have your own, although we have never met and it is none of my business. Yet, there is a sense of that, and perhaps it works because it is the opposite of the perfect face/perfect house/perfect marriage/perfect clothes nexus of the women’s magazines. I eat carbohydrates and don’t give a bugger about cellulite and sometimes forget to take my face off at night and have entirely given up on my hair and am haunted by the cupboard of doom. I am the very opposite of the shiny cover girls who gaze down at ordinary females from the newsagents’ shelves, mocking their paltry attempts to be fabulous.

All of which is a very long way of saying: I don’t really know what it is for, or why I do it, or why I love it, or how to make it better. I do think about it, and I never really come to any conclusions. Which is absolutely bloody typical.

 

Today’s pictures:

Jumping for joy. And why it matters.

It was a funny day. The sun shone, but the bitter winds, howling in the from east, kept Scotland in winter submission.

The agent rang to say we are not quite there yet. I was brave and cheerful about it. ‘I am a professional,’ I said. ‘This is part of the job.’ Not quite there yet haunts me, and I must be very, very flinty and practical and sensible and stare it in the whites of its eyes and not let it make me sad. It’s just a bit more time and a bit more work and there really are worse things happening at sea.

I did something catastrophically stupid which has led to practical and logistical problems and I had to walk the fine line of rightly scolding myself and not falling into a brown study. I needed to get my categories in a row. I had to face the stupid thing, understand it did not make me an entirely worthless person, prevent myself from falling into a frenzy of lashing and regret, and take stern steps to put the stupid thing right. I had to resist a sudden urge to fling myself into a defensive crouch. I breathed. I reminded myself that nobody had died. I remembered that imperfection is what makes a human lovable. (I really, really hope this is true.) I fixed up the stupid thing and tried not to let the stupidity haunt me.

Although I had caught up on sleep, I still felt a bit tired and out of sorts. Even though I did not have a deadline to meet, I still forgot to make lunch. (Going to do it now.)

It was a mmm, blah, scratchy, scritchy, uncomfortable sort of a day. It was not a show tunes kind of a day. It was the sort of day when I say, with my fatalistic, philosophical hat on: EVERY DAY CAN’T BE DORIS DAY.

Ah, well, I thought. Not the end of the world. Everyone goes through this, one way and another. Better tomorrow.

Then, as I went down to the field to give the duchess her tea, this happened:

Evverything was better. It damn well was Doris Day, after all.

It was not just that I had the good fortune to bump into The World Traveller and the two great-nieces, the very sight of whom never fails to lift my spirits. It was not just that all one of the little girls wanted to do was sit on the red mare, and that I could confidently say yes, because the dear old duchess is now so soft and relaxed that I can trust her with my best beloveds. It was not just that the mare was so enchanted by the small people that she blinked her eyes at them and wuffled through her nose, so that the smallest small shrieked with delight, making a noise so high that virtually only bats could hear her. It was not just that The World Traveller allowed me to vent all my worries and woes without seeming to mind that I forgot to ask her a single thing about herself, opening up her generous heart and spreading empathy like balm on my wounds. It was not just that they are ridiculously pleased to see me, and love me whether I have sold a book or not.

It is that they are so completely themselves, so happy, so bright and bonny and blithe that they literally jump for joy. You can’t be gloomy and scratchy when there are people jumping for joy in front of your very eyes.

In reality, the universe is a vast uncaring thing, full of dark matter and black holes. Almost every element of it would kill a human stone dead, from solar winds to cosmic radiation to primordial gas. It does not send portents, or care about puny humanity, or do anything but exist. But sometimes I do think of it in a metaphorical, magical sense. Sometimes I think the universe sends me what I need at the exact moment I need it. This is not literally true, and is very, very bad science. It is a metaphor, not a literal fact. But it is one of those things that can feel true.

Today, the universe sent me kind true hearts, and people who jump for joy.

And, of course, a very, very happy horse. If she had her way, they would come and set up camp in the field and live next to her in tents, so she could gaze at them in joy.

Stanley the Dog loves them too. ‘STANLEY, STANLEY, STANLEY,’ they cry, in chanting unison, as he demonstrates his skills with a stick.

Who could fail to love such loveliness?

I did not have to wait for it to be better tomorrow. It was better now.

 

PS. The thing that makes me laugh is that these pictures really are not the best I’ve ever taken. I was laughing so much and so eager to capture every moment that I merely pointed and snapped. They are technically deficient, but they are filled with sweetness, and the happiness of that half hour pours out like starlight. They are a potent reminder that things do not need to be perfect, or even very good, in order to shimmer with loveliness.

A short break.

I’m going off the blog for a few days whilst I hit my deadline and finish this particular draft. This is the one that will go to the publishers to see if one of them would like to buy it. Not much riding on the thing, only the rest of my career.

As a result, I am going to abandon you, ruthlessly. It’s not the time so much, it’s the mental space. I don’t know who started the evil rumour about females being perfectly wonderful at multi-tasking, but they were guilty of a canard. I can only hold about two things in my puny brain, so something has to give, and I’m afraid it is this.

I always laugh when I say not going to blog for a while. I feel slightly guilty, as if I am letting the Dear Readers down. In fact, you are more likely to be sighing gusty sighs of relief, because you can have a nice rest from the relentless gales of Red Mare adoration and the ridiculous obsessions about the 3.30 at Huntingdon. That is where the laughter comes from.

I’m very manic, and I am constantly drinking too much coffee and forgetting to eat lunch. How can I take time for food when so much is at stake? The idiotish thing is that I am doing all this despite the fact that, as I have got older, I have become quite good at asking myself the question What is the Worst Thing That Can Happen? And quite good at facing the answer with some stoicism and not too much drama. (I learnt this from the Beloved Cousin, who is very wise.) The worst thing did happen with the last book, and it did not kill me. I’ve also grown fairly sensible about understanding how fleeting the glittering prizes are. I know that the happiness of my mare and the joy Stanley the Manly feels when he finds a really big stick and the hills and the lichen and the trees and cooking breakfast every day for my old mum are much, much more important than worldly success. The good life lies in the small things, I am persuaded of that.

But, dammit, I would like to be published again. And so: the coffee and the no lunch and the shoulders around the ears. My better angels are trying to sing their song, but they are being drowned out by a less heavenly choir.

I don’t think ambition is bad. I like ambition. I like trying. I believe in striving. But you’ve got to work out where the important things are, and get them in order. I’ll have talked myself down off the ceiling by the end of the week, but just now, I am flown up into the boughs.

Thank you for bearing with me. You are all so good and kind.

Some of the Dear Readers have asked, but I’m not going to say what the books are exactly, just yet. It’s magical thinking, I’m afraid, something I usually try to avoid. If I tell you, it might put a hex on the thing. One is fiction, one is non-fiction. I love them both and I have no idea if a serious grown-up in a serious office with a serious business to think of will love them too. I can only hope.

Luckily, down in a quiet Scottish field, I have a daily dose of sanity:

They really don’t care. They won’t judge me if I fail. The only reason the red mare would like the manuscript to be accepted is so that I can keep her in Thunderbrook’s. If the worst comes to the worst, I can be like Mrs Worthington, and put her on the stage.

Happiness.

6.02pm on a Friday and I’m still working. I have another hard deadline, and it’s full speed to the finishing line. Although sometimes I think I shall never be finished. There is always another draft.

I had no interest in the eclipse, but I ran into a gentleman with some welders’ glass and looked at it through that and at once was enchanted. A shadow fell over the world and I could see why the ancients thought eclipses a portent of dark doings. It was oddly moving and dramatic.

Rode the mare, fed the mare, adored the mare. Walked the dog, raced up to HorseBack, cantered about with my camera, shouted with excitement at all the good work, had much happy conversation. Went home and did the HorseBack Facebook page which took ages, because there were so many pictures to choose from and so much to say.

Edited, edited, edited. Then, in a spurt of bonkersness, wrote almost 3,000 new words. The emphasis has shifted slightly, and more needs to be said than I thought. Had a moment of slight panic. Ate some cheese. Watched a delightful Hunter Chase, almost my favourite kind of race in the world. Did some more editing. Ruefully regarded my muddly office and decided it would have to wait for another day. All that is important now is getting this damn draft right.

Somewhere, vaguely, on the internet, I saw that it was the International Day of Happiness. Or some such thing. Decided I had to write you a long, long list of happy things.

Obviously it would start with THE RED MARE.

Find something you love and do it well; don’t compare yourself; look at moss; surround yourself with people who make you laugh; read a book; if at all possible, live in the Scottish countryside. Then my brain started fizzling as if the wiring had gone faulty, which is what happens at the end of such a day, and I thought: bugger it, you know what makes you happy. I don’t need to tell you. My own list is endless, and I do not have time to type it, or strength left in my fingers. Perhaps, if I had to boil it down, it would be something like – Be yourself, find your one true thing, follow your own goofy star, and don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.

If I have learned one thing in my life it is that you can never make people think what you would like them to think, and that even if you are a silver-tongued devil, you can rarely change their minds. So you might as well just keep buggering on and not fret about the opinions of others. Do your best, keep trying, accept that sometimes things will go catastrophically wrong. When they do, laugh like a drain, pick yourself, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

I talk a lot about kindness. It is up there with my most favourite virtues, although it does not get much press. Being kind to others is vital, but I also think one should be kind to oneself.

Someone said to me this week that when I bought an ex-racing thoroughbred mare, ‘we all thought you were mad’. I did not know this. I laughed and laughed. Perhaps it was not the most sensible thing for a woman of a certain age to do, especially one disastrously unfit and out of practice and ring rusty. Yet, on this happiness day, I think: that horse brings me more sustained joy than anything else I have ever known.

Every time I am with her, I hear the flapping wings of my better angels. I did not know she would make me a better human, but she did. When I am with her, all the dark things in the world fly away, and I am in the light.

 

Today’s pictures:

Really at the end of my tether now, so just time for two quick snaps. No prizes for guessing what they will be of.

After the eclipse, before the ride:

After the ride:

I know this blog is very stuttery, which annoys me since I pride myself on my rhythm. Everyone has a secret pride and that is mine. But I have no time left to edit it, and so I send it out in all its imperfections, because learning to accept imperfection is a secret of happiness too, and it feels appropriate.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

Into the woods. Or: be brave.

There is a moment in a book when I think I am editing and slashing and cutting, killing darlings with a ruthless hand, slaying those irrelevant, indulgent, extraneous paragraphs like Attila the Hun on a wild Saturday night.

In fact, I am fooling myself. I am living in a state of tense fear. I have written all these damn words, and thought all these damn thoughts, and I am holding onto them for grim death. I trim a passage here, and chop a conclusion there, but I am tinkering round the edges. I find that my perspective goes, and I can’t liberate myself. I’m so terrified of losing the good stuff that I dare not murder the bad stuff.

This morning, in the field with the red mare quietly grazing by my side, I shouted into my mobile telephone to my agent. We had one of those revelatory, galvanising conversations which change everything.

‘I AM GALVANISED,’ I hollered, into the light Scottish air. The mare took not the blindest bit of notice.

I did not go to HorseBack, but ran straight to my desk. I merrily threw out 1700 words, and wrote 2339 new ones to go in their place. I was no longer frightened. It had taken me nine months of trying to work out what this book was really about, and, finally, it was the objective eye of the clever agent that cut through the thickets and saw the light.

The thing that is making me laugh is that the heart of the book turns out to be the part about which I harboured profound doubts. It was a piece of folly and self-indulgence, I thought, too much even for me. I could not resist it, but I corralled it into little separate sections in each chapter, so that when the agent shrieked with derisive laughter, as she surely would, I could quietly remove those nutty bits and sit up straight and be a grown up.

Those parts may now be released from their box. It is the happiest irony that they are the glorious, chugging engine of the whole book.

The red mare, as you dear Dear Readers know to your cost, is not just an actual horse. She is a metaphor horse. She is my totem, my shining light, my daily life lesson. After taking a holiday whilst I was cheering on her cousins at Cheltenham, she has come back into work, and I got back on her for the first time today. Warwick Schiller, the lovely Australian horseman whose precepts I follow, has a delightful exercise which he does with his horses every day. It is called: ‘Where do you want to go?’

The idea is that you get on and you let the horse wander where it will. The only rule is that they must keep a steady gait, but you do not steer them. This achieves many wonders, too many to go into now, but perhaps the most important is that it teaches them not to get stuck. If Red heads for the gate or the feed shed or the place where her little Paint friend is grazing, I make her work by disengaging her hindquarters and moving her in tight circles. When she goes off kindly, I leave her alone. Sometimes I wave my arms in the air, just for fun, and think about how good this is for my independent seat. I always love seeing where she wants to go next, and sometimes have to lie on her neck as she weaves her way under low-hanging branches and through the trees.

On this day of all days, after I finished the liberating, galvanising conversation with the agent, I got on the mare and asked her where she wanted to go. She set off to her usual haunts, near to home, and we described a familiar circuit.

Then, something amazing happened. She pricked her ears and struck off into new territory. She was going where the wild things are. She headed with purpose, without any doubt or terror, to the scary woods. The woods to the west are indeed dark and deep, with rough ground and alarming shadows. The pheasants which used to send her into shocked, vertical leaps live there, along with cohorts of invisible woodland critters, hiding in their umbrous lairs.

In she went, had a wander about, took everything in, and then found her way out again into the light. On the border of the scary wood is a ragged area where the building yard beyond the southern treeline stores all its old stone. Huge blocks of ancient Scottish granite lie there in heaps, along with old carved pediments and fanciful curlicued columns. Some of it has been there for so long that the moss and grass has started to grow over the sleeping humps, as if the very earth is reclaiming it for its own. This was not only far out of her comfort zone, it was treacherous ground, difficult to navigate. She was Magellan now, setting out without a map, going to the edges of the known world, into the realm marked Here Be Dragons. I stifled my delighted laughter, and went with her, wherever she wanted to go.

She beat the bounds, picked her way, sure-footed as a mountain goat, over the hummocks and crevices and sharp edges of the monumental stones, tracked her way past the young trees, and emerged, triumphant, all terrain conquered, back into the familiar flatlands of her own field.

I’ve been guilty of thinking she was not a very brave horse. I made a category error. It was not courage she lacked, it was good, sturdy, human boundaries. Once she had those, it turned out she could go anywhere.

There is a profound idea that when you work a horse well, you find out who it really is. If the human is not up to scratch, the horse may hide its true nature under a defensive layer of compensations and survival mechanisms.

Now she has confidence in me, the red mare may be brave. As my agent has confidence in the book, so I may be brave. It was a perfect piece of symmetry.

I cast away the old words, and wrote the new, and I had a humming sense of pleasure in the work. But nothing, nothing, could match the delight of that moment when my courageous mare cast off her shackles and headed out into the unknown.

 

Today’s pictures:

There was too much going on to take photographs on top of everything else. Here are a couple from the last few days. I’m afraid I am taking the opportunity to show you yet another lying down picture. Any excuse.

She’s actually staring at the scary woods in this picture, because some invisible creature is moving about down there and making a racket:

Stan the Man is always brave as a lion when he has that magical stick in his mouth: