Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 36

Election Day.

Up early, and out. I do some telephoning for my local candidate, asking people if they needed help getting to the polling station. I hate ringing up strangers and have to put on a very special low, grown-up voice to brush through it. It goes against everything that it means to be British. I think: I shall never, ever again be brusque with a cold-caller. (I have been known to do a horrid sort of passive aggression, sounding polite, but in fact being as mean as Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, at her most waspish. I am not proud of myself for this and resolve to stop it at once.)

I go to HorseBack and do my work there. It’s a small course this week, only four veterans, all of them dealing with a variety of mental and physical challenges. I like the small courses because I can get to know the men and women a bit, and have time to listen to their stories, so I can feel their triumphs as if they were my own. One veteran, who served as a nurse, was really properly frightened of the whole idea of horses, but today she screwed her courage to the sticking place and rode out on a sweet-natured bay Quarter Horse mare under the wide Scottish sky.

I’m so used to horses being home to me that I find it quite hard to put myself in the shoes of someone for whom they are completely alien. I realise how hard and strange it must be, to get up for the first time on a half-ton flight animal, and not know where to put your hands or your legs or how the steering works. And then they start to get it, and they feel the movement of the horse under them, and they ask the good question and get the good answer, and that is when the smiles break out like beacons.

I edit 9,000 words of book and try to think about the shape of the thing. There is a new scene I have to write and I can’t quite work out where to fit it in. Whenever I am alone, driving in the car, I run through the scene in my head, putting myself in as the main protagonist, trying to see what she sees, feel what she feels. I have to know her like I know myself.

I roast some beef, for strength. I need the iron. There shall be beef sandwiches for the next two days, because I’ll be too tired to cook after the election. I listen to the news on Radio Four and miss the political stuff. The BBC is not allowed to broadcast anything political until the polls close. It’s slightly absurd, but it’s rather honourable too. This is the quiet day which belongs to the voters. All the pundits and commentators and professors and psephological experts fall silent, as the ordinary people who are affected by the daily actions of government come out into the light to make their own decisions.

I vote.

I love voting. It stitches me into history, into my community, into the social contract of my country. I understand well the arguments against; I know the logic of the spoiled ballot or the furious abstention. I know that first past the post means that, in some places, there is no hope for your chosen party. My own vote will almost certainly not win. But it will be counted. I choose to vote because of the women of Saudi Arabia, because of the Pankhursts, because of poor, deluded Emily Davison, because as recently as 1928 females in this country were not allowed to vote, presumably because the effort would cause their tiny pink lady brains to explode and make a mess.

I brandish my precious card. There was a horrible moment a few days ago when I got a letter saying my identity could not be confirmed by any government data base. This led to a mild existential crisis, when I felt as if I had been designated a non-person. The presiding officer looks down at her list. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There you are.’ I smile all over my face. ‘I exist,’ I say, rather too loudly, joyful with reality. Two or three good voters give me a bit of a look.

I go into the booth, with its little stumpy pencil on a string. I read through all the candidates. I make sure I have them all right. I put in my cross, for an estimable gentleman who has done a lot for his community. I pause, taking in the moment.

All parties have their flaws, and all politicians are prone to frailties and foibles. Some of them are dull and some of them are idiots. Some of them are brilliant and some of them are mavericks and some of them just keep their heads down and get on with the job. Some adore their constituency work and make a real difference in the lives of real people; some climb the greasy pole. Some are articulate and some are taciturn. Some trim; some stick to their principles. Very much like the electorate, in fact. I gave up tribalism years ago, and now choose the candidate I think will do her or his very best. (I vote locally, but I also read all the national manifestos and act on the one I agree with the most.) I don’t expect miracles and I don’t expect all problems to be solved and I don’t expect revolutions. I have no sense of entitlement. Everyone is not going to get a pony. I hope, Whiggishly, that the cracks might be filled and progress might be made and mistakes might be rectified. I no longer have the soaring ideology of youth, but the pragmatic, slightly battered hope of age.

I think of Churchill, who said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. He also said, after he won the war and was promptly cast from office by a flintily unsentimental British public: ‘They have a perfect right to kick me out. That is democracy.
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I go out into the quiet village hall, with its polished wooden floor and its high roof. The light is streaming in through the windows. I fold my ballot paper and put it into the scratched black box. I smile blindingly at the presiding officer. I say: ‘Hurrah for democracy.’ She looks faintly surprised. I can almost see her thinking: ‘Just humour the old girl. We get all sorts in here.’

I’d love to go in and do it all over again. Vote early, vote often. No, no, I think, we are not in Tammany Hall. It’s a quiet village in the north-east of Scotland. It’s a vast constituency, running from the high hills at Braemar to the low port of Stonehaven, which was established as a fishing village in the Iron Age. Tomorrow, when the country wakes up to a new order, or a constitutional crisis, or a frenzy of horse-trading, these mountains and fields will still be here, the lambs will still be skipping over the green grass, the majestic Aberdeen Angus will still be standing tall and stately in their meadows. But today is election day, and it means something to me.

The pretty way home.

Since I first got up this morning, I was writing this blog in my head. Oh, it was going to be a dilly. It had fire in it, and passion, and irony, and jokes. Then life took over. There were errands, book, red mare, HorseBack work, even some mild domestic activity. The brilliant words ebbed away. Damn, they were good. But they’ve gone. I think they got bored, and could not be fagged to hang around. They may even have thrown a slight strop. Well, they said, if you’re not going to write us down, we’ll take a ferry west. I expect they have arrived at Colonsay by now, and are just going down to Kiloran beach to watch the sunset. The little tinkers.

Here are some photographs instead. I had to go up to the kind farmer who delivers our hay, the sweetest hay in Scotland, adored by the two good mares, and give him wads of cash. I’ve been so pinned to my desk, I thought I’d take the chance to drive the pretty way home. Round here, it’s all pretty way, but some ways are more magnificent than others. This is when I catch my breath and count my luck. I miss my old friends. I hate having to say no to so many enchanting invitations, because the time and money it costs to get south is so often too much for me. But I have these hills, and they are my great love affair, and I would not swap them for anything.

Talking of pretty, here is Stan the Man and his best girl. They adore each other and are cut from the same cloth. They race and wrangle and wrestle and suddenly put their bellies to the ground and gallop flat out across the field. I could watch them all day:

The duchess is pleased because her foot is healed, the weather has taken a turn for the better, and she’s out again in her beloved set-aside:

One good thing.

I like it that people tell me stories. Apparently, I have that kind of face. (I never really know what this means.) A woman in the street told me her story on Saturday, of pain, of loss, of redemption, of pride. A veteran of the King’s Troop told me his this morning. It was filled with darkness and there were tears, the pain near the surface. HorseBack has taught me to put away the pity face. I keep my expression entirely still and do nothing but listen. I am privileged to hear these stories, although they are sometimes hard. I think: if the men and women can go through it, the least I can damn well do is listen. I have learnt not to gather the information into a tight ball of sorrow and regret, but to let it flow through me, like a river. The water is sometimes turbulent, but as long as it keeps moving, it is all right.

I see to my mare’s foot, shrug off the cold and the rain, do my HorseBack work, edit my book, have a losing bet. I think of that gentleman from this morning, and all the things he has seen, and wonder that there can be instant communion between two complete strangers. There is a loveliness in that. The story was a sad one, but I am glad it was told, and I am proud it was put into my keeping.

I’m a bit glitchy and scratchy at the moment. It’s the weather, I think. (It’s not the weather, but that will do for an excuse.) When I’m like this, I need one good thing every day. If there is one true thing, then the hours are not wasted. The glitches and the scratches will pass.

This morning, I saw another veteran work a horse in the round pen. It was her first time, and she was uncertain and a little nervous. She did really well, but she came out concentrating on her mistakes, rather than what she had achieved. That will change, over the week, and I know that she and her kind horse will make a fine partnership. I said, gently, a little hesitant, because I don’t like telling people what to do, but thinking perhaps it was worth breaking this rule on this occasion: ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Think of all the wonderful things you did right.’ She blinked. I could see the critical voices quarrelling in her head. I know those voices. I think: I really must learn to take my own advice.

One good thing a day. That’s all it takes.

 

Here are some good things, which no amount of weather could dim:

Pictures.

A long week, and I have no words left. Here are some pictures for you instead. The polar plume seems to have blown itself out and the oystercatchers are singing like drunken sailors and it feels as if spring has finally sprung. I’m just waiting for the swallows now, and the thing will be complete.

 

Broken.

Every week, I work with people who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I see them at their best and happiest. They are in a safe place, surrounded by compadres, working with kind horses, getting a glimpse of light on the long road ahead of them. They tell me stories about hyper-vigilance or agoraphobia or times when they have coldly considered finishing it all. They have opened my eyes and opened my mind and taught me the art of listening. I owe them a great deal.

Rarely, I see someone who is broken. Not chipped or bashed or struggling or holding on by their fingernails, but broken. I saw one such person this week. The shock is exacerbated by the fact that he used to do a job so perilous and demanding that he walked, slowly and deliberately, without flinching, towards danger.

I know what it is like to be stretched and strained. I know how it feels to have your heart smashed. I know about death and grief and watching your dreams go up in smoke. I know what it is to walk into a hospital room and see a beloved in a wracked sleep so ghostly that I believed them dead, and I know the streaming relief when they move their eyes. I know missing. I know failure. I know the ordinary sorrows of an ordinary life.

I don’t know what it is to be broken.

Maybe the Perspective Police got up this morning, and decided it was time for a raid. I’d been vaguely moaning about the weather, a longed-for trip I could not make, the damn car going wrong, a Best Beloved who is not well, hopeless time management, professional worries, bills, forty-seven things on my To Do list, responsibilities. I was a bit cross because Stanley the Dog dug some more of his tunnel under the feed shed and then ran into the house, went straight upstairs, and transferred all the good Scottish earth onto my nice white linen pillowcases.

The Perspective Police rammed down the door and shouted: ‘You think you’ve got problems.’

I walked away with humility in my every bone.

Some people crack, like Scott Fitzgerald’s old china plate. Some people stretch and tear and warp. Everybody hurts. And some people break.

I get an awful lot of things wrong. But I can hold up my head and function in the world, to a greater or lesser degree. This is fortune beyond price.

And I have this person, who is worth more than diamonds. The polar plume means that she is putting up with sleet and frigid rain and cruel winds. But then the sun comes out and she is happy again:



As I finish this, the optimist in me raises her head and sniffs the air. What breaks can mend. There must be hope. If there is care, and support, and understanding, and someone who has faith, and people who will help and won't give up. I believe in second acts. They are not easy, but they are possible. I've seen a few, and I've seen the dauntless humans who make them happen.

Trying too hard.

Author’s note: this is very long, and it is all about me. I’d love to think you might extrapolate some universal human truths, but let’s have the word with no bark on it: it’s all about me. It also features the red mare. She now has her own Facebook page so that I don’t bore you witless with her every whicker, but today she’s come galloping back to the blog. I just wanted you to know that before you started.

 

I love triers. People who try can bring me to tears. Horses who try have me in pieces. Children who try, with that wonderful, youthful sense of optimism and determination, pull on my heartstrings like nothing else.

And yet, I have lately been reminded that you can try too hard.

Of course I knew that. I don’t want you to think I am a complete booby. One of the surprises I have found as I motor through middle age is that I know much, much more than I thought I did. I got quite cocky about this for five minutes, until I realised that I have a fatal habit of forgetting all those good things I know. That’s when the gap comes between theory and practice, and I find myself falling into elephant traps and lying on my back, legs flailing in the air, thinking furiously: but I knew this.

­This week, I had a little parable about trying, from my red professor.

Since I’ve come back to horses, I’ve taught myself a whole new way of horsemanship. I’ve learnt from two great horsemen – Robert Gonzales, in life, and Warwick Schiller, on the internet. Schiller provides an amazing resource for people who want to have happy horses, easy to ride and handle. At his place in California, he takes in all kinds of horses who have problems. He’ll be presented with a 17 hand dressage horse who can do a test, but who can hardly be rugged up without freaking out. He is sent buckers and rearers and bolters, horses that can’t get on a trailer, horses so riven with separation anxiety that they can’t think straight. He’ll take the horse right back to the beginning, go through the methodical steps, find the frets and the worries, iron them out, and by the end will have a soft, responsive equine who can do everything on a loose rein with its head down. He videos this, explains exactly what he is doing, and posts it on his page as a learning tool for people all around the world.

It has been a revelation for me and the mare, and because of it I’ve never in my life been so in tune with a horse, or had a horse who is so at ease with herself.

This week, Warwick Schiller is coming to Scotland to do a clinic. The moment I heard, I booked my place, and started dreaming of the great moment when the red mare would meet the master. Yesterday, a pincer action of three disasters meant that I had to cancel. There would be no trip to St Andrews, no glorious meeting.

Part of me was very sad about this. I’d been working so hard to get the mare ready. We’d gone right back to the beginning, found all the things I was doing wrong, concentrated on fixing them. I’d upped the ante, asked her new questions, pushed her harder. I’d sat up late, rewatching all the videos, trying to figure out where I was going wrong and what I needed to improve. Each day, I went down to the field with my teeth gritted, trying like buggery, because we had to get our gold star.

I say part of me was sad, because there was another part. Another part was, and this is so odd I can hardly write it, relieved. Today, I suddenly realised that I had been going to that clinic for a lot of the wrong reasons. I’ve written, over the months, about the red mare and her wonders on the Warwick Schiller forum, so that she is well known there, carving out her tiny piece of internet fame. I think that I secretly believed that I would arrive in St Andrews and say: Look, look, here is the famous Red Mare, IN REAL LIFE. And everyone would gasp at her beauty, and gaze in awe at all the clever things she can do, and give her a round of applause and a laurel wreath.

In fact, they would have seen a perfectly ordinary thoroughbred, with a kind white face, who is, I have to admit, a little bit short in front, and who sometimes slings her head and rushes her trot. In my eyes, she is the embodiment of a dream; to anyone else, she is just a sweet chestnut mare, with all the flaws that horses are heir to. She has not travelled for a long time, and the journey might have unsettled her. She would have had to stay in a strange stable surrounded by unknown horses, leaving her charge and field-mate behind. She could have wigged out a bit, even after all the good training we have done. She might, whisper it, not have shown her best self. Where would I be then?

Of course I wanted to learn, and of course I hoped that the last knotty problems would be instantly unpicked by those knowledgeable eyes. But I am slightly ashamed to say that much of the driving impetus was an awful sort of showing off. My competitive spirit, which I pretend is not there but which is always yelling, in the back of my mind, give me a cup, had hijacked the whole thing and was running riot. That’s why I was going down to the field every morning with gritted teeth.

Gritted teeth are not always bad. Gritted teeth got AP McCoy to twenty jockey championships. They got my old dad back in the Grand National after severe doctors had said he should never sit on a horse again. They got me, in younger days, round huge cross country courses, to Peterborough and Windsor, through complicated dressage tests.

But gritted teeth are no good to the mare. In this new horsemanship, she has been taught the ways of softness. When I grit my teeth, she thinks there are mountain lions in the woods, and her lovely, floating stride breaks up and her neck tenses and she fears that the storm is coming. She does not know I am absurdly trying to prove myself and improve myself; she just feels the tension and dreads the worst.

As a result of all this damn trying, we had lost that elusive trot. We’d had it, so beautifully that it made me weep tears of joy, and then it went again. The basis of this method is that you should be able to walk, trot and canter on a loose rein. You are teaching your horse self-carriage. It’s one of the things I love. Instead of giving it information every two seconds, you ask the polite question and then leave it alone. You are not saying a bit slower, a bit faster, a bit more collected. You just say go, and then sit as still as Ruby Walsh on Douvan in the Punchestown sunshine. You trust the horse, because you have taught the horse to trust itself. This requires a steady mental state. Trying too hard wrecks all that work at a stroke.

This morning, in a curious combination of regret, sorrow, wistfulness, release and relief, we went for a ride. We were no longer getting ready to show the teacher what we could do; we were just being together. I let the mare wander where she would, which is a basic teaching exercise I do every morning. She struck out towards the darkest woods, the ones that use to make her snort and rear. She was in her most intrepid explorer mode. She ignored the little Paint, who was doing her own private rodeo in the field alongside. At one point, the Paint and Stanley the Dog were staging an antic series of barrel races. The mare did not so much as flick an ear. I had no hand on her rein; she was brave and free.

By the entrance to the terrifying woods, there is a high granite wall, very typical of this part of the world. In it, there is a door. The door is exactly like that in The Secret Garden, one of the books of my childhood which most touched my heart. The mare walked up to the door and put her head through it and looked into the garden beyond. I leant down along her neck so I could see what she was seeing. There was a slope of grass, the young trees we planted for my late father, when the family gathered, including his sister, his nephew and niece, his children and grandchildren, and the blue hills beyond.

The good horse and I stood, for many minutes, looking through the secret door. It felt symbolic of something profound, I was not sure what. I said, out loud, in her ear: ‘Thank you for this.’

We were not going to do any work today, because we are no longer preparing for a great occasion. But I thought, damn it, let’s just give that trot a go, just for the hell of it. And there it was, as if it had been waiting for me all along. She was as poised as an ambassadress, as delicate as a duchess, as gentle and relaxed as an old Labrador. We did it on a loose rein; we did it with no reins at all. I put my hands out into the cool Scottish air, and she bent her beautiful, mighty body round in a curving circle, found her own lovely rhythm, beat her own delightful drum.

I had stopped trying, and that was when she gave me my greatest gift.

So, after all that, the thing which was a bit of a disaster turned out to be the best thing which could have happened. I needed a lesson in not letting that wild competitive drive get rancid and wrong. I needed to be reminded that I don’t actually require a cup. I needed to know that sometimes I can crash everything when I grit those absurd teeth too hard. I had forgotten all these things, and circumstance and this generous horse came along and set me right.

Trying is good. I try to write better prose. I try to do my work at HorseBack well. I try to be a good friend and a reasonably decent human. I try to be polite and see others’ points of view. I try not to judge in a mean way, and I try not to bitch and moan. I try for stoicism and balance.

With this ravishing mare, I try to follow the example of those two dazzling horsemen, not because it will make her a supreme champion, but because she will be happy in her skin and have a human on whom she can rely. It also means I am less likely to fall off and bruise these old bones. That’s a good kind of trying. It’s trying for the right reasons.

And it means that we get a glimpse of the view, through that low door in the wall.

 

Here she is, after all that loveliness, having a happy breakfast with her questing friend. The Paint always hopes that if she stands there with her Oliver Twist face on, she might get a go. She never does. The red mare knows perfectly well that she’s had her own breakfast, and this orphans in the snow look is pure theatre:

Wheel spinning.

Spinning my wheels like a crazy person. I run around, at a hundred miles an hour, trying to get my work done, do my HorseBack UK job, plan for a trip away with the mare, keep the domestic situation under some kind of control (hollow laugh), and get in touch with the rat-catcher, since Stanley the Dog, despite digging entire tunnels and racing round every corner of the feed shed like a man with a mission, has lost control of the Rat Situation. I am trying not to see the rats as a metaphor, but they weigh on my spirit.

I want to write you something good and true about life and the human condition and the whole damn thing, but there are no words there. Out in the world, the news has taken on a desperate and apocalyptic aspect, as terrifying natural disasters strike and Baltimore goes up in flames. Everyone has something to say about that, but I find it is where words fail. Words are my touchstones, the things in which I believe the most, but they grow shadowy and paltry in the face of such despair. The world makes no sense, so all one can do is one’s best, putting one foot in front of the other. There are no good or wise or consoling things to say.

I think of the forty things I have to do and try to do them. In my harried ears, I hear the faint screech of the spinning wheels. Concentrate, I say to myself; take your iron tonic; keep buggering on.

In the midst of all this, there is this person, the one note of sanity in a discordant symphony:

I’m afraid the blog is going to be rotten this week. Bear with me, Dear Readers. I’ll be back on an even keel after the weekend.

Oh, and thank you all for the very kind response to the AP posts. They came here, and on Twitter and on Facebook. I was rather overwhelmed, and very touched. I always feel flayed when I write about something which comes so from the heart, so your generous words are amazingly soothing.

Thanks, AP. The Last Day.

They cheered him on the way out of the weighing room. They clapped him into the paddock, and out again. They cheered him onto the course, down to the start, and round the first circuit. The fairytale didn’t happen, but it didn’t matter. In some ways, perhaps it was better that way. Racing is not really about fairy tales. It’s too real for that. He finished third each time, giving it all the old drive and verve and knuckle, but just, as on so many occasions, having a horse under him who wasn’t quite good enough on the day. Nobody really cared. The crowd went wild as he came back into the enclosure, and young Box Office, who had never heard such a noise in his life, lifted his dear, honest ears to the throng and must have thought he’d won the Gold Cup.

A seventeen-year-old conditional jockey called Sean Bowen won the first race in style. He was not even born when AP took his first championship. The future, with its flags flying, had arrived. Just in case anyone was in any doubt, Bowen won the big race too, the last great chase of the season, the one that will always be the Whitbread to me, the race that still recalls that glittering sunny day many years ago when the bright white figure of Desert Orchid danced over that emerald turf with his head held high, putting them all to the sword. McCoy’s last ever race was won by Richard Johnson, another great horseman and true gentleman, who has run second to him for almost all of those twenty years of triumph.

All the jockeys came out and formed a guard of honour, clapping the slender figure in the green and gold as he went past. When he was awarded his twentieth Champion Jockey trophy, he was hoisted up onto laughing shoulders, holding his cup aloft, a smile of achievement and regret on his wistful face. The cup was decommissioned on the spot. Nobody else has ever won it, and it was right that AP should take it home. They’ll make another one for next year.

Twitter went insane. Everyone, from the humblest punter to the greatest trainer, wanted to say #ThanksAP. At one point, I thought The Champ had broken the internet. Nick Luck, natty in very sharp suiting, led the Channel Four team, who captured the occasion with perfect pitch. Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson and Jonjo O’Neill and JP McManus and Ruby Walsh gave eloquent tributes. Everyone was crying. Chanelle McCoy, who, with quiet grace, has watched the man she loves risk his very life, was in tears; Richard Johnson was in tears; AP himself, the toughest competitor I ever saw, a man they carved out of granite and then threw away the mould, was in tears.

I, as you may imagine, was in pieces. At one point, a lone voice of dissent piped up. Don’t be so pathetic, said one cross gent on Twitter; he hasn’t died.

No, thank the racing angels, he has not died, although there was one dark day in an ambulance when they thought his heart was going to stop.

It did make me think, though, as I heard that rather British crossness, why there was this great outpouring. I’m not sure I ever saw it for any other sportsman in any other discipline. In some ways, I think it’s very simple. AP McCoy has taken being the best to unprecedented heights. He’s smashed every record, put every other competitor in the shade, set benchmarks which shall probably never be surpassed. That deserves applause. Along with that there is another very, very simple thing. It’s that everyone loves him. He’s a really, really nice man. Sure, people say he can be occasionally grumpy, and he admits to being obsessive, and he has said he had to teach himself to get better at losing because he really did not take it well in the early days. In recent interviews, with a wry grin, he has said his one regret is that he wished he had smiled more. But he is a proper human being and everyone likes him. He embodies quiet, unfashionable virtues – he is humble, and stoical, and industrious. He does not showboat, or save it for the big occasions. He’ll give a novice at Stratford the same ride he’ll give to a superstar at Cheltenham.

I thought too about the nature of racing. Great sporting stars are often unreachable. They perform in an arena, away from their public. They are paid huge salaries and live in gated mansions. Jockeys walk through the crowds on the racecourse, every day. If you get to the Festival early, as I do, you’ll run into Barry Geraghty or Ruby Walsh or Tom Scu in their overcoats, with their Racing Posts under their arms. There’s a democratic element in racing which you don’t see in other sports. You can be an ordinary owner, who has scrimped and saved to join a syndicate, and you can get AP McCoy up on your horse just as if you were a mighty tycoon.

The racing world itself is a tight world. They see each other a lot, because racing goes on every day. The champion trainer will bump into someone who has ten horses in training on a dour day at Plumpton, and might be beaten by her, too. They are levelled by the marvellous and mysterious nature of the thoroughbred. No matter how much money they pay for their equine stars, how many facilities they have, how many vets and physiotherapists and jumping coaches they employ, they are still prey to the stone fact that even the most brilliant horse will sometimes have a bad day. They all know the risks, the disappointments, the disasters. They know that what goes up will, literally and metaphorically, come down. That’s why they stood tall and saluted their Champ, because they know what he’s been through and they know what it takes.

Through this gaudy carnival, as the sun beamed down on Sandown, and it seemed that the whole racing tribe was united in love and admiration, stalked the ravishing thoroughbred beauties who make it all possible. They have come in their coats now spring is here, and they blossom and bloom with the sun on their backs. They have given joy to thousands since the fine weather of October, through the rain and mud and dreich of the hard winter months, and are still galloping in a bright April. Now, they will go out to grass for their summer holidays, and get to be just horses again, in a field.

AP has said it’s all about the horses. I love the horses, he has said; I could not do it without the horses. I’ve heard him state, with quiet indignation in his voice, when he’s been congratulated on one of those improbable, last-gasp victorious rides, ‘I don’t think the horse ever got the credit he deserved.’ In some ways, I suspect he would rather that it was the equine stars who got the laurel wreaths, not him. His great friend, Mick Fitzgerald, said yesterday, laughing: ‘I think he’s probably a bit embarrassed by all this.’

Watching AP, I thought that he was surprised, too. He is the professional’s professional, and he has had his head down for so long that I’m not sure he knew how much he was appreciated.

Yesterday, at last, he got to feel the love.
 
Here he is at Aintree, on Jezki, one of his last winning rides. I’m so glad I can say – I was there:

The Champ.

Imagine, for a moment, that this is what your job involves.

You get up every morning at the crack of dawn. Some days, you eat a piece of toast, some days you do not. You may sit for an hour in a boiling hot bath to get the flesh off your bones. You may go out to the gallops, on a frigid November morning, and ride a piece of work on a raw novice, who does not yet know her job. You may school an old friend, or you may have your first sit on one of those young horses who feels like he might be one of the great ones, get the electric crack of talent and promise, and dream a dream of how high he might one day fly.

You get in a car and drive sometimes hundreds of miles. You arrive at the racecourse and perhaps allow yourself a cup of tea. You put on your gaudy silks and go out and get up on a half-ton flight animal. This may be a horse you know well. You might have educated her since she was a baby, showing her how to find a stride, how to contain her excitement, how to harness her wild herd instinct. You may have taught him balance, and maturity, and trust. You may have nurtured her will to win. He might be a best beloved, a loyal compadre, or she might be a horse you have never met in your wide life.

That horse could be a shining star, a top class athlete who glitters at the highest level. Or it could be a mundane selling plater, whose owners clubbed together and got it on the cheap, and hoped, against all the odds, that they might live the dream.

The horse might have been beautifully schooled, by a storied trainer, so that it knows its job better than you do. Or it might come from one of those now rare sorts who think that schooling at home is for sissies and that horses should learn their job out on the racetrack. And you think bitter thoughts as it puts its feet into the bottom of the open ditch.

You set off, at around thirty miles an hour. You face anything from nine flights of whippy hurdles to twenty-two fences of stiff birch, five foot high, with a twelve foot stretch. There are other horses around you. One may veer off course and cannon into you, squeeze you up the rails, do you out of running room. Loose horses are the great unknown unknown. Your fella may miss his stride; your brave girl may take a false step on the flat. The hot favourite you are riding might have got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning, and the crowd will boo and hiss as you labour into an undistinguished fourth and disgusted punters tear up their betting slips. Now, in the new age of the internet, people will break out the slanders, say that the race was fixed, that the bookies greased your palm, that you can’t ride a rocking horse. All those armchair jocks, who have never so much as sat on a fighting fit thoroughbred, will tell you exactly where you went wrong.

There are tactics to think of. Your bosom friends, the ones you laugh with and cry with and go on holiday with, are fierce competitors out there on the green track. If one of them can force the pace, or keep you off the rail, or suddenly kick for home off the last bend, leaving you flat-footed, they will. But even as they are trying to sink you, and you are trying to sink them, you love them still. Theirs are the first hands that are held out to you when you pass the finishing line. You might watch one of them go down, and lie still, and even as the giddy shouts of the racegoers die in your ears, you think – what happened to Ruby, is Dickie all right?

Some of the horses you love, and some you admire, and some you don’t especially get on with. You understand they are individuals, with characters and hopes and quirks and minds of their own. Some of them show pride when they win; some are shy of the crowd; some bask in the glory. You admire them all, because you know what it takes. Some of them don’t come home. You know, with the stern rational part of your mind, that when they go, they go quickly, with adrenaline stopping the pain. You know, better than anyone, that you can’t make them race if they don’t want to. You know that they lead a better life than half the horses in the land, that they get the incomparable feeling of being gloriously fit, cherished, honed, attended to. You know that a horse can die on the road, in the field, in the box. You know that there are poor, misunderstood, shut-down equines out there, whose twilight existence is worse than death. But all the same, where there was flashing speed, mighty power, a fighting heart and a bright eye, there is now nothing. You can never hear the names Synchronised or Darlan without regret.

For twenty years, you have lived with pain. You know that every fall could be your last. Your body is a battlefield, scarred and broken. Yours is one of the very few jobs in the world where you go out to work followed by an ambulance. Some of your friends and colleagues don’t come back. You will always be haunted by the day when you saw the clothes of JT McNamara hanging on his peg and you knew he would not be coming to get them.

On some dazzling days, they will roar you up the hill at Cheltenham and you will know elation as fierce as arrows to the heart. On other days, you will be riding some dear, slow old plug on a wet Friday at Fontwell in front of four men and a dog. You ride in the wind and the weather, the sleet and the murk. You win, you lose, you fall, you fail, and sometimes, when you think all is lost, you ask that great animal under you for one, impossible, galvanic effort and even though the tank is empty and the legs are tired, it somehow finds something more, giving you every last drop of courage and determination and sheer, bloody-minded refusal to be beat, and you flash past that cherished winning post, in front by a short head.

You drive home. Sometimes you have dinner, sometimes you do not. Tomorrow, you will get up in the indigo dawn, and do it all over again.

Congratulations. You are AP McCoy.

When I write that hard life down, I wonder for a moment why anyone would do that to themselves. The pain, the risk, the hunger, even, sometimes, the boredom, when you are stuck in traffic on your way back from a blank day at Huntingdon – where does the mental and physical strength to deal with all those come from? AP has said that winning is everything. It is what drives him, and he is one of the most driven humans I have ever seen. You can pick him out in a shifting field of jockeys, teeth gritted, body crouched in wild determination. But, oddly, I think he is not quite right. I think he really does it for love. When he won on Uxizandre, at his last ever Cheltenham Festival, he did not speak of the winning, although it was a big race at the greatest jumps meeting in the world. He spoke of the thrill of riding a horse like that, who tears off in front and jumps for fun. He spoke of the exhilaration of those mighty leaps, the joy of flying over that famous turf.

I understand that love. The thoroughbred is one of the most beautiful, graceful, brave and powerful creatures on this green earth. The moment you get on their backs, you can feel the purring power under the bonnet, the Aston Martin hum, the extraordinary result of three hundred years of breeding, going back to the day when Captain Byerley brought his Turk back from the wars and put him to stud. As well as being magnificent physical specimens, they are intelligent and kind and honest. I swear that some of them even have a sense of humour. Of course the winning is the thing, but it would mean nothing without the love.

There are many extraordinary things about AP McCoy, and they’ve all been written in the last few weeks. No sportsman or woman has remained an unbeaten champion for twenty years. Just think of that for a moment. Twenty years. It’s one of the hardest sports in the world, the most unpredictable, the most demanding. But, like clockwork, there is The Champ. His guts, his talent, his stoicism, his brilliance, his determination, his horsemanship, his never-say-die are beyond compare. But perhaps even more extraordinary is that in this keenly competitive discipline, there is not one person who has a bad word to say about him. He’s had the same agent for those twenty years, and they’ve never had an argument. He is, famously, the first person in the weighing room to offer to take someone to hospital. All the young jockeys look up to him, not just because he is so damn good at his job, but because he is a gentleman. He is tough as teak, and yet he is a gentle man. To be the best and to remain a proper human being is an achievement for the ages.

I love AP McCoy. I’ve never so much as shaken his hand, but I love him like he was a brother. When I’m feeling beaten and doleful, I ask myself ‘What would AP do?’ The answer always is: pick himself up and ride another winner.

It’s been a rare privilege to watch him, over these glory years. Today, he rides his last race and thousands of racing fans will salute him as he goes. We shall not see his like again.

I am a human being.

Warning for: very sweary swearing.

 

This morning, a letter arrived in the post. It was from the Electoral Registration Officer. It said: ‘Your application as an elector cannot be progressed as we were unable to verify your identity against government databases.’

I felt a galvanic rage seize me in its crocodile jaws and throw me about the room.

It was not just because of the ugly use of progressed in that sentence.

I am a bit of an old lefty. More accurately, I should say I am a pragmatic centrist small L liberal with whiggish tendencies. My leftness comes most strongly in my belief in government. When my right of centre friends and relations are hymning the free market and wanting to drown the state in a bathtub, I stick up for government. I believe in it for all its faults because I believe in the social contract. I am grateful every day that I live in a liberal democracy where there are no religious police knocking down the door. When people groan and say that politicians are all the same, I state the unfashionable view that most of them are decent men and women who do a difficult job to the best of their ability. I wish they would answer the question on the Today programme and I fall into despair when they ruthlessly stay on message and mouth pablum and jargon, but, mostly, I believe in them.

My government, which I defend every single damn week, to which I dutifully pay my taxes, whose laws I obey, whose history I have studied, now tells me I do not exist.

How fucking DARE it?

I’m so angry I’m tempted not to send in my driving licence and, when the electoral cops come to arrest me, I’ll tell them they can’t, because, according to them, I AM NOT A PERSON. The fuckers will rue the day.

Through my red mist, I wonder why this makes me quite so angry. My heart is hammering in my chest and I want to throw things. A vague snatch of talk from the old days in Hampstead, when I used to sit with my sage and funny Jungian-Adlerian and draw comfort and wisdom from his words, comes back to me. He was talking about children and the fragile sense of self. He said something about how when children are ignored, not listened to, not counted, it is a little like dying, because the sense of existing in the world is so important to them. They need to be seen; they need to be heard. It can feel like a matter of life and death.

I am a woman steaming into middle age. The conventional wisdom is that women grow invisible after the age of forty. I’ve never found this to be true. I think you can be as visible as you believe yourself to me. When I went to Aintree, a cameraman from Betfred picked me out of a crowd of seventy thousand. He was asking people about AP McCoy, the incomparable champion who has bestrode the sport of National Hunt racing like a colossus for twenty years. I was enchanted to be asked and poured out a stream of words. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Was that scripted?’ he asked, in astonishment, as if I had been secretly writing my paean of praise for this very moment. I laughed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think about him a lot, that’s all.’

I am not invisible, but I do not conform to society’s rules. I confuse and baffle because I don’t want to get married and have children and I don’t do a regular job with an office and a National Insurance Number and a pension and nine-to-five hours. I have odd enthusiasms. I am a geek. This can make one sometimes feel a little like a non-person. If you don’t conform, you can get written out of the script. You don’t see very many other people just like you, or if you do, they are held up as the freak girls, the cautionary tales, the exceptions that prove the rule. My dear old dad did not even know there were any rules and he bequeathed that to me. Most of the time I don’t notice it so very much, as I merrily trundle on my own way, but sometimes I smash up against the blank walls of incomprehension.

Perhaps that chafes me more than I know. Perhaps it’s just that I work hard to live a decent life and be a decent person, even if I sometimes get grumpy and unreasonable and have the odd bitch and can never tackle that damn cupboard of doom, and now someone has come along and told me that was all for nothing. I try not to need external validation, although it’s a bit of a losing battle, but perhaps everyone needs their passport stamped from time to time.

I want to shout, like John Hurt in The Elephant Man: I am a human being.

But sod it, I’m really just a number, and a number that does not appear on the government database. My red duchess will raise an aristocratic eyebrow when she hears that.

 

Today’s pictures:

The blinky duchess and the manly Stanley:

Stan the Man and the red mare then had a lovely race up the set-aside to the top gate. She was running because the Paint filly had gone ahead without a permission slip and the duchess was clearly afraid she would eat all the breakfast, and Stanley was running to inspect the tunnel he has dug under the feed shed in his constant quest for rats:

HorseBack UK, where I did not work this morning because I do not exist:

Well, that’s better. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Obviously you won’t be reading this because I cannot have written it, but in the parallel universe where someone who looks remarkably like me is typing at seventy words a minute, I wish you a very happy weekend.