In which I contemplate the nature of time

It’s amazingly easy to lose two days. It’s as if they simply fell down the back of the sofa. I know there is the thing of the brain processing time differently as you get older, but even so. Simple neurobiological explanations seem too pat.

Actually, the first one was just life, which sometimes comes and usurps the virtual world. Very old friends were up from the south, and came to lunch. The group included two of my favourite children of all time, who did special dancing for me, admired the horse, shrieked with laughter at the pony, paid adoring homage to the Pigeon, and made a small house in the garden out of old wall stones, moss and pine branches.

‘When we come back next time,’ said the small girl, ‘we can see if fairies have come to live there.’

I love that children say these things with earnest, straight faces. I like it that even in the rushing technological world, small girls still believe in fairies.

The small boy was exercised about the closing ceremony of the Olympics. He had not thought it terribly good. ‘If I were in charge,’ he said, ‘I would have had people singing songs about lakes.’

He is seven years old. I looked at him very seriously. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘on a sort of Wordsworthian theme.’

He nodded gravely. ‘And a song about the River Thames,’ he said.

‘Absolutely bloody brilliant idea,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry, I did a swear.’

Quite frankly, that child is so remarkable that he does make me do a swear. I’m not sure I know anyone else of that age who would dream of songs of lakes.

My Italian mamma had kicked in, so of course there could not just be any old lunch, but there must be a feast. Two chickens were sacrificed, with marjoram from the garden, and bunches of sage stuffed in the cavity. There was a tomato salad with chives, and a beetroot salad with real actual beetroot I boiled myself, instead of the vacuum-packed stuff, and broad beans and feta and mint. There were tiny waxy potatoes and roasted peppers and aubergines and a plain green salad for a bit of continental chic. There was not enough room on the table for all the absurd platters of food. I’m still finishing it all up. (Very good stock on the stove even as I write.)

Yesterday, there were no visitors or cooking, just the low sound of time whooshing past, and me turning my head to see where it had gone.

Today, I am still catching up. I keep looking at my watch in amazement and alarm. How can it be lunchtime?

The ponies, as usual, gave me calm and succour. Up in that field there is a sense that I can recapture time. It’s the one place where everything slows down, and instead of the wild sense of mortality screaming past, I get a moment of anchor, as if I am attached to the land, as if I can feel the very earth turning gently on its axis.

There is something timeless about looking out over that blue hill, and watching the cattle graze there, as they have probably grazed for hundreds of years. The horses themselves cannot do anything in a hurry. They do not understand the concept of rush. I am impelled to take a deep breath and let my shoulders come down and concentrate on each moment as it presents itself.

I had to get strict with the small pony today. There’s always a fine line you tread with horses. They need you to be firm and determined; if you get too soppy and soft it is no good to man nor beast. On the other hand, you must not be cross or mean. The firmness, I discover, should take the form of not giving in. There is no call for raised voices or any form of punishment, there is just serious persistence. Myfanwy did not want to do something; I wanted her to do it. We had a small battle. Eventually, I prevailed.

I had been stern; I wondered if she would hold it against me. In fact, she seemed relieved. She dropped her head and chewed with her little mouth and relaxed her body. That’s what I wanted, she seemed to be saying; someone who would damn well come along and take charge.

Red the Mare, by contrast, was doing her thing which she sometimes does, which is elevating sweetness and goodness to Olympian levels, as if the Adorable Elves had been up in the night, teaching her to make my heart burst in my chest. Ha ha ha, she seemed to be saying, I shall do this for you, and this and that, and a bit of the other, just for fun, just to demonstrate how absolutely immaculate I am. She was doing things before I even asked her, as if reading my thoughts; matching each delicate step to mine; taking harmony to a whole new level.

I was so overcome by her cleverness that I practically exploded with delight and joy, and she ducked her head as if to say, aw, shucks, it was nothing, knowing all the time it was everything.

And that was when time stopped completely. We finished, and I gave the top of her neck a long, congratulatory rub, and she bent her head into the crook of my arm, and then leant it on my chest, and went to sleep. I felt the wobble in her lower lip, and saw the flutter of her eyelashes, and sensed the stillness in every atom of her body.

That is when you can stop all the clocks. I’ve written of this before, and each time, words come up short. Thoroughbreds have been domesticated for a long time, but they still carry the wild in them. When Red is hearing her ancestral voices, and galloping about the field, squealing and kicking and pawing at vacancy, with her tail up like a banner and her head high, there is nothing domestic in her at all. She is right back to the Arabian sands of her Darley ancestor. So, when she gives herself to me absolutely, in stillness and trust, and what a human might call love, as she did this morning, it feels like something so vast and elemental that I cannot find the English for it.

Everything stops: time, fret, plans, errands to run, letters to write, books to finish, agents to speak to. The news stops and the global economy and the very world itself.

It’s just two sentient creatures in a field.

 

Pictures:

House, from Monday, ready for guests:

I always feel a bit of a eejit when I put up pictures like this. I think it is because normally everything is a bit scruffy; mud from my boots, piles of papers, tottering towers of old political periodicals. It’s as if I wish to prove to the Dear Readers that, on high days and holidays, I can take the straw out of my hair.

The Pidge, very excited about the imminent arrivals:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare:

Red’s View:

The hill, from a slightly different angle than usual:

I haven’t done a recipe for ages, and one of the Dear Readers said the other day that he still makes one of my soups, from months ago, so I am inspired to return to food. No time now, but tomorrow, I think I shall give you the beetroot salad, partly because I am very proud of it, and partly because I love the idea of making what is often thought as a rather horrid vegetable, filled with haunting childhood memories (that ghastly beetroot drowned in vinegar from school) absolutely delicious.

Lost two days

So sorry. Back tomorrow.

A few random photographs from the last few days, in absolutely no order:

The Last Day

A really funny thing has happened. Practically every single British columnist is writing the same column. I read Blake Morrison in The Guardian yesterday morning and I had to check the date. I thought: I’ve read this before.

In fact I had not, but it was the same thing Jonathan Freedland wrote a few days ago, expressing the same sentiments that Simon Hoggart did (only without Hoggart’s excellent jokes), saying the same thing that every single pundit has on television and radio. I think I even wrote a version of it myself, somewhere on this blog. The identical sentiments have been everywhere on Twitter. A vast, joyful consensus has broken out, joined with gusto by everyone except for Charles Moore, Richard Littlejohn and one cross fellow on Newsnight.

Here is how it goes:

Everything was clearly going to be a disaster. Waste of public money, Zil lanes, traffic chaos, corporate greed, idiot copyright rules. Strikes! Strikes! Heathrow queues, lost bus drivers, creaking old London, Boris bumbling; oh the shame.

Bugger off Mitt Romney. Hurrah for Danny Boyle. Danny Boyle is a LEGEND. Everyone loves Danny Boyle. Sheep! Industrial Revolution! Isambard Kingdom Brunel! And did those feet, in ancient time?

Dancing nurses, Mary Poppins, the NHS. We love the NHS. Will any of the rest of the world understand? My God, we really did invent the internet. (We did not, of course, Tim Berners-Lee did that, and gave it away, but by this stage a huge national We had taken hold.) This is us, reflected back at ourselves. Suddenly, we really are all in it together. We turn out to be a nation oddly at ease with ourselves. Who knew?

JAMES BOND!! THE QUEEN!!!!!! James Bond and the Queen!!! Bloody hell.

Small reality check. Slow start. Oh, no, Cav. Never mind. Stiff upper lip. But then: THE ROWERS, THE ROWERS. Suddenly the word Eton can be spoken without shame, as the course at Eton Dorney is packed with delirious crowds.

And then the mighty Wiggo, and the shooting, and more rowers, and the three-day-event, and the cyclists, the cyclists. Hoy-tastic.

Super Saturday! Jessica Ennis, go go go. ANDY MURRAY!!! A nation at last takes the young Scot to its heart. First show-jumping gold for sixty years; first dressage gold ever. The smile of Nicola Adams beams round the world. Mo Farah soars to glory; Tom Daley fulfils his youthful promise.

The sceptics are converted and take it all back. We might be grumbly and used to being a bit crap, but, amazingly, it turns out we are quite good at quite a lot of things. Dear old Blighty gathered her dusty old skirts, kicked up her heels, and put on a show. The BBC was magnificent. The sun even shone. The crowds, THE CROWDS; lifting the athletes over the line. But sporting too, not just blind with jingoism.

Everything will go back to normal on Monday, but for two weeks, we caught a dream of glory.

Copyright: Absolutely Everyone.

Of course, it’s not absolutely everyone. In great British tradition, there are the grumblers, as there should be. Matthew Parris told Radio Four this morning that it’s very difficult to be a wet blanket, but that he would continue to be one. And quite right too. There probably will be a bit of a national hangover; there should be questions about all that money spent and what it shall achieve. There are many people out there who have not at all been entranced, who have no interest in sport, who care not a jot for gold medals. Someone must speak for them.

An awful lot of ghastly jargon-words like legacy and inclusivity have been floating about. Despite the warning spoof of Hugh Bonneville in Twenty Twelve, everyone has been talking about Britain ‘delivering’. (I generally think of delivering as something a man on a moped does with a pizza, but that may be just me.) People are bending over backwards to insist that these games will have inspired the young people, will transform school sports, may change Britons’ very idea of themselves.

Some of this might happen. Hurrah if it does. I wonder though if it’s asking too much of a sporting event. The happy columns are lovely; the idea of national possibility is tempting. There is something wonderfully hopeful and profound and significant in the fact that one of our greatest double Olympians came here as a refugee from Somalia. When Mo Farah was asked if he regretted not running under the Somali colours, he looked amazed. ‘This is my country,’ he said; the union flag is his flag.

But really, I wonder if it comes down to something much more plain. Asking too much significance of a festival of physical prowess can cause it to buckle under its own weight.

I think: what really happened is that for two weeks, an awful lot of people were really, really happy. That’s not nothing. For two weeks, instead of the daily diet of civil war and economic decline and Eurocrash, we saw good news. Smiling people who had worked their arses off won things. Underdogs were clasped to the national bosom. Joyful crowds screamed their heads off. Dark horses, literal and metaphorical, sprung surprises. The national anthem was played in celebration, as athletes whose names were previously unknown stood tall, with a tear in their eye.

In my idiotically soppy way, I kept thinking of all those mothers and fathers who must have been so proud. The British medallists, many of whom were very young indeed, were not only really good at what they do, but also unbelievably polite and gracious. I lost count of the times they gave all the credit away – to their coaches, their team, their families, even to the Lottery who paid for them. ‘May I just thank?’ they kept saying. How very well brought up they are, I thought, with my great-aunt hat on.

The joy has not been unconfined; it has not spread to every corner of these islands. But I’m not sure I remember a moment when so much sheer pleasure was given to so many by so few.

It’s nearly the end now. The dear Olympics; I shall miss you when you are gone. I did not expect to get quite so excited, or see so much drama and excellence, or to feel so proud of people I had never even heard of before.

As I write this, the marathon is going on. The streets of London are absolutely packed with a roaring, whistling, whooping sea of spectators. Flags are being waved; all nationalities are being clapped and cheered. The sun is shining. The volunteers, who have been one of the great successes of these games, endlessly smiling and helpful, are lining the route. The noise of jubilee is so mighty that the men calling the race have to raise their voices to be heard.

The BBC commentator has perhaps the best last word. He says, with a smile in his voice: ‘The number one, running its personal best every day, is the great British public.’

 

Today’s pictures:

Red’s view:

Red the Mare:

Pigeon:

The hill:

PS. In all this list of achievement, there are too many names I have not space to mention. If you are anything like me, you may be affronted that your personal favourites were not mentioned. No Brownlee brothers? No Rebecca Addington? No Grainger or King or Ainslie or Campbell or McKeever? And what about the brilliant soldiers, who stepped into the breach when G4S failed, and have been uniformly fabulous? Or the techies and sound people, the camera operators and grips, the builders and architects? There there were so many people involved in these games who deserve credit that one tiny blog cannot contain them all. They need an entire book.

A very super Saturday

The Olympics are such funny things. This evening, eleven members of my family gathered in The Sister’s house. The Younger Brother and I cooked lamb with garlic and rosemary, potatoes with olive oil and sage, leeks, spinach, and special green sauce. The supper was specially timed to coincide with Mo Farah in the running and Tom Daley in the diving. The Brother and I got in quite a panic, working out the fractions.

We do, amazingly, have an Olympian in our family (by marriage, but still counts; counts like anything) and we spoke with due awe and respect of his gold medal. The Older Brother is an athlete, over the long distances. But really, we are not what you could call sporty. Despite this, we watched that 5,000 metres as if we understood every tactical decision, every acceleration, every dancing step. We ran each stride with the glorious Mo Farah, twitching, flinching, hiding our faces as all the other runners came at him.

Miraculously, he shrugged them off. He was like one of those brilliant thoroughbreds who just find a little extra, when it really counts. I cannot tell you the whooping and shrieking that went on, as everyone in our house, from eighty to nineteen, went batshit nuts in the head.

Then the diving started. It was unbearably tense. Luckily, someone remembered that there was the relay race, with the mighty Jamaican team; we turned over for Usain Bolt’s last hurrah. Suddenly, we all became Jamaican. (This, according to the pundits, has been a feature of these games. Britons have been overheard saying: ‘I’m feeling a little bit Australian today.’ Or: ‘Yesterday, I was slightly Dutch.’) When Blake ran his beautiful lap and Bolt took up the baton and roared down the straight, we went almost more nuts than when our home boy soared to victory. Presence of greatness, I suppose.

Back to the diving. Young Tom Daley had started off a little shaky, in the qualifying heats, but suddenly he was bringing his A game. All at once, we became diving experts. ‘No rip entry,’ said my sister, shaking her head. ‘Helicopter feet,’ mourned the Stepfather. ‘Too much splash,’ said my mother.

The Younger Niece stared seriously at the television. ‘I love him,’ she declared. ‘I am going to marry him.’

Tom Daley, at the age of eighteen, not so very long after he lost his father to fatal illness, won the bronze medal, and we made so much noise that I’m surprised the police did not arrive. The future Mrs Daley was beside herself.

In some ways, of course, it is all absurd, but if a games can have this effect on an ordinary family, on an ordinary Saturday night, it seems to me that there really is something magical in the air. Normality will return, of course it will; perspective will come back. But I don’t expect many of us shall forget this still Scottish night, when we screamed and dreamed and hoped and shouted and laughed our silly old heads off.

 

Late now, so just a couple of pictures:

My own Olympians:

The Hill:

In which I send out a vote of thanks

I was going to write a whole thing about money and happiness and privilege and elitism in sport. Oh, I had an argument for you. As I cleaned my teeth this morning and thought of it, I became really quite philosophical.

Then the day picked up and galloped off like a wild pony. Now it is ten to eight and there is no energy in my fingers.

I’ll just put up a couple of pictures, I thought. That’s fine. It’s Friday night after all. And it’s not as if the world comes to an end if I do not post a blog.

I felt very happy today. Everything was at its most lovely: the weather, the horses, the vet, the dog, the family, the work; even Scotland herself, gleaming and preening in the light. All the things with which I am blessed were at their crest and peak. And even though I am exhausted, I thought: oh, I know what I shall do. I shall not just put up a couple of pictures. I shall thank the Dear Readers.

I suddenly realised, yesterday, that I ask quite a lot of you. I express pretty much every emotion I have at the moment I have it. I follow my own flaky star, so that you get endless posts on whatever is obsessing me at any given moment, whether it is American politics or the mare or mortality or grief. I rather expect that you shall be fascinated by all the things by which I am fascinated.

Of course, as I occasionally touchily point out, you have the delightful luxury of not having to read. If I am talking of a subject in which you have no interest, you have the liberty to turn the page. But blogging is not quite as simple as that. There is a really strange connection that builds up. It’s revoltingly sappy to say so, but it does become like a little family. A couple of people were properly rude to me on Twitter the other day. I did not care, because they were strangers. I was amazingly robust. I am used to thinking of myself as thin-skinned, but I surprised myself. I shrugged off the rude, shouty people as if they were nothing. Here, it is different, because it is not strangers; everyone who comes here is part of a small community. Criticism here wounds in the way that family barbs hurt. There are expectations; there is an unwritten compact. So, it’s not quite as simple as saying: turn the page.

That is why I abruptly thought of what it is I ask of the readership. You do have expectations, and so you should. You come here, many of you every day, looking for something. If I am being winding or self-indulgent or woolly, you do, in some odd way, have the right to ask for your money back, even though you have paid no money.

Some of you bugger off, and I don’t blame you. But many of you stay, through the thick, and the very, very thin. You kindly sympathise, when I miss my dad; or empathise, when I battle with my work; or cheer, if something goes well.

Yesterday, something went well. You, utter strangers to me, whom I shall almost certainly shall never meet, cheered, as if the good thing were your own. It’s very hard to put into words how touching that is. I love the miracles of the internet. Grouchy people like to point out its ghastly aspects, and complain about the solitary sadness of finding community through a screen. I say community is a crucial part of life, and I don’t care if it is actual or virtual. In lovely corners of the world wide web, there are communities just as vital and real as anything in a front room or a corner shop.

Yesterday, one of the smallest of those communities made me smile. So, thank you for that. Thank you for coming back, for leaving comments, for putting up with the tangential and the incoherent and the sometimes frankly odd. Often, you move me more than you know. Yesterday was one of those days.

 

Some quick pictures for you:

As I was going through today’s pictures, I found this next one. It was quite a surprise. The Older Niece and the Man in the Hat, who are visiting from the south, had come up this evening to meet Red and Myfanwy. They found me just as I was, I am afraid to admit, giving my mare a head massage. She gets fussed on hot days with the flies and everything, and my job in the evening is to soothe and settle her.

I wipe her eyes with lotion and then apply a balm I made myself with added citronella, and spend about fifteen minutes rubbing it all over her dear head. My aim is to leave her happier than I found her, and when I do, it is like a great big existential present.

One of the things I love most about her is that she allows me to gentle her. Some horses are not all that amenable to this. They hear the ancestral voices too strongly, or they have bad memories of hard treatment, and all that may act as a barrier. Red has no barrier. One of the most glorious things about her is that I may find her grumpy and leave her in trance of pleasure. All it takes is a bit of patience and love and rubbing.

Anyway, The Man in the Hat or The Older Niece must have snatched up my camera, and caught me just as I was turning, with a bit of a goofy laugh, because they had found me being daffy with my horse:

The hill, rather blurry and blue today:

Of crazy projects and gold medals

Slight state of collapse. Stayed up all night working on secret project. It has suddenly grabbed me and will not let go. I found myself wide awake at five in the morning, having written four thousand words.

I sent it to The Playwright. This is all his fault. It was his idea in the first place. I asked him to tell me at once if the whole thing was a load of buggery bollocks, because I had drunk so much coffee I could not tell. I did not want to send it to my agent if it was too shaming.

The reply came back before breakfast. ‘Send it,’ he wrote.

(I should explain what an act of friendship that is. It’s very difficult reading pages for someone to whom you are close; there are elephant traps everywhere. Also, The Playwright, as his name suggests, has things of his own to be writing. To read and respond so quickly is something not that many people would do. It is an act of true generosity and elegance.)

Anyway, I sent it.

The reply was also swift. Automated reply: agent out of the office until 13^th August. I had no idea how I was going to deal with the tension until then. Luckily, the Younger Niece has just received a diploma in bartending, so if the worst comes to the worst, I can get her to feed me white ladies.

Then, just before lunch, the agent emailed. She was on holiday in Italy, but she had read my twenty pages. ‘Write it,’ she wrote. ‘Already thinking of editors.’

I CANNOT TELL YOU WHAT THIS MEANS.

Sorry about the capitals. I got into hysterical cap mode whilst watching the dressage and it seems that this is a day for intemperance and hyperbole. The thing is, the last book was such a struggle. We never struck off on the right leg, and have been slightly out of kilter ever since. It will still need a battling third draft. But this secret project is pouring out of me like starlight. I never pull all-nighters except on the day before deadline. I had only sat down to noodle about for my own pleasure.

When a book grabs you by the neck, you can only submit. What you cannot tell is whether anyone else will be as entranced by it as you are yourself. That is why the agent’s email felt so sweet. I jumped and shouted and punched the air. The Pigeon looked most quizzical and slightly shocked.

So now I have a lovely new project which is real, not secret, and it feels as if something wonderful has shifted and I do not need to sit at my desk with my shoulders about my ears, desperately doing pitches which never quite hit the right note.

As a treat, I let myself watch the finals of the dressage in the afternoon. That was when the mad capital letter tweeting started. A resolute band of horse-lovers on my timeline was as nervy and excited as I. The levels of skill and beauty were off the scale. I may describe it on another day, when I can focus my eyes. But the glorious thing was that despite massive scores posted by the Dutch and Germans, Charlotte Dujardin, the British rider, won gold, with her lovely horse Valegro.

They performed a test of beauty and humour and a little sprinkling of patriotism even; it held a flash of eccentricity, a whiff of irony. It was, in other words, a very British test, except for the part where it was perfect, which is not a virtue these islands are known for. They were immaculate, and when they won, there was not a dry eye in the house. Certainly not in this house. It was really, really lovely.

Up to my own mare now. I may explain to her the mysteries of the reverse pirouette. Or, I may not. (Ha, ha, ha, she will say to Myfanwy the Pony, after I have gone; do you know what the old girl was banging on about tonight?)

 

Pictures of evening walk with The Younger Brother:

Pigeon, doing extended trot in honour of the dressage:

Red the Mare, showing off her flying change:

Hill: