Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 33

The rain wins.

The rain won.

I did call those damn Perspective Police, but they’ve now buggered off because they have a better invitation. I did look at the beauty, and it did soothe my jangled nerves, but it did not last. And now a host of frets and angsts and shadow fears swarm about my head like angry bees and I can’t drive them off.

Write it down, write it down, say the voices in my head. The only way to vanquish frailty is to admit to frailty.

I like to give you a happy ending. I was grumpy, but look – no hands – the sun came out again. I was in a state, but I talked myself down from the ceiling. Look what an ordinary cussed human can do.

But sometimes, the jangles won’t be denied. All the little pinpricks with which I can normally deal suddenly seem insurmountable. Things which I know how to do somehow become impossible. I know, for instance, that people are never thinking what you think they are thinking, especially when you think that thinking is of the mean and derisive kind. I KNOW THAT. And yet, I sent a very slightly gushing message to someone yesterday and they have not replied and I am completely convinced that they think I am a ghastly person who sends stupid messages and that they are hoping radio silence might put me in my place. The man who was supposed to come and top the fields has not pitched up and has not called and even though my rational mind says he is busy, my inner critics, who have been at the gin, insist that he didn’t come because he was so horrified that anyone could let their docks get so out of hand that he has probably LEFT THE COUNTRY. Oh, and that he’s even now in some charming tavern laughing about my ineptitude with all his new foreign friends.

You are forty-eight years old, say the stern voices; you really should know better than this.

Oh well, say the whimsical voices, every day can’t be Doris Day.

Write it down, write it down, say the voices of sanity. Admit your flaws. Everyone has a shitty day from time to time, for no discernible reason. Everyone has an entirely irrational moment when they feel useless and pointless and feckless and are convinced they must go into the garden to eat worms. Everyone needs to have a little wail, from time to time, no matter how lucky they are.

The critical voices, high as a kite on Gordon’s, are longing for me to press publish, so that everyone can point and mock.

Don’t do it, say the terrified voices. You don’t have to chronicle every single moment of crazed angst. Keep your secret shames to yourself, for once.

Do it, says the small, hopeful voice, so that you know you are not the only one. You really don’t have to be a poster girl your whole life. Sometimes, the rain does win, but that does not mean the whole game is lost.

Into every life, a little rain must fall.

It is ten degrees, and the sky is the colour of lost hope. So much water is pouring out of it that I start to suspect that something has gone wrong with nature. It’s the kind of rain that should be a brief storm, it is so intense, but it keeps on rolling, as if it has taken a bet. The hills have disappeared into the smoky cloud, and even the sheep look despairing.

Down in the field, the horses do the stoical, flat thing that they do in the weather. They close in on themselves, and have no use for humans. It is purely atavistic; they are in survival mode. Water lies on the fields, dirty and reproachful, and the two mares stand under their favourite tree, but even its majestic green arms cannot protect them. I bless the new rug technology, but the wet still runs down their dear faces and into their ears. (I laugh a hollow laugh at the vastly expensive shelter I built for the weather. They only use it to get out of the sun and away from the flies.)

I too have rug technology, but despite a laughably ‘waterproof’ coat, a hat and sturdy gumboots, after half an hour the rain has got me. It sneaks down my neck, finds its way down my back, trickles sullenly into those stomping boots. I have to accept the wetness. There is no fighting it.

I gain some small consolation from putting out the sweet-smelling, dry hay and mixing up an extra special breakfast for the poor, drowned girls, rich with meadow chaff and herbs. I stand and talk to them as they eat. They cheer up and come out of their shells and flicker their ears at me, and I leave them a little brighter than when I found them.

All the same, this relentless downpour seeps into my soul and leaves me with a humming spiritual ache. I am generally stoical about the weather, but it’s been so rotten for so long, and everything I own, including my house and my car, has turned into a festival of mud. It knocks over my defences and makes me dwell on the sad things, rather than determinedly looking for the silver linings.

Then, of course, I feel cross with myself, because people have so many burdens to carry, and it’s just a bit of mud and wet. I go to the shop, to get some bread and coffee and ham. I see a mother and daughter. The mother is perhaps fifty, rather elegant and smartly dressed. (I look down ruefully at my filthy jeans.) The daughter is about twenty-five, and has some kind of severe mental impairment. She talks loudly, in the simple language of an infant, and stays very close to her mother.

I look again at the mother, with her bright, put-together surface, and feel a moment of awe. Her child will always be a child. She must have to look after her all the time. I wonder if she ever gets a holiday, or can go away for a day. I think of the enduring and unconditional nature of love, of the battling human heart, which does not quail from difficulty. Perhaps that mother loves that daughter even more, because she was not like the other children in the playground. But all the same, there might have been expectations, hopes, dreams, which had to be adjusted. Humans are very wonderful, I think.

As they leave the shop, the daughter turns around to say something to the lady at the till. The speech is so blurred that I cannot understand it. But the lady at the till, who seems to know the girl well, gets every word and chats back, and laughs. The daughter smiles a smile so dazzling that it lights up the gloomy day.

Never assume, I think.

I think of a woman I know on the internet. One of the things I love about the blog, and about the fine side of social media, is that I make quite profound connections with people I shall probably never meet. When people get sneery about virtual life, as opposed to the vaunted real life, I wonder at how little they know of the internet. The kindness of strangers lives there. Those strangers become known; small redoubts of common interests, thoughts, feelings, sympathies, jokes, generosities are set up.

This woman is dealing, with enormous courage and elegance and grace, with one of the greatest tragedies in life: the slow end of her Best Beloved. She writes about it a little, in brief, potent bulletins of sadness, but she will also write of small pleasures – the beauty of her landscape, the making of a cake, the antics of her chickens. I think of her great grief, and the dauntless bravery with which she faces it.

And all I have to deal with is a wet, gloomy day. I hear the knocking at the door as the Perspective Police demand to be let in. It’s just a little bit of rain.

As I think this, my spirits do not lift straight away. One can know a thing intellectually, and not quite feel it in the gut. I understand that there are people out there, brave men and women, who are fighting battles I can hardly comprehend. I understand that I have very little of which to complain. Yet, the cross voices still persist, shouting defiantly in my ear. They are on a roll, and will not be turned away so easily.

I go out again, into the rain. On days like this, the very land seems drowned, as if the elements have defeated it. I want to take a picture of it, to show the gloom. As I begin to focus the camera, I find not gloom, but beauty. The raindrops dance off the puddles like little firework displays. Tiny beads of water cling to singing green leaves like diamonds. All the greens are so green. If it were not for the rain, I think, there would not be this lush, verdant glory. I imagine the relentless nature of the desert spaces, where rain is hardly known. I think of the people of California, who are running out of water.

I stare at the beauty. There it is, in the small things, on this dark day.

I feel better. The oppression lifts.

I go inside, laughing at my own absurdity. The Beloved Cousin rings up, always a moment for celebration and delight. She makes me laugh more than anyone I know. And England take a wicket.

It’s just a little bit of rain.

 

Today’s pictures:

As I finished this, I thought – I’ll just get on the Google and see if there are any nice poems about rain. The only line I could think of was that enchanting one from ee cummings – ‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’ Which of course is not about rain at all.

The first poem I found was this one. It is by Longfellow:

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Pictures.

Crazy working day and there was no time for the blog. Hopeless. Here are some photographs from the last few days to make up for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the smallest of small things – the hills, the moss, the green, green grass of Scotland, the mare, the dog, hunting for beauty and tiny pleasures in each day. I suddenly realise, as I post these pictures, that the small things are all there. The red mare and these Scottish hills are vast to me, but in the scheme of the world they would not even make the back pages. As I get older, the things I love and value are further and further away from the classic headline desires. I’d love my next book to be a best-seller, but only so I can keep the horse in hay. I’d like to make some money, so I can build many beautiful paddocks out of lovely post and rails and fill them with ex-racehorses. I don’t want to be fashionable or famous or feted. I want my fingers to work so I can go on playing with prose, and my body to work so I can still be riding thoroughbreds when I’m seventy, and my eyes to function so I can read and look at the racing and gaze at this beloved landscape. I’d like my reflexes to stay sharp, so I can drive south and see the old friends. I’m starting to think I’d quite like a goat. That’s about the sum total of my ambition.

Love and trees, my darlings. Love and trees.

And sheep, of course. The ewes this year are so elegant I can’t stop staring at them.

A slightly unexpected life lesson.

Quite a long time ago, with a lot of sweating and swearing and yelping, I hit the deadline for the manuscript of my current book. I whacked it off to the agent, after staying up all night, and then collapsed in a heap.

After all the rushing and striving and grand-standing, I had to wait quite a long time for a response. This sometimes happens, and I have learnt to deal with it. I am a pro, after all. At least the thing was done, and I could fill in the time by working on my other book, and, lately, on the new secret project, because I must always have a secret project.

There was, at last, good news. She loved it; she was very happy; she was fired with enthusiasm. She had plans.

Then there was a check. She thought perhaps it needed more work. A change in emphasis might be needed. A little structural tweak. She wanted to go away and think for a while.

I am a pro, I told myself.

Then, finally, finally, an email arrived. I read it so quickly that I did not fully understand it. I was clearly much, much more terrified than I had allowed myself to believe, and this seemed to blur my very vision.

What I thought it said was that she was losing faith. I thought that she was trying to shuffle me off, that really she did not like it any more, that she did not trust me to fix it.

I went into a wild defensive crouch. I kept trying to do the new draft, and could not. What price that famous professionalism now? I had many good excuses – complicated life mostly, but then everyone has a complicated life. In my experience, you only don’t do a thing when you don’t want to. The excuses are always bullshit, however good and shiny they might seem on the surface.

It took me two weeks to realise what was going on. What was going on was that I was FURIOUS. Not with the poor agent, who is a brilliant woman and who has stuck with me through vicissitudes which would have sunk a lesser human. I was furious with the whole shooting match. I was livid with the process.

Writing daily for the internet is a really good discipline. It has keen personal pleasures. I get to meet Dear Readers from around the world, and learn about other views and other lives. I can keep a record, which I like very much. There are precious jewels on this blog, which would have been lost to memory had I not written them down – there is the day Kauto Star won his fifth King George; there is Frankel in his pomp; there are my dear, adored old canine ladies, whom I still miss. The writing itself is important, as it keeps my fingers moving, locking the very act of writing into muscle memory.

But it is also horribly spoiling. I can write what I want, and it can go out into the world as free as a bird. There are no mediating market forces, cultural shifts, publishing shake-ups, economic turbulences to wreck it. It has a lovely purity and immediacy and ease to it. I write it; you read it. I am sometimes proud of it; you are sometimes bored by it. If it lags and sags, I must try harder. If I’m in the zone, it sings its song, and the Dear Readers smile.

I don’t have to do a tap dance, or a dog and pony show. I don’t have to edit and revise and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I don’t have to have any bloody meetings.

The perceived doubt of the email brought all those old rejections, imperatives, wilderness years into one ball of rage. Fuck them all, the childish voice in my head was yelling. I was not even sure who or what I was cursing. The fates, the demands of the job, life itself; the whole buggery mess and muddle.

I was so angry that I then refused to write at all, and listened to the Ashes instead. The voice of Blowers on Test Match Special was the only thing which made me feel as if my fragile world was not rocking on its axis. That, and the red mare, who rose to the occasion, and was more sweet and funny and responsive and adorable than I’ve ever known her. Each ride was more enchanting than the last, as if she knew that something was up, and understood that it was in her sole power to give me the gift of peace for two hours every day.

But then the Test Match was over and I had my deadline to meet and I had to stop being such a sulky fool and do the damn work. Otherwise I cannot keep the mare in hay. (I had tried, over the weekend, to win thousands of pounds on an accumulator so that I could retire on the spot, but it did not go well.)

Crossly, after too much coffee, I went back and read the email again, to see what it was the poor agent really wanted.

It said not one single thing I had inferred.

It was still filled with enthusiasm and belief. She just wanted a few small changes, and then it was all guns blazing.

I read it again.

What had I been thinking? She had written one thing; I, in blind fear, had read another.

I sat down and did all the major edits in one session.

I’ll still need to do some more pondering and have another polish and sharpen up some of the self-indulgent parts, but all is not lost, my career is not yet over, light is shining through the tunnel.

I often say that I am an idiot. Then I have to remind myself sternly that I am not quite an idiot, but an ordinary human who sometimes does extraordinarily idiotic things. There is an important difference. This is one of those idiotic things. Will I ever learn? Back to the drawing board I go, back to the schoolroom, back to learning yet another life lesson that I don’t seem to have imbibed.

Read your emails carefully does not sound like a lesson for the ages. But in this case, it really is.

 

Today’s photographs:

Just one today, because I’m exhausted with all these revelations of my own folly. But it’s a good one, because it’s how I feel. Born free. And also because it’s of the person who has stopped me collapsing from mild hysteria into the very depths of the abyss. She really does have that power.

A bit of a jangle.

It’s been a bit of a complicated week, for about twenty-seven reasons. This is why the blog has been spotty, for which I apologise. I always feel there is an unspoken compact between the Dear Readers and me: you give me your time, I should at least have the decency to give you some regular prose. I have absolutely no idea where this imperative comes from. What on earth can it matter, after all? It’s such an odd medium, and I still have no idea how it works, but I like the discipline of daily bulletins, and I like the notion of a metronomic regularity.

As my head whirls and my heart beats, the ship is steadied by the glorious presence of Test Match Special. Those known voices, those blithe jokes, that pure love of a most English game cheer me like almost nothing else. Nothing can be that bad when Blowers is telling stories about rogue seagulls and calling muscular Australians ‘my dear old thing’.

The red mare has also been at her crest and peak of sweetness, cleverness and dearness. Horses pick up on jangled emotions, but as I get more fraught, she gets more calm. I’m supposed to be the one who reassures her, who keeps her safe, who soothes her frets. This week, it is as if she decided to step up and take it on her sturdy, sloping shoulders to be the still small voice of calm. Here, she says, generously, have a delightful, composed canter, just to restore your faith. Look, she says, I can do it WITH NO REINS. Come on, she says, you can’t go bonkers when I may offer you the poised self-carriage of a dowager duchess.

I sometimes think that she holds my sanity in her dear, dancing hooves.

Back to normality next week. That is my plan. In the meantime, here are some soothing pictures:

Some vague thoughts on niceness.

As well as thinking quite a lot about the small things, I think about the ordinary, unsung traits. I think a lot about niceness and kindness. I don’t think I am an especially kind person, but I try to do nice and kind things. Sometimes, I almost think every choice can be boiled down to picking one of two possibilities: the good or the bad. Are you going to get furious with that Sunday driver and hoot and gesticulate, because your own celerity is so very important, or are you going to smile and let them dawdle for a while? Are you going to be brusque with that poor cold caller, or do your best to understand it’s a shitty job and they are just working off a list, and get out of the conversation with as much grace as you can? Will you rush to judgement, or will you do your best to understand?

The problem with all this is that it sounds so sappy and soppy and utterly pathetic. Niceness and kindness do not make headlines. They are not thrilling or sexy. They are not words which feature in articles about the famous or obituaries for the mighty. (Although, they are sometimes marked. My heart did rather lift when I saw something on the internet the other day about Keanu Reeves being the nicest man in Hollywood.) Columnists are not employed to be nice; quite often they seem chosen entirely because they are so mean.

Being nice and kind is often conflated with weakness. They are the defaults of the mouse, of the doormat, of the pushover. Nice people may be used and abused: oh, yes, she’ll do it; ask him, he never complains.

Yet, in what is often a shouty, rushing world, I sometimes think that choosing niceness is quite a brave, muscular decision. Staunchly standing up for the small, overlooked traits is not the act of a weakling. In some ways, it’s much easier to be jaded and bitchy. You’ll always get a laugh that way. There are very few nice jokes; the sharpest humour often has a low sliver of cruelty in it.

But every time I choose niceness, I feel a little bit better about everything. I can’t always do it. I had some very nasty thoughts this morning, of which I was rather ashamed. They were cross, mean-spirited, finger-pointy thoughts, and they were certainly neither useful nor beautiful. I suppose one cannot be mentally pure or perfect; one has to let off steam sometimes; the badness and sadness of the world is such that every so often one must rant and rave and judge and point and mock or one would run mad.

Yesterday, I had a clear choice. Someone missed an appointment. I was first a little annoyed, then a little disconcerted, and, finally, worried. It was unlike them and I thought suddenly they might be dead in a ditch. I hate waiting for people; it reminds me too much of when my father was late to pick me up from school, and I would sit on the steps after everyone else had left merrily with their respectable parents, whilst I dolefully prayed that my rackety dad might eventually appear. I could have been a bit prickly and terse when the apology and explanation came. I chose, quite deliberately, not to be. Don’t worry about a thing, I wrote; it could not matter less. And, in fact, it could not matter less. I had one hour of mild anxiety and uncertainty. I am not the poor people of Greece. It was an inconvenience so small it could hardly be seen by the naked eye.

These things are a choice, I think. They may not be glittering or remarkable or extraordinary. Each tiny decision leaves hardly a ripple on the sea of life. But perhaps there is something cumulative, internally and externally. If choosing niceness or kindness becomes the default, minuscule increments of something better may accumulate into the absolutely good.

Or something like that.

 

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today as we have thunder and lightning and rainstorms. Here are a few snaps from sunnier days:

In which I return to the small things.

Back to the smallest of the small things. I always do this when the news is bad and there are too many sorrows out in the world. The small things are what make me feel that I can cling on, that the turning earth will not tip me off into vacancy.

So I tidied the feed shed, and made up a new kind of home-made fly spray for the mare, and then rubbed neem oil all over her body to soothe her skin and deal with the lumps and the bumps which come up in summer from the horrid horse-flies.

Setting a kind, trusting animal to rights is one of the keenest pleasures I know. I find her hot and bothered, snatching at the biting critters with her teeth, shaking her head and twitching her great body. I leave her anointed and soothed and settled. I give her a great scratch all over, getting at all the maddening places she can’t reach, including right into her dear ears, and then I cool her with water, and then I smooth the ointments and unguents on her red coat, and then I let her lean her sweet head against me and give her a dozy massage on her poll. It is a form of communion which goes beyond words.

We ride out and I take her to see my mother. My mum is not very mobile, so seeing the horse is a rare pleasure for her. I teach the mare to walk up the steps to the door, one delicate hoof at a time, so she can say hello.

‘How are you going to get her off those steps?’ says my mother, in some astonishment.

‘Like this,’ I say. I point at each hoof in turn. ‘Back one,’ I say, and the clever mare moves one foot at time, returning without fuss to the ground. She looks quietly pleased with herself, and has an ‘aw, it was nothing’ gleam in her eye.

‘We haven’t done that for a while,’ I say, unable to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘But she remembers everything, she’s so intelligent.’

I write 1876 words. I do my HorseBack work. There were young people at HorseBack this week, as part of the fledgling Youth Initiative, where local children who face a variety of challenges work with the horses, helped by several of our regular veterans. There’s a lovely circularity to it, and it’s been a hugely successful experiment, and will now become part of the core of the HorseBack work. I find looking at the pictures of the young people, as I edit and collate and select for the Facebook page, intensely moving.

As I finish this, I can hear a piper playing. There is a wedding about to start across the way from my house, and the sound of proper Scottish bagpipes will welcome a happy couple. Soon, I’ll go back down to the field and attend to that dear red mare. I’ll look at the deer and the trees and the pied wagtails and the swifts and the green, green grass, and Stanley the Dog will hunt for rats and play with enormous sticks, and all those small, small things will settle around me, little battalions against a world which sometimes does not seem to make any sense.

 

Today’s pictures:

A group of elegant ladies have just moved into the west meadow:

This is Glen Tanar, three miles west on the South Deeside Road, where I spent the morning on Wednesday:

And this was my lovely girl this morning. She does not always come when I appear. Sometimes she is too busy eating, and I wander down and get her. But on some days, she lifts her head and moseys right on over, with a there you are look on her face, which makes me want to laugh out loud with sheer happiness:

In memory of Kauto Star. With love and thanks.

Kauto Star is dead.

Those are four heavy words to write. I never even met the bold beauty, yet, as so many people in racing did, I loved him as if he were my own. There are mighty horses that come along once in a generation, that have a sprinkle of stardust about them, that gallop straight to the heart. Kauto Star was such a horse.

For years, I tried to work out what it was about him that was so thrilling, so visceral, so lovable. I think it was because he had it all. He had dash and power, a supreme natural talent, and, in the early days, a rather terrifying and exhilarating recklessness. He sometimes seemed to be having a little joke with the crowd, ploughing through the last fence, miraculously finding a fifth leg, before picking himself up and storming to the line. He had a lilting exuberance, a dancing stride, a joy in him, as if he really loved his job.

But he had dour courage as well. I’ve seen him win on the bridle, as he liked, leaving good horses floundering in his wake, and I’ve seen him put his head down and scrap through the mud and the rain, straining every sinew to get his nose in front, his will to win gleaming through the gloom and the murk. He could shine like the sun, and he could fight like a tiger.

His partnership with Ruby Walsh was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in racing. They had a harmony and communion and understanding which is rare and glorious. They knew each other and they liked each other. ‘Ah,’ said Ruby, that hardened professional, on live television, to an audience of millions, ‘I love him.’

He was the beating heart of Ditcheat, ridden every day by his devoted Clifford Baker, loved and cherished and honed by a remarkable team, who kept him sound and kept him fresh and kept him loving his job. To bring any horse back, season after season, with all the physical and mental demands on those fragile legs and those sensitive thoroughbred minds, is something. To keep them winning at the highest level is an achievement beyond compare. Paul Nicholls deserves every single superlative in the book.

Kauto Star was as handsome and filled with charisma as an old school film star, and like any great presence, he knew how to please a crowd. He did it in so many different ways, whether it was becoming the first horse to regain a Gold Cup, or dancing to his fourth King George victory by an imperious distance (which means so many lengths that the officials could not be bothered to count), or, in perhaps his most moving and stirring moment, coming back when everyone had written the old boy off to win his fourth Betfair Chase at Haydock. There really was not a dry eye in the house on that grey afternoon.

He had that extra indefinable something which the great ones have, what my mother calls the look of eagles. Arkle had it, and Frankel had it, and Desert Orchid had it. Horses are flight animals, easily alarmed by noise, but when Ruby Walsh would canter Kauto down in front of the stands after a majestic victory, with shouts and cheers ringing out into the winter air, the bonny champion would lift his head and turn his intelligent eye on the roaring thousands as if knowing that it was all for him. Pride is a human word, but I think he felt it.

Very few horses go beyond the racing world. But Kauto Star, with one of those mighty, streaming leaps, the ones when he took off outside the wings and landed as far out the other side, jumped from the back pages to the national headlines. For years, he was the perfect Christmas present, soaring round Kempton as if it were his spiritual home. His relentless, rhythmic gallop rattled into the minds and hearts of many people who hardly knew one end of a horse from another. But they knew brilliance and beauty when they saw it; they knew class and guts and glory. He was a supreme athlete, but he was also a great character, his bright, white face recognisable and beloved the length and breadth of these islands.

Like any storied character, he had his troubles, but he always came back. There seemed something indestructible about him. There were no doubters he could not defy, no fence he could not jump, no record he could not smash, no peak he could not scale.

It turns out, after all, that he was destructible. One freak field accident, and a superlative equine hero is brought to dust.

It was a privilege to have seen him. He gave me more joy than I can express. I loved him with that pure love I always feel in the presence of greatness. It is all sunshine in Scotland today, but it feels as if a light has gone out.

He has gone to run another race, somewhere we cannot follow him. I hope he has springy green turf under his feet and the wind in his mane and the echo of those adoring crowds in his dear old ears, as he passes his final winning post.

 

Today’s pictures:

Just one photograph today. I cannot show you a picture of Kauto, because I am strict about copyright. You can find wonderful shots of him all over the internet, many of them taken by the exceptional Edward Whitaker. Here is a picture of my blue hills instead. These hills are my cathedral. Whenever anyone I love dies, I commit them to the hills. The Scottish mountains were here for millions of years before I was thought of, and shall stand for millions of years after I have gone. I find a curious consolation in that, and a sense of peace and perspective.

PS. As I finished writing this, and was about to press publish, I had to go back to the internet, just to check. My magical mind was saying: it must be a mistake. The big fella cannot possibly be gone. But he is, and so I make my farewell. He will live on in my heart, and in those precious memories which no amount of time can erase.

In which I defend the expressing of thoughts.

On the last blog, a Dear Reader wrote:

‘How C21st - someone writing at length on the internet about why they haven't been on the internet for a bit. Something has gone seriously wrong. Whatever happened to the quiet, gentle, personal, unexpressed thought? Everything has to be "out there" including "not being out there"!
My brain hurts!’

Not that long ago, this kind of thing would have made me feel rather melancholy. I would have felt a doleful sense of reproof, convinced that I had got everything wrong, that all this stupid blogging was the worst form of navel-gazing, that the internet itself was in fact the spawn of Satan and that humans really should go back to pigeon post and quill and ink.

Now, I have butched up a bit. I’m going to stick up for myself.

This is not a terrible charge. I’ve had much worse. But for some reason it made me want to mount a spirited defence. Not of myself, so much, but of the expressing of thoughts.

The ‘quiet, gentle, personal, unexpressed thought’ sounds enchanting. I expect there have been some humans who have had quiet and gentle thoughts, unspoken and unwritten, but I would hazard that most humans, for most of history, have been expressing their thoughts like gangbusters. If you walk along any city street, or get on a bus, or travel the underground, or walk in the park or shop in a shop, there are people, expressing their thoughts.

Obviously, some people are more articulate than others, and some more reticent, and some more garrulous, and some more taciturn, but the expressing of thoughts is pretty much what humans do. There are the holy women who take vows of silence, and the monks who go and live on rocks, and the philosophers in their barrels, but they are a minority game.

The Reader has a point, in a sense. The expressing of thoughts may tumble into narcissism and bombast. As one grows up, one tries to understand that other people have thoughts too, which, crucially, may be different from one’s own, and that conversation should be more like a dancing game of ping pong rather than a shouty soapbox at Hyde Park Corner. One learns to listen, so that the button is not permanently on transmit. In writing too, which really is the most shamelessly self-indulgent of pursuits if one thinks about it for more than two minutes, there is an attempt to understand the world, rather than lecture it. Or at least, there should be.

The expressed thought should not need defending, but clearly it does. I agree that some of the thoughts daily expressed are crashingly dull or rude or bigoted or platitudinous or repetitive or vacuous or cruel or stupid or bland. Not every mind can, all the time, express thoughts which are beautiful and useful. But that is why all liberal societies believe in freedom of speech. In order for the lovely expressed thought to have its liberty, so must all the dross.

I admit that I could, if I chose, express an awful lot fewer thoughts, and perhaps I should. Actually, as I write that sentence, I realise it is a beastly passive-aggressive thing to say, to make me sound much more reasonable than I am. I love expressing thoughts. Expressing thoughts is possibly my second favourite thing after riding the red mare. I have so many damn thoughts, and they buzz around in my head like cross bluebottles, and if I did not express them I should go bonkers. I could choose not to, but I don’t.

I chose writing, because I love it and I have something to say. I chose blogging, because I love the open spaces of the internet, where I may talk nonsense and put pictures of the dog and the horse and the hill and find interesting people I would have never met in life. I chose to play in the splashing pool of social media, because I find Facebook and Twitter funny and interesting and quite often surprising and sometimes properly profound.

I write about the internet because the internet is huge. To watch an entire new medium arise in one’s own lifetime is extraordinary. Because so many parts of it are uninteresting or workaday or stupid or vicious, it’s easy to forget what a revolution contemporary humans are living through. It’s not quite as revolutionary as the printing press, but it is changing people’s lives, and, if some of the neurobiologists are to be believed, changing people’s brains. Your own neuronal pathways may be stretching and twanging even as you read this.

Why would one not write about such a galvanic change, if one is to write at all? Nobody yet knows the rules, an entire new etiquette is developing, a novel language has had to be invented out of whole cloth and is continuing to develop so that even the grand gents at the OED have had to sit up and take notice. Nobody has quite decided what the internet is for or how it should be best used or whether it should be policed, and that battle rages on.

In a wider sense, far beyond this particular criticism and this particular reader, there is a school of thought which does not like the internet in its current form, partly, I think, because of fear. The World Wide Web is truly democratic, and pretty much ungovernable. Throughout history, the people in power have tried to control the word. That was why the translating of the Bible out of its priestly Latin was such a terrifying twist of the wheel. It is why every single dictatorship ever invented exercised censorship, took over the radio stations and the television and the press, shut down dissent and debate at the point of a gun.

The general horrified shout that all these bloggers and twitterers and Facebookers have no reticence or edit button or even shame, that they insist on telling the world what they had for breakfast, covers a much deeper fright. When this old school talks of the universal ‘they’, it often means some traditionally powerless cohorts. The complaint is often really about the women, the young people, the geeks, the gays, the previously unheard. Until really quite recently, even in developed societies, the means of expression lay in the hands of the elite. There were gatekeepers everywhere. You had to have a level of grandeur to be asked on the news, on the radio, to write an article for the press, to give a speech, to publish a book, to have what you had to say considered important enough for broadcast. Not so many generations ago, Mary Ann Evans had to call herself George in order to get her novels into print.

Now, the gatekeepers may be side-stepped, as the ordinary people storm the citadel. Not any old person is going to get a job on The Guardian or be asked on Question Time, but any old person can write essays on the internet, and be heard. Those traditionally silenced voices can finally sing their song.

As with all great revolutions, there is a price to be paid for this. Some of the thoughts expressed will be ugly, banal or almost entirely pointless. But it seems to me that the expression, if not the sentiment, must be cherished. Every time you pick up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, open a political periodical, turn on Radio Four, settle down to the diaries of Chips Channon, read a poem by Yeats, remember why you love Dorothy Parker, see what your favourite columnist has to say, buy a broadsheet, you are voting in favour of the expressing of thoughts. The price paid exists in the fact that for every James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, every Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Daniel Finkelstein, Matthew D’Ancona, Caitlin Moran, there is an equivalent of that cross reality television lady who makes inflammatory remarks about fat people. She is the price you pay, and, in this rushing age of new media, it is almost impossible to avoid those ugly voices. There was a prelapsarian age where nobody knew what a Kardashian was, and most people thought that shades of grey were something to do with paint colours. A certain amount of quiet has been lost, but then so has a certain amount of complacency.

I say: throw open the gates. Express those thoughts. Let others express theirs. Take the good with the bad, the smooth with the rough, the inspiring with the dispiriting. The key to the new age is navigation. It is discrimination and choice. Find the thoughts you love, or the thoughts which challenge your own, or the thoughts which startle you out of complacency, and leave the rest.

The Dear Reader must express his thought, and I shall express mine right back. No single human on the planet has to read a word I write, in print or online. There is no press-gang, no three-line-whip. I shall go on expressing my thoughts, because I like doing it, just as some people like gardening or pot-holing or building replicas of Notre Dame out of matchsticks. And the people who don’t like that kind of thing can go on not reading them. And that way, everyone is happy.

PS. After all this grand argument, I do have one faintly lowering notion. I wonder whether the Dear Reader was objecting not so much to the expressing of the thoughts, but to the fact that this particular blog post was slightly dull. And the awful truth is that it was, a little bit. I had been feeling rather cross and blah, and I think that infected the writing. For all that I will defend to the death people’s right to say what they wish, I do think that it is a matter of good manners to attempt, as much as possible, to avoid boring the poor readers to death. This cannot be achieved every day – I am a flawed human, and those flaws will sometimes show up in my prose - but the effort should be made. So, if that was the charge, I must hold my hands up.

I also feel a sense of gratitude, because that comment really did make me think. Unfortunately for the poor reader, it also drove me to express my thoughts, at some length. Still, nobody’s perfect.

 

Today’s pictures:

Ordinary life.

Sometimes I go off the internet for a reason. Not that long ago, I gave it up for a week, just to see what happened. It turned out that I read a lot of books. This week, I just went away, for no special reason. There is quite a lot going on in my life, some of it quite tiring and complicated. The internet, which I adore and tend to see the best in, suddenly felt like a vast, shouty cocktail party, where many people were talking about subjects which did not mean anything to me. I no longer wanted to get into long discussions about rugging decisions which were raging on the some of the horse forums I follow, or look at a video of someone doing something amusing with a dog, or even read interesting articles from the Washington Post. I thought I’d let the gaudy carnival go on without me for a while. People really did not need my opinion on every single thing, or endless pictures of my red mare, or reports on the dour old Scottish weather.

It turned out that I read a lot of books.

I’ve nearly finished Middlemarch. I stopped reading it for a bit, because I can’t bear it to come to an end, so I’m saving up the last part like a child saves sweets. I’ve returned to another 19th century Beloved, Jane Austen. I really did think I knew Jane Austen by heart, but it’s probably fifteen years since I last read Sense and Sensibility and even long since I sat down with Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. I think they are stitched into my heart, because I’ve read all of them more than once and because of all the films and television series, but there is so much that is forgotten.

Austen’s unbelievably naughty and piercing sense of humour still comes as a shock. She can thrust her gentle rapier right through the ribs, piercing pomposity and self-importance and indulgence. Silliness is perhaps the thing that drives her most demented, and she distributes silliness freely among her characters, men and women both, and then shatters it, almost as if she is shooting clay pigeons. It seems odd, across the long centuries and the shifting social mores and the cultural changes, that she can still make me laugh out loud. She surprises me into startled shouts of laughter, and I shake my head in awe and wonder. I love her.

I’ve also been looking at the grass and the trees and the hills. Even under a low cloud, they are still ravishing and real. The Younger Brother and I went for a walk in the rain last night. It was fine, soft rain, and we did not mind getting wet.

The online cocktail party swings on without me, and I am glad it is there. It’s considered rather clever to sneer at online life and the people who enjoy it – oh, the grumpy trolls and the keyboard warriors and the anonymous ranters – but I think that most of the time the internet uses its power for good rather than evil. Everybody, after all, needs a baby panda from time to time, or even an amusing dog.

 

Today’s pictures: