Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 12

365 Days of Shakespeare.

Of course it turns out that it won’t quite be 365 days of Shakespeare, because I took the weekend off to ride my horse and watch the racing. A year of Shakespeare, then, which is not too dusty.
Almost the moment I start reading, I find this glittering gem –
Lafeu:Fare you well, my lord; and believe thisof me, there can be no kernel in this light nut; thesoul of this man is his clothes. Trust him not inmatter of heavy consequence; I have kept of themtame, and know their natures. Farewell, monsieur:I have spoken better of you than you have or will todeserve at my hand; but we must do good against evil.
I think the insults in this play are very splendid indeed. The soul of this man is his clothes is a crusher indeed.
I absolutely love the Lords. This is the First Lord, with a tremendous universal truth:The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good andill together: our virtues would be proud, if ourfaults whipped them not; and our crimes woulddespair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
And here is another roaringly good insult, this time from Parolles, who rather reminds me of Malvolio: I knew the young count to bea dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale tovirginity and devours up all the fry it finds.
A whale to virginity, devouring up all the fry, is a conceit of absolute brilliance, although rather disgusting. I wonder whether Shakespeare sat in his room after he wrote that line and laughed and laughed. I think I might have done.
And one more magnificent, unbridled set of insults before I go, from Lafeu:
No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffetafellow there, whose villanous saffron would havemade all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation inhis colour: your daughter-in-law had been alive atthis hour, and your son here at home, more advancedby the king than by that red-tailed humble-bee I speak of.

I have absolutely no idea what a snipt-taffeta fellow is, but I know it cannot be good. And a red-tailed humble-bee sounds very dodgy indeed. I think Shakespeare had more fun that he could shake a stick at when he was writing this. I am certainly having a lot of fun reading it, although it is quite nonsensical in many ways. But that does not matter; one is carried along on a tide of language and brio.

An opinion is just an opinion.

Down at the field this morning, the sun shone. It shone with vigour. It shone with conviction. It shone with feeling. The mares basked and glowed in the light, as happy as bugs. My friend and I talked and talked and talked. We brushed the good horses and we talked of life, and marriage, and the peril of expectations, and cultural differences, and clashing opinions, and how it can sometimes be dangerous to get what you want.
At one point in the conversation, we looked at our mares. They were both standing still, at the end of their long ropes, facing us, lined up smartly as if they were about to do something very important for the Queen. ‘Goodness,’ we said to each other, ‘we think we are just chatting, but we are actually doing some work.’
Teaching a horse to stand still is quite an important foundational step in horsemanship. It’s a subtle one, because you don’t quite teach it. They learn it, by default. You don’t say: now you stand still. They learn that when you stop, they stop. And that is first step of them getting control over themselves, so that eventually you can canter on a loose rein in a perfect rhythm with no fussing or fighting or pulling.
The humans stood still for a while, watching the horses standing still. The little Paint had her show pony face on, ears pricked, front feet delicately placed together. The red mare had her dozy donkey ears and her wibbly lower lip and her Zen waves of peace. ‘You know,’ said my friend, laughing, ‘if someone came in the field now, they would say we are doing nothing.’            ‘And yet,’ I said, laughing too at the absurdity, ‘we are doing everything.’
Then we took them out for some more active work and the little brown mare, back in her paddock, cantered about for the hell of it and did some polo turns and a bit of a rodeo as if to say: hey, I’m working too. It was so funny and beautiful that we all stopped for a moment to watch her.
I wanted to write that down because it was an hour of pure joy. It’s one of those crocks of gold I shall want to go back and dig up when I am old and grey. But it made me think, too. My friend and I are very different people and have chosen very different paths in life and have very different characters, upbringings and views of the world. We have very different instincts. When we talked and talked this morning, our opinions were, in some ways, a bit different. Yet we always come together in happy common ground, find a lovely bit of earth that we share, end up laughing and shouting yes, yes. (Actually, she does not shout. I’m the one who yells when excited.) Our differences do not disturb us at all. We don’t take them personally; in fact, we hardly notice them.
Out there on the internet, there is an odd thing about difference. Difference gets very personal, very fast. There is a strange combination of displacement, category error, extrapolation and projection. So, instead of someone saying well, you see the world a little differently than I do, that someone will say: your opinion denigrates mine, means you see me as an idiot, is an act of judgement. People tend not to say: I think your view is wrong. They say: I think you are bad. This classically happens between left and right, when everything goes tribal. The Trump voters don’t think the Hillary voters are mistaken, they think they are evil. The Hillary voters don’t think the Trump voters are incorrect, they think they are stupid and racist. Everything falls into a Manichean mess of light and dark.
Even in smaller matters this strange binary division can rear its confused head. People will get into spats about the simplest meme, or picture, or saying. I saw a thing a few weeks ago where people were sharing an adorable picture of baby donkeys. Only the sweet creatures weren’t donkeys, they were goats. And the goat people got really cross about the donkey people, because everyone should know what a baby goat looks like.
I’m a huge believer in difference. Imagine how dull the world would be without it. I quite often read articles by people I radically disagree with, because I want to keep myself on my toes and not let my mind slam shut and not fall into the terrible trap of the smug liberal. I freely admit that my live and let live is sorely tested by the Donald and his not very merry Trumpsters because I think he is egregious and dangerous and he has the power to make the world a more fragile and perilous place. And when I am tired and cross and I read something very stupid on the internet I do feel the growling monster that lives in the dark lair of my subconscious lift its head and start to snap and snarl.

But I do try to remind myself that a difference of opinion is just that: the expression of another opinion. It’s not a smashing down of me and everything I believe in; it’s not a judgement on everything I do; it’s not the end of life as I know it. I don’t have to suit up and wade into battle every time someone says something with which I don’t agree. It does not have to be a fight. I can say my piece and the other person can say their piece and then, just like my friend and me in the field, we can laugh about it. You say potato and I say potahto. And we really don’t have to call the whole thing off.

365 Days of Shakespeare.

On I go, with my new play. It’s really quite an eccentric story, but perhaps I notice that more because I don’t know it. A lot of Shakespeare is very eccentric and I think that he must have had so much fun, throwing all the rules out of the window. He certainly followed his whims where they took him and maybe that was part of what made him great. One gets the sense that a lot of the time he really did not give a damn.
And then, just as I am laughing or raising an eyebrow or thinking what? what? he smashes me with pure beauty, like in this speech of Helena’s, which is so filled with lovely language that I read it three times.
Helena:Poor lord! Is’t IThat chase thee from my country and exposeThose tender limbs of thine to the eventOf the none-sparing war? And is it IThat drive thee from the sportive court, where thouWasLater, two tremendous lords appear, who are funny and interesting and unexpected.This one has a fine turn for the frankly insulting - Second Lord:He’s a most notable coward, an infinite andendless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the ownerof no one good quality worthy your lordship’sentertainment.
Well, that’s him told. I especially like the ‘hourly promise-breaker’. I know a couple of those.
And there is this line, which pleases me mightily, I’m not quite sure why. It has such a mordant and comical cadence - First Lord:Yes, yes, do let him fetch his drum, for the love of laughter.
The Second Lord then whacks me with something I absolutely do not understand -
Second Lord:I must go look my twigs.
I have not the wildest idea what this could mean, but I absolutely love it. I am certainly going to go look my twigs at once.

The plot is getting rather Byzantine now, and I frown at the page as it twists and turns. I don’t really understand the motivation of half the characters but somehow that does not matter. I fulfil the first duty of the Dear Reader, and suspend my disbelief. I follow the beauty where it takes me.

In which I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

I had something absolutely dazzling to tell you today. It was all about life and the small things and what really matters. I must must must write that for the Dear Readers, I thought, practically falling over at my own cleverness. They will be so pleased, I thought.
Now, I have absolutely no idea what it was. Nothing. Not even a glimmer or a glance or a scratch in the back of the mind. Not a hint or a clue.
Bugger, I think. Sometimes flakiness really can go too far.
The day was raw and drab, but I did horse work and work work and HorseBack work. Some of the things that have been worrying me seemed less worrying. I’m never quite sure how this happens but it is always a most welcome delight. I tell myself sternly not to waste time and energy on worrying about things I cannot change, or things that have not yet happened, or things that float around in the universe in a random manner that is beyond my control. Sometimes I am able to take my own advice, and sometimes I am not.

At least I have ticked off everything on my To Do List. That is a red-letter event. Well, everything except one. At the bottom, in a furious scrawl, it says: TIDY FRIDGE. It’s nearly four and I’ve got to go and give the mares their tea. I would rather chew my own arm off than tidy the fridge. I’m going to take my chances. The housekeeping police may well break down the door and cart me away. There is definitely something in the back of the fridge which has taken on a life of its own and may be spawning cultures even as I write. But sod it, I’m not feeling butch enough for Marigolds and spit spot. I sometimes wish I were the kind of person who simply had a tidy fridge, but one must work within one’s limitations. I can write a sentence and wear a hat and get a red mare to do smooth walk to trot transitions from voice and that is going to have to be enough. 

365 Days of Shakespeare.

I wasn't quite sure where to put my Shakespeare experiment. In the end, I've decided to add it as a bonus post rather than sticking it into the main blog. That way, anyone who is bored witless by the idea may exercise their right not to read it.

I missed yesterday because I was in a post-insomnia crash. So I started again today.


I am enjoying All’s Well That Ends Well very much. I haven’t read Shakespeare for a long time so I find I have to get my eye in. There are some speeches I have to read twice before I get the meaning of them. There are also the usual questions that the reading of an unfamiliar play brings. Why does Bertram despise Helena so much, and why does she love him so much? How is it that she cures the king so quickly and completely? Shakespeare is obviously entirely bored with the idea of this and wants it as a plot device, so the whole thing happens in a flash, offstage. One moment the king is dying and the next a slip of a girl has cured him completely. Why do the two lords Lafeu and Parolles loathe each other? And what on earth is the clown on about?
I think there is no answer to the last one. I’ve never really understood the clowns and fools in Shakespeare and I’m not sure that any modern entirely can. The jokes seem to be in-jokes for the 16th and 17thcenturies, the kind of thing that audiences of the time would have absolutely got and which leaves the 21st century viewer vaguely uncertain and out of step.
What is lovely is that I don’t really care about the questions. The aesthetic pleasure is keen. Every so often I find a line which gives me as much pleasure as looking at a ravishing view or listening to a Bach suite.
These are the ones I chose for today:
Clown.It is like a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks,the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawnbuttock, or any buttock.
I love this because it is so naughty. I don’t usually like bawdy but I like this. Most of all, I really want to know what a quatch-buttock is. Or perhaps one should not ask.
Parolles:Mort du vinagaigre! Is not this Helen?
I love this because I never knew that death of vinegar was an exclamation. I wonder whether it was in common use at the time, or whether Shakespeare was having fun with the language, or whether it was a wicked joke against the French.
The King:...honours thrive,When rather from our acts we them derivethan our foregoers.
I love this because it is a universal truth. Also, it seems that the king is a philosopher and a radical. For him to ascribe honour to one’s own actions rather than titles and position and wealth and lineage seems quite a surprising act, ahead of its time.
Lafeu:Go to, sir; you were beaten in Italy for picking akernel out of a pomegranate; you are a vagabond andno true traveller; you are more saucy with lords and honourable personages than the commission of yourbirth and virtue gives you heraldry. You are notworth another word, else I’d call you knave. I leave you.
I love everything about this speech. I love the kernel out of the pomegranate; I love the use of ‘saucy’ and ‘knave’; I love the rather mysterious picture of being beaten in Italy. I can’t tell whether that is actual or figurative.

My ten minutes stretched to twenty again, because I was having too much fun. I still have no idea how long this experiment will last or where it will take me, but it’s started off on a very happy note.

A slightly unexpected lesson.

The sun shone today, out of a vivid blue sky, and I learnt a small lesson in life.
I’ve been over-tired since Christmas. I missed my mother keenly and I let that missing out, so there were quite a lot of Railway Children tears. Allowing emotion to run through you is a good thing, but it is quite exhausting. My sleep patterns were a little erratic and the whole thing was quite wearing, so when I walked down to the field this morning I felt as if I were recuperating from a bout of flu. If I were living in Edwardian England, this would be the time for restorative beef tea and lying on a chaise longue.
As a result, I thought I would not ride my mare. I’ve got to get back into training for our Wobbleberry Challenge but I decided to give myself permission to take a couple more days off.
At first, preoccupied with this recuperative feeling, I thought I would simply give the mares breakfast and then go home quickly and sit very still. Because I’d given myself official permission, all pressure was off. Because there was no pressure, I then decided that I would not leave quickly, but hang out with the sweet thoroughbreds for a while.
The while stretched itself and grew longer. I pottered about, remembering why I love these horses so much, laughing at their gentle comedy, stroking their furry coats, chatting to them. The dogs danced about in the frosty air.
Because of the permission and because of the no pressure, I then thought, on a whim, that I might get on after all. The red mare was in a fine mood and she stood sweetly still in her peaceful little dream as I put on the saddle.
Just five minutes I thought. Just a little walk.
I let her wander where she would, which is how we always start a ride, and she took me on a great adventure, through the trees where I had to lie down on her neck so as not to be swept off and out towards the woods.
She then decided she was going to cross the old burn. She has never attempted such a Rubicon before and I hated to have to stop her. She was Columbus discovering the New World, but I feared the going was treacherous and we might get bogged down in the false ground. With a slight regret, I took charge and turned her back. I loved that she was exploring and I loved that she was feeling so bold and I loved that she was trying something new, all off her own bat.
In the end, we did quite a lot of good technical work. It did not feel like work because it arose naturally, on the spur of the moment.
And that was the lesson. If I had got up this morning, in my rather debilitated state, and lashed myself to go and do proper work and butch up and stop being such a weedy wet, the sullen, cussed part of myself would have dug in its toes and I would have had a furious argument going in my head before I even got to the field. The morning would not have been one of easy pleasure but of raging dispute.
As it was, I gave myself a break, and so the cussed part took itself off for a day by the seaside, and the sensible part, the part that gets things done, could gently come out and decide that it was time for action.
There is a fine line between galvanising and lashing, between encouraging with suggestion and demoralising with orders. I can’t let myself get lax and idle, but sometimes being gentle works better than being stern.
And the really sweet thing was that the mare seemed to pick up on my easy state of mind, and was as soft and sweet and responsive as I’ve known her. Nothing was an effort, nothing was an argument, nothing was a trouble. Yes, she said, and yes and yes and yes.

The dogs came with and the little brown mare watched with interest from her station under the tree and Scotland looked ravishing and I went home with a most unexpected feeling of achievement. It was not swaggery, look at me achievement. It was private and gentle and authentic. It was so quiet that I almost did not want to write about it. But it’s one of those ones that I want to look back on. I want to remember that sometimes letting oneself off the hook can lead to rather wonderful rewards.

A slightly surprising project. Or, Shakespeare is my boy.

Yesterday, I said to a friend: ‘Shakespeare is stitched into my heart.’ We were talking about cultural references. I put all kinds of references into my writing: blood, toil, tears and sweat; fight them on the beaches; not in single spies but in battalions; do I dare to eat a peach; the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; the woods are lovely, dark and deep; take down this book and slowly read; fear in a handful of dust; the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.
I was talking about this because I’d been replying to a story on a horse forum I follow and I wrote, slightly joking, that getting my horse right had taken ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. Then I thought: what if they don’t know that is Churchill? What if they take it literally, and picture me weeping and bleeding and sweating in my Scottish field? So I took it out, just in case.
I was telling my friend about it as we walked out with my horse and her daughter and I said that it made me realise how much Shakespeare crept into my ordinary writing, because they started me off with Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest when I was nine years old and the serious mistresses at prep school used to gather us on the lawn on sunny evenings and get us to read those plays out loud. I said that I suddenly wondered about the people who did not get those references. Then I laughed and said: ‘Perhaps they will just think I’m a really good writer.’
My story to myself has always been that I love Shakespeare, that he is my boy, that he walks beside me like a doting old hound. He came all the way through school with me and stayed with me in my adult life. Even in my wildest years, when I was staying up all night in illegal drinking holes in Soho where all the cross-dressers went after hours, I still had time for Shakespeare and would totter off to the National and the Barbican and the storied theatres of London’s glittering West End. When Kenneth Branagh did his first London season of Shakespeare plays when he was about twelve, I was so excited that I went to see them all twice. I took my mother to see him, and I can still hear her voice as she reminisced about seeing Olivier and Gielgud playing Shakespeare when she was a girl. Her father had been a fine stage actor, and theatre ran through her like Brighton through a stick of rock.
But as I made my faintly grandiose statement a little mouse-scratch of doubt started in the back of my mind. What I really meant, I realised, is that there are a few Shakespeare plays that I know quite well. I know Hamlet and Much Ado and Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It and Henry V and Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear. I went to see Coriolanus once, because someone I knew was in it, and I’m afraid I will not be dashing back for a second viewing. I could not tell you the first thing about Cymbeline, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, whoever they are, have never so much as hovered onto my radar. (Although I suppose, to be fair, there is a slight attribution argument about that one.)
In the spirit of self-improvement and not just saying stuff but actually meaning it, I decided that it was time to go and read the lot.
This is the kind of thing I do at the beginning of January. There is a very real chance that by the time dour old February rolls in, with its bleak reality and its lack of sentiment, I shall have decided that what with the four different projects I am working on and the animals to look after and the usual demands of daily life, there simply is not time for such a flight of fancy. It may die a quiet death, and lie in an unvisited tomb. Many of my ideas, so galvanic and antic at the time I think of them, come to this. But for now, I’m going to try to read ten minutes of Shakespeare every day. I’m going to try to make a little note of it. I would love to look back on this year and see that it had literary beauty in it. The world of geo-politics is so mad and ugly at the moment that beauty is needed, as an antidote.
So, I started this morning with All’s Well that Ends Well.
Even as I began to read, I realised that I don’t know this play at all. There was not even a glancing sense of recognition. Within moments, there was already a famous passage of wisdom, the one that goes Another ravishing phrase stuck me: ‘Twere all one that I should love a bright particular star’. Write that down, write that down, said the chattering voices in my head; you will use that one day.
And then there was a very startling question: ‘Are you meditating on virginity?’ I found this oddly comic. Did people really ask each other such questions in the 17th century?
And Parolles answers her with a long speech which has this dilly in it:
What was Shakespeare thinking? Had he had a little drink? Was he making virginity jokes for a bet?
By the time I got to the second scene, I was in a hysterical state of love. I was loving everything, even the stage directions: Flourish of cornets. Enter the KING of France, with letters, and divers Attendants.
Everyone, I thought, should have ‘divers Attendants’.
I scooted on, enjoying myself. I had set a timer for ten minutes, and when it buzzed I impatiently switched it off and kept on reading. I watched the ailing king face his mortality, and the young lords dashing off to war, and feisty Helena standing up to the countess and then going to Paris to see the old king with the intention of making him better. This all felt very radical. She is not a grand lady, but young and orphaned, and yet off she goes, off her own bat, to cure the king with her beloved father’s secret remedies. And when she gets there she is not abashed by his scepticism but says something very wise:
Expectations, I often think, are the enemy of happiness. I stopped there, long after my ten minutes were up, gazing happily at words to live by.

Even if this nutty project only lasts for one day, it was worth it. I do love Shakespeare and he is indeed my boy. I know he is not for everyone but he is for me.  

PS. Formatting apology. I don't know why some of the quotes have come out as links. They don't lead anywhere. I copied and pasted them from a brilliant page which has all of Shakespeare's plays for free on the internet. This, I thought, would be quicker than typing them out from the Collected Shakespeare which my dear old dad once gave me for Christmas. I have no idea how to fix this little glitch, so please forgive me.

Farewell to Channel 4 Racing. Or, I was wrong.

Being a racing broadcaster must be one of the hardest jobs in the world. This is because racing people are passionate about and protective of their sport, excessively opinionated, and often unconvinced by change. Everybody knows what racing should look like and everyone secretly dreams of the glory days of Sir Peter O’Sullevan.
I was one of those people, in the turbulent days when Channel 4 Racing gave the job to a new outfit. There would be changes, and secret technology, and, help us all, gimmicks. I at once gathered up all my toys and hurled them from the pram. I did not want gimmicks. I did not want special touch-screens. I wanted Alastair Down, with his shambling dress sense and his poet’s heart. I wanted re-runs of every single race and more shots of the horses in the paddock, going down, in fact anywhere. If a ravishing thoroughbred so much as pricked her ears, I wanted a shot of it.
I could not bear the sight of Jim McGrath looking rather lost and forlorn since he no longer had his great compadre beside him. How could they deprive him of John Francome, greatest jockey and greatest broadcaster, whose dry-as-a-bone asides and lyrical voice harked back to the days when he and the noble Lord Oaksey used to marvel over Desert Orchid’s impossible leaps? I felt an injustice had been done to the suave and smiling Mike Cattermole, who had once had to do battle with the rudest owner in racing. There must have been nothing else to cut to and there must have been a frantic producer yelling in his ear ‘you’re coming into the final furlong’ as Cattermole manfully struggled to get a single polite word out of the taciturn person, before tottering away, a broken man.  And after all that, there was no place for him on the new team.
So I yelped and howled and complained. More horses, I bawled on Twitter; no no not another vapid celebrity interview.
Then, slowly, slowly, something unexpected started to happen. I began to see that although the old band was no longer in town, there were some new stars. Nick Luck, quietly and without fuss, turned into one of the most polished broadcasters in the business, with his glinting humour and his excellent suiting. Mick Fitz stole into my heart with his twinkly eyes and his years of experience and his love and knowledge of the thoroughbred. In Alice Plunkett, the new Channel 4 had unearthed one of the most natural onscreen talents I’d seen in years: completely authentic, unapologetically enthusiastic, and unafraid of emotion. Simon Holt, who had survived the change, developed into the most heart-stopping caller of a race since the legendary O’Sullevan. There are other good commentators out there, but he had that little extra something which I can only call soul. He understood and admired the grand fighting qualities of the horses he was calling and hung out more flags for the genuine and the brave.
Clare Balding stepped up to make the big occasions as splendid as they should be, combining her trademark professionalism with the love of horses she inherited in her cradle. I even started to like some of the more eccentric stuff, like when Rishi Persad, with great determination and good humour, trained to take part in a charity race. The behind-the-scenes features – visits to Frankel at stud, or the maestro that is Aidan O’Brien at Ballydoyle – were beyond price. Jim McGrath stopped looking lonely and started to make jokes again.
I had to admit that I had been entirely wrong. I gathered up my toys, put them back in the pram, and began to enjoy myself.
And now there is to be another great change. I’m not going to make the same mistake again. I’m going to give the new lot a chance and be on their side, because I love racing so much it makes me cry (literally) and I want it to succeed.

All the same, I feel a little melancholy today, as Channel 4 and the old guard have their last hurrah. If you watch racing every week as I do, these people become like family to you. I’ve seen them wrangle with the unexpected and go on smiling through the pouring rain and keep the show on the road even when there are only three wheels on the wagon. They love the game as I do, and they brought it flashing into my quiet Scottish room with verve and enthusiasm and passion. So I do thank them and I will miss them and I put up my hands and say: I was wrong. That start might have been a little bit glitchy in places, but as the race went on it developed into something fine. And everyone, from the headline act to the most behind-the-scenes runner, deserves credit and gratitude.

Christmas Eve.

In the kitchen, the nine lessons and carols from King’s comes on. The high, pure voice of the lone chorister starts to sing. I miss my mother so much I cannot breathe. I cry for her.
There, I think, after five minutes, that’s done. I should really have written it down on my list. Let the emotion out, I think. Let it run around and feel the wind in its hair. It does no good if it is kept inside.
I go to the village for the last of the errands. ‘Happy Christmas, happy Christmas,’ I say, to my favourite ladies in the shop and to the kind woman in the chemist. The Christmas lights twinkle gently against the indigo sky. Children in festive hats are literally jumping for joy. I smile, thinking that I am not jumping for joy for tomorrow but for the day after. For the lovers of racing, Boxing Day is the real Christmas day and this year there will be the old king up against the young prince and nobody can tell who will come out on top and it will be a clash of the titans.
I drive back along the lime avenue where families are out walking their dogs. The grandparents are there and fathers with tiny infants hoisted onto their shoulders and mothers corralling the canines.
Down at the field, the mares are very happy because the kind farmer has appeared like Father Christmas to fill their shed with hay. That is their best present and they are content. I rub their sweet spots and murmur in their dear ears and smell their beautiful, honest, earthy scent.
I take the dogs out along the burn, where they rush and race and bark hysterically at the resigned old heron, who flaps off in faint indignation. The sky is translucent as the gloaming falls and, above the hill, there is the evening star. It is so glittery and magnificent that at first I think it must be a spy satellite. But no, it is its true self, as eternal as the ages. I stare at it for a long time.
I’ve got my iPod with me and I stick the earphones in and decide to have a song. I don’t want Dean Martin singing Let it Snow, so I put on The Rolling Stones instead, singing You Can’t Always Get What You Want. I belt out the words, into the still evening air. As I walk over the meadow I see a light burning and suddenly remember that I have new neighbours. I hope very much that their windows are not open. I imagine them peering out into the half-light, to see a lunatic in a strange hat bawling ‘I sold my soul to Mr Jimmy.’ I suddenly can’t stop laughing. Poor neighbours. They have no idea.

A quiet day.

I potter about, doing errands. The funny thing is that even if you do not do Christmas there still are things to do. I find myself making lists and delivering things and doing a lot of cooking.
As I do the cooking, I listen to the wireless. Mark Mardell has devoted the whole of The World At One to Syria. He has three experts in their field to talk about it. They are serious and engaged and articulate. They use their brains to combat despair. But I can hear, under their fluent voices, the rumble of exhaustion and fury. ‘How could we let this happen?’ says one of them. ‘On our watch. It is on our generation’s watch.’ As if in some way an entire cohort is responsible, by default, by neglect, by simple confusion or inertia or the awful tangle of what is politically possible, and perhaps it is.
Then a rather extraordinary thing happens. Mardell mentions that people have compared the situation to the Thirty Years’ War. Andrew Mitchell, his political guest, at once takes up the baton, as if this were the very analogy for which he had been searching. He begins talking of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
I stare in amazement. I read history at university, but I could not begin to tell you about the Peace of Westphalia, nor could I have given you a date for it. How many politicians, I wonder, would know that? How many educated people would know that? I feel oddly proud, in a completely irrational way, that there are backbenchers in the House of Commons who know about the Peace of Westphalia and the great powers who signed it and when it happened. Good old Blighty, I think; someone, somewhere is still teaching the history.
And then the programme finishes and another one starts. It is a programme about secrecy. A cross-dresser comes on. He has to keep his predilection a secret from his family. He sounds very weary, as if this secrecy rubs and presses on him, never letting him go. I think of the drag queens I used to run around with in Soho when I was in my twenties. They were so totally without secrecy, so vivid and proud and witty. They used to give me lipstick tips in the lav. I looked up to them, literally because they were all immensely tall and they wore six inch heels, and figuratively too. I was not at all sure who I was in those days, but they seemed to know exactly who they were and what they wanted and they strode out on those antic streets in search of it.
Storm Barbara huff and puffs. She keeps pitching up, in a livid rage, and then she gets bored or spots something else more interesting and goes away again. I start to think we won’t have a power cut after all.
Everything is very quiet now, as the wind dies down. I miss my mother. It is my second Christmas without her and I miss her. I fold the missing into my heart as if I am putting a note away in a careful, precious place. I had been running away from the sorrow, I realise. I got a little cocky. I had come back to usual life, was able to laugh with conviction and think of happy things and feel enjoyment running through me like electricity. That’s it, I thought; that race is run. But of course it does not quite work like that. Grief does not go. It becomes rarer, its visits more spaced out, its knocks on the door less frequent. It loses its daily weight, and stops making the head hurt. But at certain times, for a reason or for no reason, it pays its visit, and you can’t slam the door in its face. You have to let it in and give it a nice glass of Fino and let it say all the things it wants to say and then kindly smile and wave it goodbye until the next time.
In the quiet, the Beloved Cousin rings. ‘I am reading your book,’ she says, her voice carrying strongly down the line, full of life and interest and humour. ‘I’m absolutely loving it. And you know it is really helpful. N keeps saying: what does she say next?’ N is the smallest cousin, who is now eight. I think the fact that she wants to know what I say next is one of the best compliments I ever had. I smile all over my face.