Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 41

A bad workwoman blames her tools.

Or so I thought.

In fact, it turns out that the tools make all the difference.

I take a secret pride in putting up reasonably decent photographs, although I know nothing about the technical side of photography. I have tried reading those special magazines but my brain just goes phhhtt. It’s something about the acronyms and the clinical language and the thicketty prose. I get lost and then I get cross. I hurl the thing aside and think: sod it, I’m just going to point and shoot.

For many years, I’ve had a delightful Olympus PEN. It has seen me straight and seen me curly, and it has put up with an awful lot. It’s been dropped in the mud so many times and tumbled from the back of the horse so often that it is all cracked and scratched and little threads of Scottish earth are ingrained in it. I lost the lens cap some time before the Old Queen died, and so the lens is always a tiny bit smeary. Some of the functions frankly no longer work.

But I hate the notion of disposable things, and I’ve never been one of those crazed people who always has to upgrade to a new model. I have one bog-standard mobile telephone, nothing smart about it, which I hope will last for years, and I’m cherishing this dear old computer, so it, too, might stay the distance. I quite liked that my camera was a bit bashed and battered, as if it and I had been in combat together. After all, Cartier-Bresson did not need any bells and whistles. He shot pictures for the ages with his trusty old Leica. But then, he was Cartier-Bresson. I am no Henri, nor was meant to be.

In the end, the camera made up my mind for me. The crucial battery charger went mysteriously missing. It’s probably in a field somewhere. (I carry it around with me, in case I have a battery emergency, which I thought was a good plan until I could not find the thing.) Ah well, I thought; it’s time.

Because I love taking photographs, and because I am in charge of the HorseBack Facebook page, where I must make an effort to produce something reasonably professional, I had thought I might grade up to a proper SLR. The Olympus is one of those three-quarter cameras, not quite as posh.

But I’d tried out my stepfather’s Nikon, and had not got on with it at all. I looked about on the internet, and all the high-end cameras were so expensive and so foreign to me. I decided to stick with the one I knew and loved, even though it felt a little unadventurous. I would effectively be getting a replacement, not something new.

I had not taken in the fact that the good people at Olympus have been very, very busy in the six years since I last bought a camera. The new PEN is a completely different beast to the clunky old thing I had before. It is ravishingly beautiful, small, tight, light, pleasingly retro, and neat as a pin. The shutter makes the loveliest sound I have heard any piece of equipment ever make. I found myself snapping away just to hear the delightful old-fashioned clunky click.

And, oh, oh, the pictures. Suddenly, everything is sharp again. There is depth of field and all sorts. I can do everything on automatic, which is good for a dolt like me. I really can point and shoot. The camera does it all for me, in the most charming and helpful way. It almost feels like cheating but I don’t care, because the results are so lovely. I feel like I’m back in the hunt.

I do love recording this beautiful place, and my beautiful animals, and my beautiful hills. Now, instead of struggling with old and creaking equipment, I can see every gleaming detail of the moss and the lichen, so that I look at them anew, and remember why I love them so. I suddenly realise that I had lost some of my joy in photographing things, because I was always having to edit and delete to produce a half-decent result. Now, I have my mojo again, thanks to my little Bobby Dazzler. I almost want to send a thank you letter to the brilliant boffins at Olympus, and the kind people at Curry’s, who put the marvellous article in their sale so that I got a raging bargain, and sent it out to me post haste. I am rejuvenated. Snap, snap, snap, eh Mr Gibbon. I am so happy I feel like doing a little dance. I may, in fact, do a little dance. Perhaps for the red duchess, as entertainment while she eats her tea. She’ll like that.

 

Today’s pictures:

Never were those two words typed with so much joy. Just look:

And, as if all that joy were not enough, THE FIRST SNOWDROPS ARRIVED. Too, too much:

The only thing about the dear PEN is that it can’t quite deal with very dense colours. I noticed that with my old one, and this is the same. I imagine that is where the SLR might beat it. You can see that the intense whiteness of the snowdrops is almost too much for it. But it’s such a tiny drop in the sea of loveliness that it seems almost churlish to mention it.

Down at the field, the duchess was sweetly and gently and politely waiting for her tea, and graciously posed without complaint whilst I faffed about with my new toy instead of mixing up her Thunderbrook’s:

That’s her sweetest, softest face, the one she wears when she is utterly at peace and all is well in her world.

And this is her I’VE GOT MY HAY face. There’s no special filter or effect on this picture. That really was the colour of the Scottish light at 4pm:

And one more of Captain Handsome, because one can’t have enough handsomeness:

And one last one before I really must stop -

Is there tea yet?:

Oh, and as if that was not enough happiness for one day, Teaforthree, one of the horses I love the most, won the Hunter Chase at Bangor with a glorious combination of composure, enthusiasm, strength and diamond-sharp jumping. He was given a beautiful ride by Jamie Codd, as quiet as a tranquil sky, trusting the clever old fellow to see his own stride at each fence, seeing him to the line with hands and heels. It was a shining sight, man and equine in perfect harmony, and it made me smile and smile and smile.

A ridiculously ordinary day.

Today, I cooked my mother breakfast and took her some flowers, just because. I took some more flowers to my brother-in-law, for his birthday, because nobody ever gives men flowers and they should. I had a lovely chat with the ladies in the flower shop.

I worked the mare in the snow and she was so good and sweet and funny that I ran out of words for enchanting. I am trying not to use my voice, because all the great horsemen are silent. It’s one of the things I notice. ‘Good girl,’ does not really mean much to a horse. But in the end, the words burst out, because my heart was overflowing. ‘Well done,’ I cried, as she did a perfect free-school. She waggled her donkey ears at me, happy in her world. Perhaps she does understand a little bit of English after all.

Stanley continued his Great Mouse Hunt and scared the crap out of a cowardly buzzard.

Then I did work and work and work and work and work.

And all the time I was thinking: must have something interesting for the Dear Readers. The blog has been very paltry lately. Surely there must be something meaty and chewy and entirely fascinating.

The brain sent out messengers to all parts of the kingdom and they came back empty.

I have nothing for you. Just a very, very ordinary day.

And you know the awful thing is that my secret pride is that I think deep thoughts. How the hollow laughter of the hubris angels ring around the barren land.

 

Today’s pictures:

Well, just one, from the Instagram. I think I rather overdid it with the filter. Even the red duchess is not that red:

This is dozing after  some most excellent work. (It’s always important to give them a really good rest so that they have thinking time, and all the lessons can sink in to the clever thoroughbred mind.) Notice the interested face of Autumn the Filly in the background, very, very slightly smug because nobody is asking her to do transitions in the snow.

Work.

I’m at the stage where all I can do is think of work, do work and dream of work.

The lovely part of this is that I skip back from the morning field, where the red mare is dreaming away her snow day, urgent to get to my desk and start typing.

The unlovely part is that everything else goes to hell. A sort of monomania takes over. Emails are not answered, laundry goes undone (it sits in plaintive piles in its basket, mocking me), hair remains bonkers, lunch is often forgotten. Since I have this absurd fantasy that I am getting better at life as I get older, this state of affairs is faintly dismaying. It’s like being back in my student days, with an essay crisis, when I used to sit up all night and write pages and pages in green ink about the Second Reform Act.

I have been thinking lately about emphasising the positive. Yes, the weather is grinding me down a little at the moment, but in the snowy fields I have the sweetest, funniest, most interesting mare in the entire world. Absolutely, we are in the February doldrums, but every morning Stanley the Dog makes me laugh as he picks up entire hay bales and hurls them about the shed in his frenzied hunt for mice. Certainly, I am toppling over into the Chasm of Domestic Disorganisation, but I have almost finished two whole books.

I read something somewhere about getting the doing of tasks to go with a swing by giving yourself small rewards. As I believe in almost nothing more than the small things, I am going to implement the tiny reward system at once. As a present for doing absolutely stupid amounts of book today, I am going to make myself some soda bread. And then I am going to eat it, hot from the oven, with absurd amounts of butter. Don’t ever say I’m not a girl who knows how to have a good time.

 

Today’s pictures:

The poor, dear old camera has finally given up the ghost. It is crusted with mud from where it has fallen to the earth, and the focus has been entirely erratic for many months, and the screen is cracked from where I accidently hurled it to the ground from the back of the red mare. (Top life tip: don’t try and ride and use a proper camera at the same time. It never ends well.) As I shop around the comparison sites and decide on my next model, I am playing around with my little iPod camera and all its different incarnations. For a sliver of a thing, it’s not bad. At least you can see the daily sweetness:

 

Poor Stan. He really, really does not like having his picture taken. Not when he could be FINDING HUGE STICKS. Just look at that plaintive face:

Weather.

Yesterday was a fairly dodgy combination of exceptional grumpiness and a lot of work, so there was no blog. I always feel oddly guilty about this. What will the poor Dear Readers do? (Have a huge glass of gin and breathe a sigh of relief is almost certainly the answer.)

Today, for no known reason, I woke up without the grumpiness but still did the work. I wondered, as I so often do, about moods. Today, all the things which felt overwhelming yesterday seemed quite manageable. In some ways I find this reassuring: on rotten mornings I can tell myself this too shall pass and know it to be true. It reminds me that the shrinks were right when they said: it’s not the thing, it’s how you think about the thing. On the other hand, it’s mildly disconcerting since it means there is no objective reality.

Despite the weather, the horses were peaceful and sunnily fatalistic. Sometimes they go into pure survival mode when the snow and ice close in, and they really have no interest in humans except as the bringers of food. But this morning, the red mare went for a little browse in the snow and then came and stuck her head in the feed shed for a chat and to check that I was mixing her breakfast just right. The sight of her sweet face in the doorway made me think I could never really be grumpy about anything, ever. She then followed me kindly back to the field and, without even being asked, politely went and took up her feeding position, and waited for me to put the bucket down with all the poise of a dowager duchess at a diplomatic reception. All this without so much as a rope. Any thoroughbred who can do that must banish all the February blues.

Also, I had just seen a photograph of another horsewoman with her equines in Canada, where it apparently was minus twenty-seven. That made our minus six look paltry by comparison, and when the mercury raced up to half a degree over zero I felt as if we were in the South of France.

The work went well. I’m back on the other book now, and I’m still not cutting as much as I should, but slowly, slowly I persevere, and I shall get there in the end.

Stanley the Dog, who used to shiver when he first came here from balmy Somerset, now races around like a true snow dog, and is so busy hunting for mice and putting up pheasants and rounding up the mares that he has no time to think of the cold.

It’s February, and it’s pretty dour, and I’m constantly chilly and covered in mud, and I do yearn for spring with every beat of my heart. I like to think I am stoical about the winter, but sometimes I fall into a rather weedy longing for sunshine and warmth. But there is always some little metaphorical ray of sun to warm the cockles, even if I have to squint a little to see it.

 

Today’s pictures:

I’m playing around with Instagram. I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet, but here are some early attempts at special photographic effects. I quite like it that the pictures mostly look as if they were taken in 1955:

Not sure quite how this got so blurry, but I don’t mind it:

A slight birthday shock.

I am forty-eight.

FORTY-EIGHT.

FORTY-EIGHT.

As I said this morning to a friend, standing in the dazzling Scottish sunshine and the bitter Scottish wind: ‘Old for a jockey, young for a prime minister.’

In the spirit of the birthday, I thought I’d write you one of those amusing lists, like they do on the Facebook – you know, seven interesting or surprising facts about oneself.

I only managed three. And they are not very interesting.

They are:

1. I really like cockles.

2. I have a bronze medal in life-saving. Which means that if ever an inflated pair of pyjamas were drowning in a small swimming pool, I would be able to rescue them.

3. I can’t remember the third one.

Ah, ah, ah, ah. All these years, I secretly thought I was quite interesting. I could tell you about the repeal of the Corn Laws and how not to dangle a modifier. How damn fascinating is that? And then, when it comes to it, I discover that I HAVE NO INTERESTING FACTS.

It’s a bit of a blow, to be honest. (And I never use the phrase ‘to be honest’, so you can see how acutely I am afflicted.)

Oh yes, I remember the third one. It is: I once saw Judi Dench in the ladies’ lav at the Groucho. She was absolutely radiant.

You see? That sound you hear is the bottom of the barrel being scraped. In order to drum up the tiniest roll on the interest timpani, I had to dredge up a National Treasure.

Obviously, I am now going to have to go away and deal with this. I suppose it’s lucky I’ve got to the age of forty-eight with my delusions intact. At least it is excessively British. Being fascinating is really best left to Bobby Dazzlers from the continent. (Not that I would stoop to vast cultural generalisations, oh no.) Much better to talk about the weather and not blow one’s own trumpet.

Talking of the weather, there is going to be sleet tonight. Rug up the horses and put on your thermals. Never say this blog does not do public service.

PS. I was going to tell you about my enchanting birthday, which has involved cake, champagne, a jewel, flowers, a mystery parcel, and a lot of loveliness on the internet. But I’m saving that for tomorrow because I’m still a bit over-tired and my fingers have done enough typing. I’m going to watch the racing from Chepstow instead. See how ruthless I am, now I am hurtling towards fifty?

 

Today’s pictures:

One of the things I don’t really know how to do is take a selfie. It’s oddly hard, and my arms are not long enough. Obviously I had to try to get a special birthday picture of the red mare and me, since she is the beat of my heart. She stood for ten whole minutes in the middle of the field, not moving a hoof, occasionally letting out a gentle, resigned, forgiving sigh at the folly of her human.

Excellent Lady of a Certain Age tip – pose head-on into the dancing Scottish sun. It’s insanely flattering. I probably should care that I don’t actually look like this, but I don’t:

Can you see the look in the mare’s eyes? It says: just let the old girl get on with it. Possibly with a bit more swearing:

Stan the Man was moving so fast he is completely out of focus. But you had to see the special birthday ears:

SOMEONE LEFT FLOWERS IN THE FEED SHED:

The sweet, woolly, muddy duchess, sighing a sigh; at least that’s over. She’s very dozy and dreamy this morning, as if her wild gymnastics of the other day are quite forgotten:

PS. I’ve thought of another interesting fact. Watching the racing, I was reminded that the very first time I tasted smoked mackerel was at Chepstow racecourse in 1976. I was nine. I thought it the most madly sophisticated food I had ever eaten. Even though I had encountered the legendary soupe de poisson at Tetou. But you know, that was just soup.

So sorry. That really is the best I can do.

Being human. Or, sometimes you don’t get the gold star you want, you get the one you need.

Sometimes, I have a bad few days. I feel a bit weak and weedy, I forget to take my iron tonic, I don’t sleep well. I get behind on work and neglect to make special green soup.

I believe this is called: being human.

However, although I know on paper that all humans are human, and that flaws are written in to the deal, and that not even the Shiny People are shiny all of the time, there is a part of me which feels this as haunting failure.

Acceptance is a lovely word. It is used, I believe, quite often by the Buddhists, and certainly by the shrinks. One must learn to accept that life is complicated, that human beings are complex, that psychology is a snaking, labyrinthine thing. What is it? I ask myself crossly when I have the bad couple of days. What is going on? As if, by rationality and reason and empiricism, I may come up with the right answer, get ten out of ten, go back to the top of the class, and FIX EVERYTHING.

Sometimes, I think, there is not an easy ‘what is it?’. Sometimes, there are barely perceptible tectonic plates, shifting under the surface. Sometimes one just has to sit with a thing, and let it run its course.

The regular readers will know that I often write: every day cannot be Doris Day. I know this to be true, in my rational mind. In my irrational mind, which is six years old and quite often high on sugar, I am shouting: yes it can. Come on, Doris, shouts the irrational mind, put your damn dancing shoes on. Do jazz hands, Doris, bawls the irrational mind, which wants to have a party.

Today, for no known reason, the sane mind has taken over, like a lovely grown-up coming in and telling the children that it really is time for bed. Now then, says the sane mind, who is like a cross between Mary Poppins and Jung and the Dalai Lama, you really can just sit with it. You can accept the fact that this is not a test; it’s a long, winding journey, with bumps in the road. You don’t always have to get a gold star.

As I type this, with my poor old brain a bit swimmy still from two days of not functioning, I wonder: why write all this? I think it is because almost everyone I know of this age has this push-me, pull-you. My cohort has reached the time in life when we really do know quite a lot of things. We have had to face cruel truths; we have been to funerals; we know mortality like a dear old dog. Perhaps, we have had to understand that not all our childhood dreams will come true. We have had to adjust our expectations. We have had, in the outmoded vernacular, to get real.

But as TS, who knew everything about poetry, and quite a lot about wisdom, but could not apply much of that to his own fraught life, once wrote: humans cannot bear very much reality. They run away from it, or deny it, or drink it away, or merely point in the other direction – look at that, over there, let’s get furious about that.

I try to write about reality so that somewhere, out there in the dark, one person might sigh and say: oh, yes, me too. The more I go on, the sweeter I think it is to know that one is not alone. It is why I love the internet. It’s not just the baby pandas and the Budweiser Clydesdales; it’s the fact that there really is a lot of human truth out there. There are people admitting that they, too, are not quite as shiny as they would like to be. The funny thing about the internet is that it is not about gold stars, or top of the class. It is often about the stone in the shoe. It is about that rocky road, which everyone must walk. Or, at least, the good, kind parts of it are.

Out in the field, where the red mare has no time for such absurd ponderings, there is spring fever, even though it is not yet spring. In fact, it has been minus one and gales and blizzards. Then the dear old Scottish sun came out, casting its benign amber glow on the scene, and the two fast friends went for a hooley. They galloped from one end to the other, turned on a sixpence, and galloped back, throwing up wild clods of mud as they went. They hurled themselves to the ground and rolled and rolled. They leapt in the air for no known reason, twisting and snorting and broncing. The red mare stuck her tail vertically in the air, so it flew like a flag, and snorted like a steam train, and did her floating, Spanish Riding School of Vienna trot. Then she showed off her Champion the Wonder Horse rear.

Bloody hell, I thought, she really is remembering that Nijinksy is her grandsire. I went to work her with a small degree of trepidation. When she is like this, I am keenly aware that she is half a ton of thoroughbred. But when she saw me, she dropped her head and went through her groundwork steps as softly and accurately and politely as if she were a dressage diva instead of the rodeo crazy of ten minutes before. She blinked at me, kindly. Just getting the twinkles out of my toes, she seemed to be saying. Now, what would you like me to do next?

She doesn’t care about Doris Day. She doesn’t care that it’s been a bit of a scrappy, crappy week. All she minds about is that she gets a reliable, patient human, who cares about clarity and consistency. All that matters to her is that I make her feel safe. And then, as I hear the wings of my better angels begin to flap, she sweetly gives me a little gold star of her very own.

 

Today’s pictures:

Two incredibly muddy horses in an incredibly muddy field, having a little party of their own:

And then, after all that, I worked her for half an hour and she stood, composed and elegant, ground-tethered, whilst I faffed about with the camera:

She may be the scruffiest, woolliest, muddiest horse in Scotland, but she is also one of the funniest and sweetest and cleverest. She is all gold stars. No matter how cross and grumpy and scratchy and jangly I am feeling, she makes everything better.

Sick leave.

So sorry about no blog yesterday. I’ve got one of those dull, non-specific, low-grade viruses, where you feel weak and swimmy and hot and cold and generally demoralised. As the regular readers know, I have a lunatic belief that I never get ill and that somehow it is a sign of weakness. If only I eat my greens and harden my will, I can escape stupid germs. What about my cherished notions of stoicism and stiff upper lip? Life is too short to give in.

However, the poor body is saying stop, stop, and the addled brain is incapable of composing a coherent sentence, so I’ll be off for a couple of days.

In the meantime, here a horse of shining sweetness:

(She is delighted that I am not firing on all cylinders, since I just wobble down to give her food and love and then stump off again, and she gets to have a holiday. There are some horses who really need a job but she is not one of them. She adores mooching, and is taking the opportunity to give herself a spa day, with complete mud pack. So good for the skin. It’s going to be a lot of fun when I return to grooming.)

Errands.

For the second day in a row, I need a drum roll, please.

I did errands.

I quite often dream of the Organised People. Here is how I imagine they deal with errands:

They say to themselves: ‘Goodness gracious, I have some errands to run.’

They make a list.

They run the errands.

They cross the items neatly off the list.

They go home and have a nice cup of tea.

I imagine that they weave domestic and logistical duties into the warp and weft of daily life. They understand that there are jobs which must be done, and they do them. They do not obsess over the errands, put the errands off, pretend the errands do not exist, wake up in the middle of the night in a muck sweat on account of the errands, dread the errands with a dark, morbid dread, build the errands up in their minds so they take on the operatic aspect of a Wagnerian spectacle.

They just do them.

They do not tell themselves that they have no time to do mundane, administrative tasks because they are a Creative, and they must gaze into the middle distance and think Important Thoughts. Often about The Human Condition.

They just do the errands.

They do not return home after the errands and shout out loud with glee and do a little dance. They do not yell, to the puzzled dog: I DID THE ERRANDS.

They certainly don’t write a whole sodding blog about it.

They do not have to remind themselves that all these dreaded tasks turned out, in fact, to be quite easy, and that everyone was kind and helpful and understanding, and that the young man in the bank said yes to every single question.

The young man had been giving some Euros to the gentleman in front of me in the queue. He asked the gentleman where he was going. ‘Vienna,’ said the gentleman. ‘Oh,’ said the young man. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Germany.’ Small pause. ‘It’s in Austria, actually,’ said the gentleman, laughing, to take the sting out of the mistake.

The poor young man blushed scarlet in shame. There was a lot of muttering about yes, Austria, of course, I meant Austria. He was still flustered when I came to the window.

I know all about geographical faux pas. I once muddled up Persia and Mesopotamia, whilst talking to an Iranian. I’d love to say that I was ten, but in fact I was over thirty and should have known better. I still go cold with embarrassment when I think of it.

I’ll cheer up the poor young man, I thought, by being extra nice. But I did not have to try, because spit, spot, he pressed a few buttons and typed a few typings and printed out a few pieces of paper, and all the awful admin was done in a flash. The tax remit was fulfilled, a vital standing order changed, some important information given. JUST LIKE THAT.

‘You have made my morning,’ I told the young man. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’ I hope he never thinks of Vienna again.

I was so delighted that I went straight to the hardware shop and bought the red mare a new scarlet bucket for her feed. She deserves a spanking new bucket, and it was only £4.99. (Also, there are few things I love more than a good hardware shop. All those enchanting items made out of galvanised metal.)

I expect that the Organised People do not return from all this and decide that they feel like a new woman. Especially if they are gentlemen. (Although I’m always in favour of blurring a few boring gender boundaries.) But I damn well did feel like a new woman. The cares of the world are off my shoulders.

Why I have to go through all this I do not know. Why I can’t just do the jobs as they arise like a normal person remains a mystery to me. I know I have to write hundreds of thousands of words, and I am idiotically attempting to finish two books at once, and my whole professional future is riding on it, but even so. I don’t imagine Sebastian Faulks (rhymes-with-jokes) gets into a state of hysteria when his tax return rolls round and he has to buy a new mop head.

Ah well, one works with one’s limitations. Mine are legion. But today, the sun shone like honey and the mare was at her crest and peak of dearness and sweetness and Stanley the Dog reached a pitch of comedy styling, and I got my errands done.

And now I’m going to have a bloody big drink.

 

Today’s pictures:

No camera today, what with the errands and all. Instead, here are some randomly chosen pictures from the archive. Starring Herself as The Red Duchess, Stanley the Dog as Stanley the Dog, some inexplicable leaves as some inexplicable leaves, and me, as the Most Disorganised Woman in Scotland. (But who cares? Because I have a NEW SCARLET BUCKET.)

 

PS. I also put together this album of photographs for the HorseBack Facebook page. I thought you might like to see them. There are only forty-three of the damn things. (What was I thinking? It took three hours. Still, it’s the least all the good people in the pictures deserve. They did great work and I take my hat off to them all.)

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152972669180568.1073741978.197483570567&type=1

A book and a horse. Or, it’s not magic beans.

Drum roll, please.

I have finished the fifth draft.

This is not quite as drum-roly as it might be, on account of the fact that I was supposed to be slashing and burning and did not, in the end. It turned out to be a quite different edit than the one I had planned. It was, in the end, a character edit. I had been living with the characters for long enough to see below the surface, so I found myself writing new scenes, to give them depth and nuance, to explore and cement the relationships, to let them leap off the page as three-dimensional individuals instead of lying there like types or cardboard cut-outs. Now, I know my people, and I had to give them room to breathe.

The kill your darlings draft is yet to come. I’m going to take four days off, clean my mind, and then print out the manuscript, so I can read it with a stern eye. A hard copy is always better for this process, and one may take a ruthless pencil and CROSS THINGS OUT. One can put squiggles and question marks in the margins, and little tentative ticks for the sections which work.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about horsing and about writing. They have a great deal in common. You have to go over every element again and again, get the tiny things right, or the whole will not fly. You have to pay attention to the minute details, which the careless or the cavalier do not even notice. You have to dig the foundations deep. You have to practice and practice and practice, every damn day, if you want to be good.

I sometimes suspect that almost anyone could write a book, in the simple sense of putting a hundred thousand words on paper. (My nutty book is currently clocking in at over 160,000 words, which is why the darlings must, must, must die.) What sorts the sheep from the goats is the willingness to go back and do the endless drafts, wrangle and mangle and pummel the thing into shape. The difference between the amateur and the professional is the taking of time.

Just like writing, good horsing can’t be rushed. I worked my mare this morning, in the snow, paying attention to the most basic things, checking those foundations, not letting the fundamentals slide. It’s take me a lot of time to realise what is really important, in this new approach I am learning. At the beginning, I was so excited to have discovered an entirely novel way of thinking about horses that I leapt about all over the shop, as if I were teaching the mare circus tricks. We made some progress, but there would always be a moment of disaster. It took me a while to figure out that it is the doing well of the right things in the correct order that brings enduring results.

One of the fascinating things you are teaching them is that the world has pressure in it, shocks and surprises and things not always going in a calm and predictable way. You are teaching them to deal with that, and not scoot off into a maze of adrenaline and panic. To do this, you put pressure on them, on purpose. If you pussy foot around, if you coddle them or namby-pamby them, they learn nothing. Quite often, on a still day like today, I’ve thought: oh, it’s a bit mean to ask her to work. She’d be in her dozy Zen state, enjoying the sun, and even though I know most horses like a job, I felt like a horrid slave driver. So when I asked her to do something, it would be with an underlying note of apology.

Today, I assumed my stern face and put the pressure on without regret or restraint. If I ask her to go, she must go. No messing. She was slightly surprised. Hey, she said, throwing her duchessy head in the air, what’s that all about? Good boundaries, I said; clarity, consistency, clean lines. After a firm ask, I’d relax her again, with a rest and a damn good rub. Then, off she would go once more. We rinsed and repeated for fifteen minutes, until all I had to do was lift my hand and she would walk off, click my tongue and she would move into a smooth trot. Oh, she said, looking utterly delighted, I really do see. It was as if I had encircled her in a gleaming ring of safety, because she knew what I meant, that I really did mean it, and that she could rely on me to be absolutely consistent in that meaning. All was clear.

Life lessons, I thought, extrapolating like a crazy thing. That’s the whole point of growing up. You learn to deal with pressure. You learn to take the knocks. I talk quite a lot about my battered heart, the one I have taken to funerals, the one that misses my old dad, my old dogs, my old godfather, the great generation which is leaving us, one by shining one. I think sometimes that I am holding it together with binder twine and hope. (And strong liquor.) But this morning, I watched my mare learn to take more pressure, to be a little braver, a little tougher, a little more sanguine, and I thought: the battering does not make the heart weaker, chipped and bashed and second-hand, but makes it stronger. Life will always make the heart ache, because of the sorrow and the pity, but it will not break it or smash it, not if you learn the habits of resilience.

She was so happy and content, after doing good work, that kind mare. It was so simple, what we did, but wonderfully profound. It’s taken me a lot of time for the understanding of the whole to grow strong roots. Yeah, you can get all the books, and watch the videos, and listen at the feet of a master, and ask questions, and discuss niceties with people who are on the same path. But you have to let the knowledge settle, you have to make mistakes, you have to think and think and think, and that cannot be rushed. There are absolutely no short-cuts, no tricks, no tick tick ticking of neat boxes.

I always thought that horsing was an instinctive thing, and in some ways it is. Some people really do have it. I thought that writing was an instinctive thing, that some lucky souls had a feeling for words, a facility with language. The feeling has to be there, but with both disciplines it is the thought that makes the difference. I think and think and think, and I work and work and work, and every day, it gets a little better. It’s not magic beans. It’s effort. And the more effort you put in, the more effortless the thing becomes, so the words fly off the page and the sweet mare goes forward in ravishing harmony, her great thoroughbred heart and my chipped human one stitched into each other, across the species divide.

 

Just one picture today. I think I already put it up on Facebook, but I’m posting it again because I love it so much. I love her wibbly lower lip, and her furry ears, and the fact that she has the Scottish sky in her eyes:

No words.

I was going to write you a whole blog about why words matter, but then I decided not to. I’ve been editing all day and my brain is gradually turning to mush and it’s minus four outside and I didn’t sleep very well last night.

Besides, you all know that words matter.

Mr Bobby Jindal sadly had to find that out the hard way, when he tweeted ‘Your welcome’ instead of ‘You’re welcome’, to hysterical and pitiless Twitter derision.

Sometimes, words matter when you least expect them to. I had to write a condolence letter not long ago, to someone I love very much. I always feel that scratches on the page are paltry things, in the face of death. But I bashed on, trying to avoid platitudes, trying to put my heart into my pen. The reply came back today. The words, amazingly, had mattered, even though I feared none of them were the right ones. (What can one say? Really?) I felt the old communion, running between old friends, who do not see each other often enough, but who may still send out little arrows of affection, small balm to shattered spirits. That does matter.

Tiny words mattered this morning, in the arctic chill, from a tiny person. The smallest of the great-nieces had come down to see the red mare. She was defying the weather and wearing her special gold-sequinned party skirt. I know no other human who can get away with gold sequins whilst standing in a snowy paddock. She insists on choosing her own clothes, even though she is only three.

She regarded the mare for a long time, and held out a little hand to stroke the soft muzzle. The mare went still and gentle, as she always does with children, whom she adores. (A lot of thoroughbreds love children, I never quite know why. It’s very touching.)

The small person went on regarding, pondering, observing. The mare snuffled through her nostrils and whickered. The great-niece rang out peals of delighted laughter. ‘She’s so funny,’ she said.

That pretty much made my day.

Then the great-niece told me, very seriously: ‘Rabbits eat carrots so they can see in the dark.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, gravely. ‘That is excellent information.’

Well, it turns out that I did have a few words after all. And now, here are some pictures for you, selected at random from the archive: