Bonus post: modelly boys sing and dance

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Don't know why this is so adorable, but it just IS. Perfect for blasting away the January gloom.

Too much news

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today was a crazy news day. Police are beating protesters in Egypt, Mervyn King is saying sad things about lack of economic growth, President Obama gave his State of the Union address (which I damn well refuse to call SOTU). Ireland has a new Prime Minister, after Brian Cowan stepped down; Oprah Winfrey apparently has a hitherto unperceived sister; some football commentators said something disobliging about ladies, thus astonishing the entire civilised world. There is so much going on that it was hardly even reported that Britain's national debt shot over the trillion mark. Probably too many zeros for the human mind to process.

And the point is: I'm supposed to have serious thoughts about all this. I have no idea why, since I am not a columnist, pundit, talking head, radio presenter, political editor, or taxi driver. I am writing a book about beauty; for this, I have no imperative to understand the ramifications of the coup in Tunisia. Nonetheless, there is some shouty voice in my head which insists I must not only know what is going on, but understand it, and comprehend all the fiscal, geopolitical and sociological ramifications.

At the weekend I was talking to the husband of an old friend. He is someone I like and admire very much. He saw that I was reading the new book by the brilliant Paul Berman.

'That's impressive,' he said.

I felt rather pleased that he admired my choice of reading matter, but instead of just taking a compliment, I sat bolt upright, waved the book at him, and shouted:

'You know what drives me mad? That I'm almost forty-four years old and I don't know enough stuff.'

(There was a slight look of surprise, but he is a very polite man, so he hid it well.)

Where does this come from? It is not genetic. My old dad proudly knows nothing, except what will win the 3.30 at Kempton. My mother knows more than she will admit, but has no compulsion to hoard any more knowledge than she needs.

I have a horrid feeling that it springs from some kind of magical thinking. Of course I value knowledge for its own sake; I like being interested. But I fear that I may be gathering facts in the way that some middle-aged men suddenly start going to bed with much younger women. They think, in the primitive part of their brain, that this will immunise them against death. I worry that I think that knowing things will make me immortal.

Or, it could just be that I have written 1182 words today, and at that stage, like the great Talking Heads, I stop making sense.

Maybe I should contemplate nature and dogs instead -

(Look who thinks she is Bette Davies in Now, Voyager. Don't let's ask for the moon; we have the stars. Cue violins.)

Today's hill, in panorama, to make a change:

Now I am going to make some chicken soup.

Real vs Fake People

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was contemplating just giving you a lot of dog pictures today. It is a dour, cross day; the sky is the colour of old socks. It is coming up to tax day, and that always makes me furious, not because I resent paying tax, but because it always reminds me of my inability to keep track of the Vital Documents. (I have banged on about this before, and shall not revisit it; it is too demoralising.) I am having a sluggish work day, which sometimes happens and is not the end of the world, but is a mild, constant irritant like a grumpy old fly buzzing in my ear.

On days like this, I generally don't have much to say. But as I sat down to write, or rather not write, the blog, I suddenly remembered something someone said yesterday. There was a discussion about the resignation of Andy Coulson, and how it left the Prime Minister without the crucial voice of the Essex Man. Coulson is not a child of privilege. He is working class, has worked for the tabloids, and not only did not go to Oxbridge, but did not go to university at all. All this was related as if it gave him exclusive insight into the mind of the modern day equivalent of the man on the Clapham Omnibus. It was stated, by every presenter and commentator, that without the Coulson hotline to the great British public, the front bench would be left clueless, cocooned in the precious bubble of money and private education, entirely unable to discern the worries and fears of ordinary citizens.

This herd narrative started to irritate me. There was a kind of four legs good, two legs bad whiff in the air. The implication was: regular, not especially rich, state-educated people are all good, and fortunate, moneyed, public school people are all bad. It was all reductive, all the time.

It's not so much that I mind a bit of toff-bashing. The toffs have had an awful lot of advantages in their lives, and so can probably take a bit of bashing. I'm not becoming tenderly protective of people who went to Eton. What I mind are lazy generalities and intellectual incoherence. The idea that every single person who grew up on a council estate is automatically morally superior to every single person who was expensively educated is just empirically incorrect. The notion that because a politician went to Oxford or Cambridge, she or he may have absolutely no understanding of someone struggling on the minimum wage cannot be right. It is much, much harder, if you have never had the sick panic in the pit of your stomach because a bill has arrived which you have no money to pay, to put yourself in the position of someone for whom that is a weekly occurrence. But humans have two miraculous faculties which make it possible. These are: imagination, and empathy. The ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes is one of the defining marks of an adult. I cannot believe that every single member of the government had it magically removed at birth.

I am perfectly certain that there are elected representatives who regard everyone on the dole as work-shy dossers. The point is that you cannot tell who they are simply from where they went to school. It was Norman Tebbit, if not an Essex man at least a Middlesex one, who insisted that everyone out of work should just get on their bike.

But this counts for nothing in the current received wisdom. One journalist yesterday revealingly said that the point of Coulson was that, unlike the Prime Minister, he understood 'real people'. The assumption is that not only does Mr Cameron have no concept of real people, he is not a real person himself. I can't go too high up on the mountain top on this, being fatally attracted to a massive generalisation myself. But you can't go around dividing people into the categories of real or fake because of their backgrounds. The silliness would never end. Was Churchill bogus because he went to Harrow? Must we regard Gladstone as a phoney because he went to Eton and Christ Church, where he got a double first in Classics and Mathematics? Would a little bit of complexity kill us? That is all I ask.

Pictures of the day appear to feature rather a lot of wood. On the ugly old days, I search for moss and lichen and a good bit of texture like a trufflehound on the trail.

That's probably quite enough of that. Despite the dreich, there were still some views:

To cheer me out of my blah mood, the Pigeon put on a tremendous jumping display:

She may be eleven years old, but she can still get her groove on when she sees a cattle grid to leap over:

She goes so quick it is almost impossible to capture on film, but I rather love this blurry shot of her feet:

The Duchess, meanwhile, was much more concerned with doing a bit of moody gazing:

(Do not disturb me; I am contemplating the possible existence of an eleventh dimension.)

And here is the dear old Pidge at rest:

Despite the dull dankness of the day, there were some thrilling buds, to remind me that spring will one day come:

In three months, those will be horse chestnut leaves as green as apples. And these will be a philadelphus bush:

 

And today's hill is cropped right into close-up, for your viewing pleasure:

In which I wax slightly sentimental

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

One of the things Sarah and I banged on about in Backwards was the idea that romantic love is not the only love. If you believe the poets and the pop singers and the playwrights, you would think that all other loves are distinctly second-rate; the only one that really counts is the swinging from lamposts, butterflies in the stomach, can't remember what your name is kind. Romantic love is the higher love; all the rest are mundane, workaday shadows of that.

I think this is, as the ladies of Absolutely Fabulous liked to say, a load of absolute buggery bollocks. There are so many other tremendous loves: family love, dog love, place love (I love this patch of Britain like a person), food love, book love. But if I were forced to choose one, I would pick friend love. No one ever wrote a sonnet about it, but in some ways I think it the highest love of all.

I went to stay this weekend with a man I met in my first week at university. Twenty-five years ago we sat in a tutorial given by a very old, venerable old don, on the mysteries of de Tocqueville, and we have been friends ever since. There were two other old friends there from that time, and it was like falling from a great height into a deep, luxurious feather bed. It's a pleasure so profound and keen that I can hardly find words for it.

It's the twenty-five years, I think. We've seen each other straight, and we've seen each other curly, as Nanci Griffith once sang. We loved each other when we were callow eighteen year olds who knew nothing but thought we knew everything, and the love is still there even though we have all been round the block and got a bit bashed up by life. We've seen each other through failure and triumph and the dull bits in between. It is the most luxurious, ineffable fondness, because all the flaws and foibles are known, and none of them matter a whit. In fact, the foibles and flaws are the whole point, because no one wants to be friends with flat white perfection.

Maybe the most delightful part of friend love is that it is disinterested. No one is demanding anything of the other: there is no requirement for sex, or the bringing up of children, or helping about the house. All that is wanted is that you be your absolute self, with the warts and all.

The thing that I adore the most is that nothing has to be explained. There is a shorthand in ancient friendships which is gloriously relaxing. Sentences often do not even need to be finished. Lines are easily read between. Stupid old stories and jokes and memories are resurrected as if we all saw each other yesterday. There is that lovely thing of picking up exactly where you left off, even if it has been months since you last saw each other. The very old friends get you in a way that no one else can, and sometimes I think all I want is to be got.

It was a weekend of wine and laughter. In these dark economic times, I do not take that for granted for a single moment. Perhaps I shall write a little sonnet about it, after all. (Except of course I have absolutely no feeling for the sonnet form.)

Pictures of the day are, you will be astounded to hear, mostly of trees and dogs. Oh, and also some buds.

Trees:

Dogs:

(You can see the whole posing thing is now completely out of control. Quite soon they will be requesting their own riders: red Smarties only, and bottled water flown in from Fiji.)

It was a slightly flat day, but the colours still managed to sing out:

And then there were the buds, some of which are breaking into actual blossoms, which feels like a miracle to me:

The dear old wall:

And of course the hill, rather mystical today, in a penumbra of light:

Lovely to be back. It sounds a most peculiar thing to say, but I rather missed the blog, and all the dear readers.