Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 23

Just a day.

2553 words of secret project. (The proper manuscript is with the agent, so I have to have a secret project to keep my mind off it.) Sunshine in the morning, and a lot of wild canine activity. A splendid pack of three comes to play with Darwin the Dog. Poor Stanley the Manly is not allowed on this adventure as he wanders from the field and frightens the farmer, whose ewes are about to have their lambs. Stan does not chase sheep, but the presence of a socking great big lurcher anywhere near a ewe at this time of year is enough to make the hardiest farmer either faint or reach for his shotgun. I ride the red mare and lope about pretending I am a cowgirl.
Then there is work, work, work, work.
I keep thinking: this is the last year of my forties, and I must record memorable events. But after all those words my mind is blank and I can’t even remember what I just heard on the news. I did not even have any deep thoughts, which is most unlike me. Pretty much the most riveting thing that happened was that the boiler man came. I love the boiler man, a fact which seems to baffle him slightly.

Be fascinating, shouts the critical voice in my head. But I have no fascination left. It was a good day, a long day, a productive day. It was just a day. 

The quick and the dead.

I lost a couple of days down the back of the sofa. There has been so much going on that there was no time for the blog. So sorry about that.
The great news is that the little brown mare is home. The red mare and the sweet Paint were so pleased to see her that they put on their own rodeo show to welcome her back. She is a little sore and diminished, in that post-operative way that you see in humans. She has an open wound the size of a hand on her leg, but the vets have done a grand job and she is healing well. I am feeding her back up to fighting strength and, even in the space of thirty-six hours, she already looks like a different horse. There really is no place like home.
I’ve been writing thousands of words for my new secret project. The regular Dear Readers will know I always have a secret project. This one is entirely speculative, and is occupying my mind whilst my agent deals with the manuscript for the official book. If I do not have a secret project then I fret and worry and imagine that something terrible will happen and I shall never be published again. I try to be strict about not worrying about things beyond my control. As you can tell, I am not always successful in this ambition.
The dear Stepfather has gone away for a holiday. I drove him to the airport yesterday and said a fond goodbye. Every day when my mother was alive, I would go to their house and cook them breakfast. We still continue the tradition without her, and I talk to him about politics, which we both love, and make him eggs, and do a little metaphorical tap dance to try to keep his spirits up. He is a very brave man, and we don’t say it out loud, but we still miss her sorely.
This morning, I went to the house to check on it and have a cup of coffee and collect his paper. As I was sitting in the suddenly very silent room, I felt a great yawning gulf of regret. The Stepfather will come back from his holiday, but then he will move down to the south, to be near to his family and his old friends. This room, where he and I and my mother ate breakfast, and watched the Derby and the Grand National and the Gold Cup, and had Christmas and Easter, will be truly empty then. It will no longer be mine, with my ghosts in it. There will be another tenant, and I shall drive past the door and not go in.

It’s been a good week, really. I’ve had to deal with a bit of stuff, but everybody has to deal with a bit of stuff, every week. I’ve got a lot done and seen my beloved horse come back to us. But I am a little haunted by that empty room. Just a little. 

The real and the not real.

Good riding; HorseBack work, where I listened in awe and fascination to one of the most interesting men I know; 2257 words of book.            The sun shone for a while, with all the conviction of summer, and then the day reverted to a sulky, sullen state, with the winter chill still in it, and the world looked brown and low. But I got a lot done and had interesting talk and thought many thoughts.             And that was all, really. It was an ordinary, good, productive day. It had no banner headline; it was mine and it was fine.
            Out in the world, there were bombs and horrors. The news filtered through into my ordinary day, feeling distant and unreal. In the social media, everyone had something to say about it. I don’t know what to say when the horrors come. I feel that words, the words I love so much and in which I have so much faith, falter and fail in the face of hatred and nihilism. What can one say? I go doggedly on with my ordinary day, as if good humans and good horses and these good hills and trees can anchor me to another reality, a sane, kind reality, where people do not blow each other up in the name of God. 

Friendship.

The sun shone this morning, and I took my mare out into her favourite glade in the wood and let her put her head down to graze whilst I spoke on the telephone to the Beloved Cousin.             The cousin is not only my relation, but one of my oldest and dearest friends. We’ve been together for thirty years and I don’t know what I would do without her.            It was one of those intense, knotty conversations. We had both been dealt blows; we both wanted to ask each other about the best way of dealing with them. We listened and spoke and thought and got right into the knotty hearts of the problems. We offered each other sympathy and empathy and support and encouragement and all the life wisdom we have both picked up in our combined hundred years.            Once we got the serious part over, we wandered about all over the shop. We talked about Trollope. (We have a mutual love for Lady Glencora in the Palliser series.) We pondered over the latest political news and the resignation of Ian Duncan-Smith. She suddenly told me a story about her late father, one of the best men I ever knew, which made me laugh so much I really nearly fell out of the saddle in hilarity.             When I put the telephone down, I thought of friendship and what a mighty force it is. It can restore me to myself like almost nothing else. It sets everything to rights, everything back in its proper place. After such a conversation, I feel a vast sense of relief, as if a great granite stone has been lifted from my head. Everything seems brighter, better, more explicable. The world suddenly shines with possibility.             It’s not just that the cousin is a tremendous human being, although she is. It is that she has faith in me. We have tremendous belief in each other, and there is something profound and lovely in that. I think everyone needs someone who is completely on their side, who gets them, who thinks they can do anything they set their mind to. It’s the great, human version of iron tonic.            Then I cantered the mare about the field in giddy, liberated cowgirl fashion, one hand on the reins, the green grass of Wyoming in my head. Yesterday, we did serious schooling work. We were Charlotte Dujardin and Valegro. The mare worked so hard she got up a sweat. I could feel all my muscles stretched to their limit. Today, we were not working but flying, dancing our own joyful dance, in perfect harmony with each other. It was as if the Beloved Cousin had removed such a weight from my mind that the mare sensed it, and responded with her own soaring, stream of freedom.
            Then I went to my desk and wrote 1357 words of book and felt that perhaps, just for the moment, everything would be all right.

A rather extraordinary week. Good, bad; high, low; happy, sad - and all the spaces in between.

I wanted to write you a tremendous report of the last days at Cheltenham, but I ran into the wall of mental and physical exhaustion. Usually, I take Cheltenham week off, but this week I was doing my day job and my HorseBack job and then studying the form and watching the racing and by the end of it all, I hit the wall. I could hardly think, let alone type a coherent sentence.            Cheltenham is always an emotional turmoil for me, because I love those brave, beautiful horses so much. My heart is in them as if they were mine; they feel like old friends. I love the stories of the humans behind them, and, having grown up in a National Hunt yard, I know well the hopes and dreams and love and care that go into those glittering equine athletes. I am incapable of watching in a calm, detached manner. I pace and fidget and hide my eyes and shout my head off. After four intense days, I have entirely lost my voice from roaring the great champions home.            This year, quite apart from the fairy tale of Sprinter Sacre coming back in glory, which induced an outpouring of adoration and joy such as the festival has not seen for a long year, there was the hard fact that I was watching these races for the first time without my mum. If I was at home, I would go in to her house each morning and discuss the day, dream of new stars, remember old triumphs, let her tell me about the times when she would watch Arkle soaring over those great fences to his own immortality. If I had travelled down to the racecourse, I would ring her up between each race on the mobile and shout out inarticulate, antic reports of what was going on. ‘There are grown men crying in the Jockey Club stand,’ I yelled, after Coneygree flew up the hill last year. ‘The Champ did it!!! The crowd has gone mad,’ I bawled, when AP rode his last festival winner on Uxizandre, for an astounding pillar to post victory.             All her favourites won this year, and I felt her absence and wished she could have been here to see Annie and Sprinter and the mighty Don. I cried an awful lot of tears, of joy for the dazzling performances, of missing for a voice that was silent, of memories for a shared passion.            Today, it was the dear Stepfather’s birthday. It was the first one without my mother, so I made a special effort. I cooked him a fillet of glorious Aberdeenshire Angus beef for his birthday lunch, and he got out a bottle of 1990 Cheval Blanc, which my mother, who knew all about good claret, had hidden away in the cellar. It was one of the most elegant wines I have ever tasted in my life, and we drank it in her honour.
            This has been her week. I don’t really believe in other lives, but if I did, I would like to think that she was looking down, and smiling her sweet smile.

The old king rises. An equine story and a human story.

The old king, sagely, calmly, and without fuss, took back his crown. He saw the outstretched grasp of the young pretender, shook his wise old head, and said: ‘No, no, not yet.’            I had convinced myself it could not be done. I did not even dare to hope. But Sprinter Sacre shone like the stars in the sky. He soared over the early fences, with that extraordinary, almost ethereal action I remembered so well. Un De Sceaux scampers along like a little terrier, his head down, his colours nailed to the mast. Sprinter seems to defy the laws of physics – when he meets a fence just right and launches over it, it is as if he goes into slow motion. He is stately and grand and fine and entirely other.            As I watched those early leaps, a tiny hope rose, like a bird in my chest.            But no, no, it could not be done. Surely, it was too much to ask.            At the top of the hill it seemed that the new kid, all fearless youth, convinced of his own immortality, was running away with it. But then they turned the bend and the old Sprinter unfurled like a flower in springtime, ranging upsides, astonishingly, impossibly, going on.            He went on, and he kept on. Nobody, on this day of days, could catch him. The grand monarch was, once more, in his rightful place, emperor of all he surveyed.            I cried and shouted. The crowd cried and shouted. Anyone with a human heart cried and shouted. The roof lifted off the stands, as one of the great comeback stories in racing history revealed itself before their joyful eyes.            In all this grand equine story, there was a quiet human one.            Sprinter Sacre was ridden by a young jockey called Nico De Boinville. He is not a household name, even though he won the Gold Cup last year with an audacious front-running ride. He was, for a long time, the very definition of a backroom boy. He rode Sprinter in all his work when the horse was in his pomp, and then stepped back to let Barry Geraghty take the ride in public.             He rode in races as an amateur, then took out his license, and, when Geraghty was taken on as retained jockey to JP McManus, replacing the retiring AP McCoy, started to get more and more of the Nicky Henderson rides. He had worked for Henderson for long enough, and the guvnor must have seen something in him, because he was up on the proper horses.            I spent a lot of time, in my yelping, exuberant racing tweets, complimenting de Boinville on his skills. I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves. He is cool under pressure, brave, thoughtful, and a proper horseman.             As Sprinter Sacre started out on his improbable comeback trail, de Boinville got the gig. He dealt with the weight of expectation and guided the good horse to victory both times. But yesterday was a whole other kettle of fish.            I can’t tell you how hard it is to ride a fit thoroughbred in a race. There is half a ton of athletic flight animal under you, a sea of imponderables before you, split second decisions, crucial tactical moves, high speed, unforgiving obstacles, and an ambulance trundling along behind to pick up the pieces. That’s just on a wet Wednesday at Wincanton. The armchair jocks, who have never ridden so much as a bicycle, laugh and scoff and call you names when you fall off at the last.             At Cheltenham, with the eyes of the world upon you, you are going faster and harder than you’ve ever gone in your life. There is no room for error. The other jockeys, pumped up for the big occasion, give no quarter. I’ve heard good riders speak in shock about their first experience of the festival.             De Boinville carried the stretched hopes of a vast sporting crowd, who would have given anything to see Sprinter Sacre defy the odds, rewrite the history books, and turn over the hot favourite. He had the responsibility to that good guvnor who had given him his chance, to the hopeful owner, to the fine horse under him.            But none of that is the human story.             The story is that Nico De Boinville’s mother died, two weeks ago.            I thought of my own mother, as that grand horse strode up the hill, the king back in his castle. I thought of how she would have loved it and how she would have wept along with me. I missed her horribly, and regretted bitterly that she could not see her hero back to his swaggering best.All I had to do was watch and wonder and shout and weep. That jockey had to do the business. Two weeks after my mother died, last October, I could hardly go to the shop. This man just won the Champion Chase.            I knew none of this in the build-up to the race. The Channel Four Racing team, perhaps sensitive to grief, did not mention it, even by vague implication. I was struck, when they cut to a shot of De Boinville in the weighing room, by how sombre he looked. His eyes were distant and unfocused; his face grave. I thought he was bowed by the weight of all that hope and expectation. I think now that he was thinking of his mother.            Immediately after the wining post, he rose briefly in his stirrups, his expression set and serious, almost defiant. His face did not split into the great, glorious Cheltenham grin. (When Ruby Walsh rides a winner at the festival, you can actually see his smile from high up in the stands, gleaming like a lighthouse beam.) For a moment, de Boinville wore an air of weary gravity. He bowed his head, almost as if in defeat.            The microphone was held up to him, with welcoming, enthusiastic congratulation. He tried to gather himself, to say something to the waiting public. After a few stuttering sentences – ‘I’m speechless about that; he means so much to us’ -  he said ‘Can I just say a big thank you to all our close friends and family and to the wider racing community? We’ve had a really tough past month with my family and this is just, uh, the icing on the cake. And I’m very happy.’ His voice failed and he moved his horse away, and then there was a smile for the cameras, bittersweet, slightly forced, joy and sorrow in it.            I write all the time about the bravery of these horses and these jockeys. It is why I love them so much. It is why I love racing so much. My father was a brave man, who, years ago, flew up the Cheltenham hill twice in the Kim Muir. I spent my childhood with that physical courage.            But this was a different kind of bravery, a different, more muted, more profound story of sheer guts.
            I don’t know what gave Sprinter Sacre wings yesterday. A brilliant, dauntless trainer, who simply refused to give up and who pulled off a training feat for the ages, a group of dazzling experts in equine health, the devoted team at Seven Barrows, those unsung heroes who rise at dawn to look after him, come rain, come shine – all played their part. Perhaps it was just his day. Many horses have their day, when everything simply falls right and the stars align. He had a damn good jockey, who rises to the big occasion, for all his youth. But the romantic in me, the dreamer in me, the griever in me, wonders if somehow, somewhere in his sage, horsey old head, Sprinter knew that Nico De Boinville was riding this race for his mum.

The old kings.

Yesterday, the mighty mare set the stands on a roar. Annie Power confounded her doubters, and showed the boys how it should be done. Douvan dazzled and dumbfounded and delighted with his sheer, untrammelled brilliance. And dear Vroum Vroum Mag, the most matter-of-fact horse in racing, gently rolled up the hill as if she were going out for a nice day with the Galway Blazers.             Today, the story is of two great old kings.             A year ago today, I stood in a quiet backwater, as, thirty yards away, a raucous, swelling, shouting party went on. The sounds of triumph from the winner’s enclosure floated on the air. In the melancholy stretch of grass where the losers go to unsaddle, hidden away as if to conceal their shame from prying eyes, stood a small group of worried humans and one very downbeat horse. It was the grand Sprinter Sacre, brought low.            Sprinter Sacre used to win at Cheltenham as if he were out for a schooling canter. He is an emperor of a horse, and he owned this place. Prestbury Park was his, and the crowd saluted him for it. He had a swagger and a power and an exuberance, and good people tipped their hat to him, knowing he was one of those once-in-a-generation horses.             Then it all went wrong. He pulled up with a heart murmur and it was suspected that we might never see him again. But Nicky Henderson, despite his smiling affability, has a core of steel, and he would not give in so easily. He threw experts and vets and professors and the kitchen sink at the problem. Slowly, slowly, Sprinter started to come back.            But last year he was a pale shadow of his former self and I looked at that deposed monarch with keen, sad eyes, certain I would never again see him in his pomp. I thought they must retire him; that his race was indeed run.            This season, to my amazement, he was back again. He was growing in strength and confidence. If the swagger was not quite back, the talent was still visible. He came out and won. Then he won again. He had to scrap for it a little bit, which he had never done before, but I took that as a sign that his heart, literally and figuratively, was mended.             Now he returns to the place of his greatest festival triumphs, and if he could pull it out of the bag today, the roof would come off the stands, he is so brilliant and beloved.            But he is up against one of the most complete natural talents in chasing, in the dashing Un De Sceaux. Un De Sceaux roars off in front, eats his fences for breakfast, and says catch me if you can. It’s a fairly high-risk strategy, and he has been known to tip up, but last time at Ascot he was polished and professional and devastatingly strong. He probably will win. He probably shouldwin. Passing the crown from the old king to the new king is one of the great traditions of jump racing.             Sprinter owes us nothing. He has delighted us enough. I would weep tears of disbelief and joy if he could pull off the miracle, bask once more in the sunshine of the Cheltenham love. But really, I just want to see him happy, conducting himself with honour, coming home safe.             In the next race, the heartstrings will be pulled even harder. The new king of the cross-country race is the determined and dogged Josies Orders who sticks his neck out and charges up the hill after many long miles. He’s ridden by Nina Carberry, as brave and dauntless as her horse.            But there, below him in the betting, is the old monarch – the adored Balthazar King. Balthazar loves Cheltenham like no horse I ever saw. He’s won over the regulation fences; he made the cross-country his own. He lights up when he comes to Prestbury Park. Then they sent him to the Grand National and he was cannoned into by another horse, breaking his ribs. He received devoted care at the Liverpool hospital and then went for a long, healing summer at his owner’s farm.             The master that is Philip Hobbs has nursed him back to health and here he is again. He’s a big, strong, handsome, honest horse, and he doesn’t know how to run a bad race. He did not scale the dizzy heights of Sprinter Sacre, but he’s almost more loved, because he’s so genuine, such a standing dish, as good and reliable as a Swiss Watch.             I think his mountain is an even steeper one to climb than Sprinter’s. He’s twelve now, and he would be getting ready to pass on his crown even without his injury. His old partner Richard Johnson will look after him, and if for a moment he feels something is not quite right, he’ll pull him up. But oh, if that brave horse could glitter and gleam once again, it would be my shining moment of the festival.
            I love the new kings. There is something viscerally thrilling about watching young horses leap into their own brilliant future, as if they know that the sky is the limit. But the old kings, those grand, sage rulers of all they once surveyed, they are the ones who fill my heart like nothing else.

The mare did it.

Annie Power won the Champion Hurdle, and I cried tears of joy.            Mares don’t really win the Champion Hurdle. The last time that happened was twenty years ago. This mare had gone to Cheltenham twice, and come up short each time. She was beaten in the World Hurdle. ‘Will Annie stay?’ was the cry. She did stay, but she was bettered by a faster horse on the day. Then she went for the Mares’ Hurdle. ‘She only has to stand up to win,’ everyone said. She was tanking into the last. It was a sunny day, and there was deep shadow in front of the hurdle. She jumped the shadow and landed on her elegant nose.             Then she disappeared. She had niggles. There was something not quite right. She finally returned to the spotlight in a little egg and spoon race which she won as she liked, but which told nobody anything except that she was fit and well. She was still Annie, but was she the supermare she was once supposed to be?            It was not precisely the ideal preparation. Off the track for months and months, one nothing race in the bag, no big trials or expected tests. But Annie is Annie and Willie Mullins is a genius and the normal rules don’t really apply.            Now, everyone said: ‘Will she be quick enough for two miles?’ Will her jumping be neat and accurate enough? Will she have it in her to beat the boys?            The race cut up and she was backed in to favouritism. She was a sort of false favourite, as the bookies desperately tried to protect themselves from a possible Mullins/Walsh accumulator, as is becoming tradition on the first day of the festival.            You could see her winning by ten lengths, or making a muddle of one down the back and not recovering. Anything could happen. There were plenty of others for whom cases could be made.            I love Annie Power. I’ve loved Annie Power since she first burst onto the scene. She is big and bold and imperious. She’s a great slab of a mare, nothing delicate or retiring about her. She goes into a race like she’s the boss, and when she wins, she wins as she likes, dismissing the others with disdain. She is not sweet or pretty or gentle. She is mighty.            I wanted her to win so much I convinced myself that she could not possibly win. That way I could avoid crashing disappointment. I am very fond of The New One, a stalwart in the race, and I thought it might be his year. There were other hopes from Ireland; Nicky Henderson was bringing one of his stars back from a long absence, and there is nobody who can do that at Cheltenham like Henderson.            This morning, I got onto my own little dancing chestnut, my own little Annie Power, and stood up in the irons and imagined the Cheltenham hill before us. She caught my excitement and flew up the slope and we passed the imaginary winning post with nothing but the emerald green track in front of us. My red mare is as different from Annie Power as can be. She never came close to winning a race; she never made a single headline, except for the crazy ones in my own head. The two horses have only their colour and their gender and a few hundred thoroughbred cousins in common. (All thoroughbreds end up being related; hardly a one does not go back to Eclipse.) But my own red mare is still the supreme champion of my heart.            In the end, I let that heart rule my head. I threw loyalty cash at Annie Power, and went all in. I could not desert her now.            She won in a canter, measuring each hurdle to perfection, dancing round those undulations as if she were doing ballet.             Annie Power won the Champion Hurdle, and I cried tears of joy.            Later, I took the dogs out into the cool Scottish air and looked at the sky and looked at the hill and listened to the quiet. I had been shouting and weeping and leaping up and down. Now all was still. I was, literally and metaphorically, hundreds of miles from that cauldron of emotion, that great natural bowl of hopes and dreams.            I looked at the view. I wished very much I could tell my mother about Annie. She had loved her too. ‘Oh, Annie,’ she used to say, a wistful note in her voice.             ‘Mum,’ I said, even though I knew she was not there. ‘Annie Power won the Champion Hurdle. And I cried and Ruby cried and Rich Ricci cried and even Willie Mullins looked as if there was a tear in his eye.’
            ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘The mare did it.’

Sunshine.

.Dazzling sunshine; 1799 words of book; a grand schooling ride on my dear brown mare; a lot of HorseBack work; and dreams and dreams and dreams of Cheltenham.
I thought I might be sad, thinking of my first Cheltenham without my mum. There will be so many brave, bonny horses running this week that she adored. I’ll miss the early morning excitement as I would take her a copy of the Racing Post; I’ll miss the post-race telephone conversations. But the melancholy which has been floating about seems banished by the sunshine. It’s my favourite four days of the year, and this year I shall be shouting for two.
I hoped I might be able to take the week off and give myself my traditional Cheltenham holiday, but there is too much going on in my work. So I’m going to be juggling pure pleasure and serious responsibilities, which sounds about right. I can’t just stop the world because the best horses in Britain and Ireland will be gathered together under the benign, timeless gaze of Cleeve Hill. But oh, oh, oh, the glory. There will be all the things I love and admire most – bravery, beauty, dour determination, dazzling natural talent, enthusiasm, grace, a refusal to give up. There will be the old friends and the new shooting stars. The crowd will sing Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. (My mum used to ring me up and say, a dying fall in her voice: ‘Oh, Ruby.’ As if he were a cherished son who turned out to be a prodigy.) Willie Mullins will wear his special hat. The hot favourites will be nailed on, as if the memory of Annie Power plunging at the last is not seared on every punter’s mind, and, as always at the festival, absolutely anything could happen.

The Mullins battalions seem invincible, but never far from my mind is the year that Norton’s Coin won the Gold Cup at 100-1, having been driven to the races in a trailer by his trainer, Sirrell Griffiths. Nobody goes to the Gold Cup in a trailer. Griffiths had been up at dawn to milk his cows and only had two other horses in his stable. Yet he lifted the greatest prize of all. Colin Tizzard has a few more than three horses, but he also is a milker of cows, three hundred and fifty of them, so perhaps that is a sign for dear old Cue Card. Cheltenham is the place for stories, equine, bovine and human. I’ve heard those stories all my life, since my fearless father stormed up the hill in the Kim Muir. Absolutely anything can happen, and I can’t wait. 

Most people.

Not long ago or far away, someone suggested that I do a thing I had not done. ‘That’s what most people do,’ she said, in laughing reproach.            She was right. The thing I had not done was what most people would do. She had reason and rationality and common sense and empiricism and correctness on her side. I had nothing. Except that I am not most people.             It was not said with any rancour or unkindness. It was a mere statement of fact.            It was a knife to my heart.
A lot of the time, I am perfectly comfortable with the fact that I am not most people. At those times I don’t even know who most people are. Surely each individual human is as idiosyncratic as a snowflake?             Then there are times when I yearn to join the glorious cohort of the Most People. They do exist. They have conventions and cultures and things in common. They have the steadiness of the majority, because they are the majority. They, without even knowing it, get the blessing of the zeitgeist, because they play by its rules.             They have sorrows and setbacks and losses, just like everyone else, but they don’t have to paddle madly against the current, because they go where the river goes, gracefully towards the sea. They may take this for granted, because they don’t know what it’s like to be going the wrong way.
When I was much younger, I took what seemed to me a very ordinary and logical and rational choice, but what the wider world considers a radical and even bizarre decision. I knew, deep in my bones, that I did not want to get married and have children. I hate doing things that I am not good at, and I knew that I would be no good at those things. I looked in awe and wonder at the people who were good at them. I look in awe and wonder still. I watch those who make a great family in the way I watch Yo-Yo Ma play the cello or I once watched AP McCoy ride a finish. I take off my hat.             This is not what most people do. It is especially not what most women do. It is taken as read, carved in stone, preached in pulpits, written in newsprint that all females long for marriage and babies. There are quite a lot of people who consider this the grand fulfilment of their life and their biology and their very being. It is really hard for those who naturally follow that river of the majority to understand what it feels like not to paddle down that stream.            Every atom floating in the culture tells you that you are odd and other. I suspect that married people don’t realise this, because it is so usual to them that it becomes like white noise. But every time you turn on the radio or get a cold caller (‘Is that Mrs Kindersley?) or open a magazine or read a newspaper or have a conversation with a stranger or watch the television, the notion of marriage as normal, wonderful, expected and admired is present. Those who don’t want husbands and wives and children and family life are so beyond the pale that they don’t really feature, except for the occasional article where some poor woman has to explain, at great length, why she refuses to fulfil her biological imperative. She has to twist herself inside out like a pretzel to prove that she is not vain and selfish and weird and cold and generally peculiar. However articulate she is, nobody really believes her.            Even good friends, with kind hearts and intelligent minds, don’t always get it. ‘You have a womb, surely you must use it?’ (That person had a first in classics.) ‘What is she doing up there in Scotland, all on her own?’ ‘You’ll change your mind when you meet the right man.’ ‘If you refuse to find a husband, why don’t you get a proper job?’ Because I not only won’t get married, I sit at home and write books, a job that comes with no regular salary and means that it is financial feast or famine, so that there are times, like now, when I annoy everyone by having to refuse all invitations until I can get a deal, and I don’t know when that deal will come because it’s not a proper job.            Nobody throws a party for the stupid single people; there are no white weddings, no gushing speeches, no anniversary celebrations, no greetings cards, no diamond rings. Married people damn well should have a party, in my book, because making a good marriage is incredibly hard work and the ones who make a success of it should get prizes. But it’s a zero sum game. Those on the outside, the ones who are not most people, are invisible, and not to be celebrated, the bolshie buggers. Why can’t they just stop making a fuss and do the decent thing?             As if my strange decision not to procreate were not enough, I am an introvert. Introverts are about 25% of the population, and, if you are as far along the spectrum as I am, that minority status grows even more acute. Introversion is hard to explain because it is so often misunderstood. It falls constantly into category error. People think that introverts must be shy and silent, when in fact many are garrulous and perfectly composed in company. The difference between introverts and extroverts is that introverts are exhausted by people while extroverts take their energy from them. An introvert may be the life and soul of the party, but she will then have to sit quietly in a silent room for three days afterwards to fill up the tank. I often turn down perfectly lovely invitations for this reason, which causes raised eyebrows and wounded incomprehension.             Solitude, which I love and cherish, is considered another oddity. Most people, perfectly naturally, don’t want to sit in a quiet room. They live in families and work in offices and go to pubs and move in packs. I like eating in restaurants alone; I like going to the races alone; I much prefer going to the cinema alone. Odd, odd, odd.             Most of the time, none of this matters. If I am robust and at home in my skin and have taken my iron tonic, I can make jokes about it and accept it and even, if the light is coming from the right direction, take a little secret pride in it. When I am a bit bashed and battered, as I am at the moment, I feel wearied and worn down by it.             I don’t generally complain, as the Dear Readers know, except about dangling modifiers and people spouting jargon on the Today programme (‘What does that mean?’ says poor John Humphreys, driven to distraction by acronyms and management-speak). I am too keenly conscious of my luck. But occasionally I give in to a little wail. Today, I’m having a wail. Today, I’m lacerated and when that happens, I have to write about it. Nobody reads this blog on a Saturday anyway, so I can shout into an empty room. Occasionally, my wailing self says, I am sick of having to explain myself, of having my oddities questioned, of being so damn other. Occasionally, I look with envy at Most People, and wish that I could canter along with them. Occasionally, I wish they might understand.
            Perhaps this is part of the reason I love my red mare so, quite aside from all her glorious qualities. She is a horse, and she has no idea what most people do. She does not do the funny laughs or the funny looks or the funny comments. She takes me just as I am. She does not wonder what I am doing, all on my own. As long as I feed her well and work her well and love her well, she does not care about the rest. If I leave my cares at the gate and give her my best self, she thinks I’m pretty damn fine.