Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 64

Tuesday.

Book sent off to agent.

BOOK SENT OFF.

We are still in early doors and there is a long, long way to go. But at last it may be seen.

If she hates it, I shall write another one. I am a Briton, after all. I have Blitz spirit encoded in my DNA.

I suddenly realise this may sound a little strange to non-writers. Surely I must have some idea of whether the thing is any good or not?

A most peculiar thing happens when you have lived with a book for many, many months. You go snow blind. My critical faculties flicker in and out, like faulty radar. I can tell that this this sentence works, or that idiom is fine, or this paragraph rattles along with some skipping syncopation. But I have no way of judging the whole. It is my damn story. I love it and I fear it may not be good enough and I cannot have any objectivity.

What I can see is that it is very, very eccentric. It is idiosyncratic and fits into no nice category. There’s nothing I can do about that, either. I kept trying to make it more respectable and able to go out in public, but it kept putting on strange hats and wearing white shoes after Labour Day. It is even more cussed than I am.

Despite my very British Britishness, the book is not British at all. It wears its heart on its sleeve and has no stiff upper lip. It eschews the prosaic and the stoic. People may easily laugh and point. I would not blame them.

Still, the thousands and thousands of words exist now, in the world. I can take a deep breath and let my shoulders down and have some days off. I may think about Christmas, which has not crossed my mind. The house remains resolutely undecorated and there is no whiff of festive spirit. I’m going to watch the racing and get in some eucalyptus and cook proper food and ride my horse and throw sticks for the dog.

I can’t do this, because everyone would fall on the floor laughing and my credibility would be finally shot for ever, but if the thing ever is published, I should dedicate it to the red mare. It is she who has held together my tottering reason, with her dear, steady hooves, all this time. It is her beauty, her kindness, her generous heart and her comedy skills which have acted as an anchor, to stop me floating away across an uncharted sea.

What made me the happiest this week.

Just pausing in my hectic work day to give you a little Friday loveliness. (I say that with great certainty. It is loveliness to me. I quite accept it shall not be to everyone’s taste.)

There are many, many reasons I love my red mare. I love that she turns all stereotypes about thoroughbreds, ex-racehorses, chestnuts and mares on their head. Any good horse person knows that an equine will reflect back at you exactly what you put in. Breeds do vary – some are bred for speed, some for strength, some for steadiness – but all horses are individuals, and have characters as discrete as snowflakes. To say that every cob is this or all Arabs are that is as inaccurate as saying that all men like cars or all women crave shoes.

A thoroughbred is likely to be sensitive, clever and fast. That is the result of years of careful and tightly controlled breeding. Many of them are also very brave, and exceptionally willing. But you will get dear old dopes, and ones who are a bit windy, and others who are absolute jokers. Some are as genuine and straightforward as the day is long; some are entirely idiosyncratic and capable of being a bit of a monkey. Some like strength and drive from their riders; some yearn for quietness and softness.

My girl is clever, funny, generous, willing and kind. She likes steadiness and calm. She adores routine. She has a goofy love for very small children, who make her flutter her eyelashes and soften her eyes. She has a mighty talent for stillness, which is why I think of her as my Zen mistress. She likes listening to conversations, twitching her ears and going into a little doze of pleasure. She is fond of humans, thinking them good things.

She is about as far from the loon thoroughbred of ill-informed myth as you could get.

I love her for all these reasons. But the thing that made my heart lift most this week is that she makes my mum smile.

My mother is not terribly mobile and has to deal with a lot of pain. She is very stoical about it. To cheer her up, I ride the half mile to her front door, to show her Red’s sweet face. Each time, my mother’s own face lights up. My dear stepfather feeds the good mare apples. Only he is given special dispensation from our strict rule of not feeding by hand. Red is gentle and polite with him, lipping quietly at his fingers until all the deliciousness is gone. This makes my mother laugh out loud.

Then I show off a few paces, and do some figures of eight, and trot off down the long field towards home. The mare pricks her delicate ears, leaving pleasure trailing in her majestic wake.

What is it with the horse? an old friend once wrote, a while ago. There are a hundred answers to that question. I could get philosophical and say that horses teach humans everything about authenticity. They are perfect professors of existing in the present moment. They have their priorities straighter than anyone I ever met. They care nothing for the superficial, and everything for the profound, unshowy virtues, like reliability and kindness and understanding.

I could say it’s a matter of aesthetics. In an often ugly world, a good horse is a still point of beauty. I could say it is the challenge – my old saw about the half ton flight animal under the ten stone human. Sometimes, I think it is the most simple thing – doing honest, physical work in the open air. And there is the funniness. Red is a natural comedienne, and makes me laugh every single day. She is a fascination of complexity too – both a duchess, and a conscientious and responsible lead mare. (It touches me daily to see how seriously she takes that important job.)

But just now I think it is that this delightful creature can bring a dancing smile to my old mum’s face, by the very fact of her simple presence. She is better than any medicine. There is something in that which goes beyond words.

 

For some reason, as I put up these pictures, a line from Prufrock comes into my head –

‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.’

This was our visit:

Dozing, listening to chat, with the ears switching back and forth to get all the finer points of the conversation:

Are there APPLES?:

My mum, who was a pretty serious horsewoman herself and taught me the vital importance of light hands:

And off we go, with Red preening for the camera, and me still trying to explain to my mother why I have no bit in my thoroughbred’s mouth:

Work. With a bit of horse.

Work, work, work, work. It starts off feeling like a mountain to climb. Or mud to wade through. Or something very, very hard. Then I get the thrilling hint of possibility. That section works; that paragraph is true. Suddenly, I am motoring. I can see it.

So it is now almost six and I’m still bashing on, and I shall bash bash bash until ten, and there is no room for the blog. But the Dear Readers have been especially dear lately, and you must have a line or two, so you do not think I am dead in a ditch. (In my mind, you do sometimes become exactly like my mother.)

In between the writing and the editing and the squinting furiously at the screen and the tap tap tap of my manic fingers on the keyboard and the completely forgetting to have lunch, I took a moment to watch dear old Riverside Theatre at Huntingdon. He was once a mighty champ, but he lost his way last season and I hoped more than anything he might find his road home.

He started off bonny and bouncing, happy to be back, and then he made mistakes and started scribbling and scrabbling, losing that relentless rhythm which is what wins races. But his jockey, Barry Geraghty, has faith in the fella and would not give up on him. He cajoled him and pushed him and persuaded him and booted him, and almost lifted him over the last. It was a never say die ride such as you usually see from AP McCoy. (What would AP do? is my daily question now, as you know, and the thing he always does is never, ever give up.)

And suddenly, when all seemed lost, they got a little bit of luck, as the bold Champion Court found his saddle slipping and veered to the left, and dear old Riverside found his mojo again and shot through the gap and won by a neck.

It was not the prettiest run you ever saw, but it was a race in a hundred, and I shouted my head off, my heart lifting like a helium balloon. I love comebacks, even when they are messy as hell.

And the only other news, as I turn back to my deadline, and my acres and acres of prose, is that this person gave me the most glorious, dancing, lilting ride today, so that I shouted out loud into the clean Scottish air, with gratitude and love:

She may be furry and muddy and scruffy, but in my mind she is as gleaming and shining as Riverside Theatre and all her other cousins, racing out on the springing green turf, champions all.

No words left.

I have no words for you today. I emptied all the ones I had out of my head and onto the page. This might usually be a cause for gaudy celebration. But I am supposed to be editing. I am supposed to be cutting and polishing. I am supposed to be slaying darlings, so that the stage is littered with them, like the last scene in Hamlet.

Instead, I was up until after one last night putting on words. Thousands of the fuckers. And then I put on more again today.

Stop, stop, STOP, I bawl at myself, with my sensible hat on.

But without this new scene the thing makes no sense, says the voice in the stupid comedy hat. And you must explain this. And you must explicate that. And the fingers go tap tap tap and the thing grows terrifyingly big, mocking my puny plan.

The red mare, who knows nothing of words, except for ‘good girl’ and ‘breakfast’, canters up the hill and looks at the view. The view looks back. Please, please, says the sensible hat. No more words. No more.

We walk slowly home, on a loose rein, as the view folds up its tent and disappears from sight. And another idiot new scene unfurls itself in my head.

 

Just time for two pictures today, of my favourite mountain and my favourite dreamy face:

She has gone away into another world in that photograph. She is dreaming of something I cannot even guess at. She is guarding all her equine mystery.

In which I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. But it was a very, very good day.

Author’s note: I got carried away with this one. It is long, baggy and tangential. The point gets lost somewhere in the sixth paragraph, and is never retrieved. But if you are willing to bash on, and dig with a spoon, there are some moments of loveliness.

 

I was thinking, this morning, about taking the good bits and leaving the rest. I like to pretend I know all about human complexity and the flaws and frailties flesh is heir to. I can get a bit swanky about how I do not put people into boxes. But still, I sometimes get pulled into the quicksand of the single label. This person is good, that one is bad; this one is a dullard, this one is quite coruscating; this one is a melancholic, that one is a sunny optimist.

The fact is that humans can be all these things, on the very same day. We are all on a veering, curving spectrum. (And you know how rarely I use the Universal We. But in this case I think it is called for.)

I was reminded the other day of something a wise person said to me. Or perhaps I mean a wise thing a person said. It was: ‘it is easy to behave well when you are happy.’ Often if someone is mean or unfair or sharp, it has nothing to do with you. I am always in danger of taking things personally, and off goes the three act drama, with me as the operatic star. Usually, in these cases, it is nothing to do with me and everything to do with the other person. They are wrangling with existential angst, or fretting about a beloved, or have suddenly lost their moments of glad grace. They don’t necessarily mean to, but they may take it out on the person nearest to them.

My old dad, whom I miss every day, was a man of labyrinthine complexity. He was adored throughout the racing world. He was the sweetest and funniest and most charming and eccentric gentleman. He could light up a room just by walking into it, even though he did not stride in like a colossus, but shuffled through the door with his shoulders hunched from all the operations he had to stop them falling out of their sockets in a tight finish, and his back slightly bent from the times he broke it. He would twinkle his eyes through his great spectacles and somehow everyone would feel better.

On a horse, he was brave as a lion. But he was also fabulously irresponsible, occasionally unreliable, and very, very naughty. He drank too much and gambled too much and chased far too many women. He loved his children but never particularly felt that he should do anything for us. In way, this was very liberating. There was no burden of expectation. He never told us how to live our lives, or read us lectures. I think I sometimes did wish for a regular, respectable dad, but in the end I realised that what I got was much, much better. He taught me the best lesson I ever learnt, by simple example. That is: to judge people exactly as you find them, not through the prism of class or money or colour or creed or sexuality. If someone could make my dad laugh, he did not give a bugger what car they drove or what school they went to.

Now, as I remember him and carry him with me, I leave the bad parts and contemplate only the good.

I was thinking particularly of him because a rather astounding thing happened a few days ago. A cousin of mine became a colonel. As I do my work with HorseBack, I always think: well, I know horses, but I don’t know the services. That is the new part which I am mapping. I don’t come from a military family, I tell people. Yet, all the time, there was this brave fighting relation, doing tours in Afghan, and now, being promoted to a rank which makes me take my hat off. The first thing I wrote, to the cousin and his sister, when I heard the news, was how much the auld fella would have laughed. It’s true. I am in awe and wonder, incredibly impressed by such dizzy heights. A colonel in the Household Cavalry is a mountain top which I can hardly imagine. But Dad would have roared with laughter. He would have been proud, of course, but he would have found it inexpressibly comical that someone in his family would do such a grown-up job. (He did his own national service in a cavalry regiment, joining the Hussars I am perfectly certain in the expectation that he could pitch up with his horse. I think he got a bit of a shock when he arrived at Salisbury Plain to find only tanks.) The lovely cousin and his proud sister wrote back to say that they were raising a glass to the old man.

So many good parts, I think. Who cares about the less good. Emphasise the positive, I think, and eliminate the negative and latch onto the affirmative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between.

People are always going to behave in ways that one might not choose. They may think thoughts that one would prefer they did not think. They will not always react in the hoped-for manner. They may baffle and confound. But I start to think that if you search for the good parts, the rest won’t matter so much.

The red mare is, in the magical part of my mind, the exception to the rule and perfect in every way. Of course this is not in fact true. She has her grouches and her small moments of stubbornness and her grumpy mornings. There are very few humans I secretly believe close to perfect, but one of them is my friend The World Traveller, who lives up the road and is my relation by marriage. This morning, she came to ride the mare for the first time. She is a tremendous horsewoman, but has been too busy bringing up four small children to think of things equine. I suddenly decided, on a whim: I have this great horse, and the WT is a great rider, and I am going to bring them together.

It was quite frightening, sending Red off into the unknown. What if disaster struck? What if my profound faith in this mighty mare is misplaced?

I need not have worried. Back they both came, after a morning out in the fields, wreathed in smiles. The World Traveller (given her blog name because she once rode across half of Asia on horses and camels) is not, of course, perfect. She has told me of her flaws, although I never quite believe her. But she is one of the sunniest, kindest, most generous-hearted people I know, and being able to put her up on my equally big-hearted mare made me happier than I can say.

This blog did have a serious point when I started it. I think it was about complexity. Now, as I wander towards the end, I realise that I have galloped off on my usual tangents, and I have absolutely no idea what it was that was so important I had to write it down for you.

Perhaps it was a rumination on my daily fight against perfection, against black and white, against false expectations, against cramming people into boxes.

I am galvanised and filled with energy today. After the World Traveller got off the red mare, I got on, and went out riding with a friend who had arrived unexpectedly on his Quarter Horse. Red got rather excited about the arrival of a handsome gelding on the property and flirted with him shamelessly, sticking out her nose and fluttering her eyelashes.

Away in the fields, she suddenly realised she had a fit horse, on its toes, to run against. My dozy old donkey remembered her racing past. I felt the competitive spirit rushing through her. All right, I said, you can go if you want. I gave her her head. And then she recalled that she was a dowager duchess, and settled back to her stately canter as the other fella tore off up the hill, and we rolled along on a loose rein, with me laughing my head off. Red’s loveliness is so intense that a smile is not enough; the joy comes out of me in great whoops of hilarity.

It was another of our greatest rides. There were the hills, open before us; there was the clean Scottish air on our faces. Under me, was a horse who is all kindness and generosity and sweetness. She could have been infected by the high spirits of the new equine who had pitched up in her territory. She could have pulled and pranced and forgotten herself. She could have charged off into the blue horizon. Even the best schooled horse can do this in such a situation. But she chose not to. She had a ball, but her steadiness never left her.

And that is why I am wild with joy and pride, and unable to stop typing, and that is how I ended up with a long, tangled, not-making-much-sense post, because at times like this I want to tell you everything, and I have no editing facility.

But perhaps, if my subject was partly the danger of expecting the perfect, that is just as it should be. I would love to give you tight, finely-honed prose every day. But some days, it is going to be woolly and wandering, and maybe that is the whole point.

 

Just time for two pictures:

The unexpected visitor, with whom we rode:

And one of my best ever sights – the return of the travellers, beaming with delight. I don’t know which of them looks happier:

Work, horse, love.

The kind of slang I use tends to be very, very old school. It is more likely to be drawn from Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford and PG Wodehouse than the current demotic. But today I would like to say that I absolutely SMASHED my work.

It’s the approach to my second deadline, which is a renegotiated first-and-half draft date. In the end, it was decided that it would be just too scary for the poor agent to read the full mess and muddle which was the raw first draft. But she would like to see something before Christmas, which does not give time for a full second draft, but does allow for a tidied up, nicely trimmed and frankly less alarming version.

The push for this is not as manic as getting the thing written in the first place. There is some sturdy earth on which to plant my stuttering feet. The story exists; the chapters are there. There is, after a fashion, a beginning, middle and end.

All the same, it requires a lot of concentration and effort.

So there may not be much room for blog, as I charge into the final furlong.

Red the Mare very kindly put her shoulder to the wheel and did her bit for my mental health. This morning she gave me a ride of such loveliness that I whooped out loud on three separate occasions and fell on her neck with fervent congratulation and love twice. The Remarkable Trainer, who was on the American Paint filly, discreetly averted her eyes and did not say anything. Really professional horsewomen tend not to whoop and hug. The best horsemen and women, I have noticed, don’t use their voices much at all. Horses are visual creatures, rather than verbal ones. (This is because they came out of the woods very early in their evolution, and their defining characteristics were mapped out on the plains.) 

But I can’t help it.

The red mare makes me so happy and so proud that I can’t contain myself. This is slightly nuts for a middle-aged female who has been round the block, but there we are. When I ask myself what AP would do, I know the answer would be: not this. He might allow himself a small smile; he would give the horse a restrained pat on the shoulder. I holler and throw my arms in the air and hurl myself bodily up her dear neck. As I do so, I can just about see the corner of her face. It seems to be wearing a quizzical smile, as if to say: just let the old girl get it out of her system. She is not only a very clever and beautiful and talented equine, but remarkably forgiving as well.

Usually, when I ride her, my cares all soar away in that very moment. Once I am off her back, I return at once to the normal work frenzy of tension and push. The medicine only obtains when I am with the good doctor. But on this bright, mild Monday, it lasted all day. The shoulders did not go back up; the sense of frazzle and fret did not return. I did my work, acres and acres of it, and it came easily, and I was not lashing myself but enjoying the process. I kept stopping and smiling, as the memory of the beautiful contained trot and the gentle rolling canter flashed into my mind. That damn mare is a miracle horse and I don’t care who knows it.

 

No time for pictures today, just a couple of Herself with her most demure, I am doing my good work face on. Remarkable Trainer up:

Oh, and actually one more which I can’t resist. One of the things I love about keeping the mare out is that she can be her own, horsey self. She can get as muddy and scruffy and filthy as she wishes. Today, she took this remit to its full limit. I love this picture not because she looks beautiful. She looks like an old donkey. I love it because she is a horse at ease with herself:

A good man and a good woman, in a slightly unexpected juxtaposition.

Quite often in these pages, I write the sentence: ‘Another of the good old men has gone’.

Well, another of the good old men has gone.

The strange thing is that I was not going to write of it. Last night, as the news came in, I suddenly felt that the internet had got it all wrong. The wisdom of crowds can be magnificent at times like this. There is a touching communal outpouring, a coming together in regret. Passings are marked well, with restraint and elegance.

But I found something curiously grating about the response to Nelson Mandela’s death. There was a faint whiff of bandwagon-jumping, of one-upmanship, of sentimentality. Some of the things that were written were good and true and heartfelt, but some hit a false note. It was not just that idiotic spats broke out, between people of different political kidneys. It was not just that the Ukippers started singing their ugly song. It was that a morbid competition arose – who was saddest, who knew him best, who referred to him as Madiba rather than Mandela, in a rather proprietary way.

I felt not sad, but cross. I went into a fugue-like silence. I could not join in this untrammelled effusion.

When very great public figures die, the newness of the social networks are thrown into vivid relief. The etiquettes and the mores have not quite been worked out yet. If you do say something, on the Twitter or the Facebook, it can sound a little forced and phoney. Look at me, minding. If you say nothing, you have a heart of stone. The balance between the two is finely poised. I could not find the balance.

I had nothing to say. I went to bed, dry-eyed.

This morning, I told my mother. She did not know. Her power is still out. She has no news.

Then I did the morning chores, fed the horses, and returned to the kitchen to make hot soup for my cold, stranded, powerless mum. I put on the radio. Clare Balding was on Desert Island Discs. She was being funny and self-deprecating and human. And then she spoke of the time she was treated for cancer, and how she and her partner dealt with it, and this most articulate woman suddenly lost her words. Her voice cracked and broke, and there was that rarest thing on the wireless: silence.

It was that moment that unzipped my heart, and restored my humanity. So I stood, in a Scottish kitchen, making soup with split peas and barley, weeping for a great old gentleman and a brave woman, both. Then, not long afterwards, someone played Something Inside So Strong by Labi Siffre, and that was that. That song makes me teary at the best of times; today it finished me off.

Sorrowing for the loss of someone you do not know is a curious thing. Nelson Mandela did not belong to me. He was not my president or my grandfather or my friend. But perhaps the very great ones belong to everyone. Perhaps he really was that most unlikely of things: a true citizen of the world. And that was why everyone rushed to the Facebook and the Twitter, because he meant something to them and they wanted to give that meaning voice. They wanted to do something.

In my teenage years, my cohort had three heroes. They were an oddly assorted bunch. They were Che Guevara, Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela. Everyone had Che pictures and Solidarity posters on their walls; everyone played Free Nelson Mandela by The Specials until the vinyl was worn thin. (We are back in the days of records, now.) Che, it turned out as we grew older and wiser, was a bit of a dodgy hero, and we were perhaps taken in by his great beauty. He looked as a revolutionary should look. Walesa and Mandela did not. They did not have the flowing hair and the romantic aura and the motorbikes. Walesa was a stocky fellow, who looked like a farmer. Mandela, from the old pictures before he came out of prison, was a solid man with a boxer’s face, nothing fey or fanciful about him. There were no Guevara sculpted cheekbones, no perfect profile, no dashing rebel hat. But those two unlikely bedfellows were shining beacons for the ideological teen in the raw and rampant eighties.

The really astonishing thing about Nelson Mandela was that he proved even more remarkable in life than he was in our young imaginations. He was unseen for so many years, and he went into the realm of myth. Usually, such humans are a crashing disappointment when they return to the theatre of the real. Few can live up to that weight of ardent expectation. But on that day when Mandela made the long walk to freedom, emerging at last into the bright South African light, he spoke not of vengeance or hatred but of forgiveness and peace. It was not just rhetoric: for every day afterwards he lived up to those words, steadily put thought into action. He turned out to be worthy of the burden of hero-worship placed on his shoulders, which may be the most extraordinary thing of all.

I really was not going to write about this today. I thought: everyone knows what they think, and everyone knows what they feel. My paltry scratches on a page mean nothing. A good old man has gone, and in some odd way it feels like a private thing, for all his public renown.

It was Clare Balding who made me do it. She was the one who made me cry and unlocked the door. (As I write this I am laughing, because it is such an unexpected juxtaposition. But sort of perfect too.)

Despite this, I still have a sense of hesitation, even of impropriety. Then I remember something else I always say here. Which is: the thing must be marked. That is why humans plant trees in remembrance or lay flowers or stand in silence. In my case, most often, the marking is made in my beautiful hills. It is in their eternal blue that I find solace and proportion. I drove into them today, as the sun shone again after the violent storms. To the west, Morven was entirely white. The tips of the silver birches were scarlet in the light and the air was high and thin with the promise of snows to come.

I looked out over this beloved country, and marked the thing which must be marked. On the way home, the South African national anthem came on the radio. I smiled. Everyone, I thought, does their remembrance in their own way, and that is exactly how it should be.

 

Today’s pictures:

The weather gets wild.

I go to sleep with the gentle sound of Vic Marks in my ear and wake up to nothing. There is only the plucking, howling sound of wind beating its way round the house.

The power is down. I have no way of knowing whether Australia suffered a sudden batting collapse at 3am. (I discover much later that dream did not come true.) I am momentarily confused, deprived of news, as if my sensory receptors are shocked at having nothing to receive. I take my bath by candlelight, which sounds marvellously romantic but is in fact maddening when you have horses to do and books to write and the pressing need to get on.

Down at the field, the door is off the feed shed and the roof felting is flapping in the gale like some crazed bird. The wind has entered the shed, removed items from it, and scattered them over a thirty foot radius. It is actually quite sinister. There are body brushes embedded in the mud as if a sociopath has hurled them there with the force of a thousand furies.

The gales, which I later discover are gusting at up to ninety miles an hour, blow visible sheets of rain in horizontal legions, as if they are marching to war. I look with trepidation at the Wellingtonias, which are rocking about like drunken old sailors on a binge. But I can have no Chicken Licken moment. I have Beloveds to see to.

I hear a distant whinny. Red has taken Autumn the Filly to the farthest corner of the field, the place most precisely distant from all trees and branches and gale hazards, and is standing guard over her. It is rather pitiful seeing her being responsible for only one horse now, when she looked after two with such care. She takes her job as lead mare very, very seriously.

The whinny is almost a question. Is it safe to come in?

I call to her, and she leads Autumn slowly along the long, winding path to the gate. Red rolls her eyes at me, as if to say: ‘You won’t believe the night I’ve had.’

‘I know, old girl,’ I say. ‘Not a wink of sleep, I shouldn’t think.’

Horses hate wind not just because of the obvious reasons – the rush and the noise. They hate it because they cannot hear. It muddles around with the hairs in their ears and screws up their detection systems. They are still prey animals at heart, and if they cannot hear the footfall of the mountain lion over the hill, they become nervy and unsure. The junior horse is fine, because it is not her job to be on the qui vive. The big mare is jumpy and unsettled, looking for reassurance. I give it to her, along with lots of hay and plenty of rations. My spectacles are covered in rain and I can no longer see where the falling trees are going to come from so I just get on with it and trust to luck.

The power cut lasts until lunch. I light candles and cover myself in blankets and read a book. That is all you can do when the electricity fails. Every time it happens, it further amazes me how reliant I am on that invisible spirit running through the wires. I cannot type my book, see the news, cook food, heat the house, or even boil a kettle. The day begins with no coffee. My creaky body cries out in protest.

I think always of how much time must have been spent on mere survival, on the taking care of logistics, in the age before electricity. The chopping of wood, the making of fires, the boiling of water – all would have taken hours of physical labour. Even the lighting of lamps would have been an event, as someone went round the house doing the candles and the lanterns. This does not take us back as far as the nineteenth century; it is not all Jane Austen, who is the one I tend to think of when I am plunged into a pre-technological age. You do not need to go nearly that far. A huge number of rural houses would have been off the grid until well in the 20th century. How did they function? I am filled with awe at their doughty resolve.

For a moment, I rather despise my modern softness. I’m afraid to admit that I panic when I do not have the internet. So much of my life is there. I resolve to grow more hardy, to get my mindset back to that tough, wood-chopping, water-carrying incarnation of my ancestors. I must teach myself not to wail if I miss the 12.40 at Wincanton. Butch up, I tell myself sternly, and remember your inner steel.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are not awfully good. I managed to snap a few shots in the calm between the two storms:

Hard to believe only yesterday I was cantering up that far slope in vivid sunshine:

Red, on guard, while little Autumn peacefully gets on with her hay:

WIND EAR:

This is the red mare’s stoicism face. Even though she is so finely bred, she’s tough as old boots. She has a huge shelter but she rarely uses it. Even in weather like this, she prefers to be out in the air. I think it is her evolutionary past, singing in her delicate ears. Always be able to move your feet, those ancestral voices tell her. Do not let yourself be confined. What a trooper she is:

The hill, amazingly serene in the wild winds:

 

Ha. I’ve just come back in after writing that. It was tea-time for the horses and extra rations were required. Out came piles and piles of the best hay, placed tenderly in the sheltered spot; out came the extra water, in case the trough should freeze in the night; on went the protective necks which attach to the rugs and keep the girls from getting icicles on their manes. All this was performed in gales which have now dropped to a modest forty miles an hour, with the temperature at zero, and the snow looming over the hills. I am pretty soft, I can’t pretend otherwise. But for the hour of evening stables, when it comes to the wellbeing of my dear equines, it turns out I am like a tough, stompy old farmhand in a Thomas Hardy novel.

And talking of toughness, I take my hat off to the staunch engineer who went out in all that weather, and put the power lines back together again, so that I may be warm and connected again. That was quite a thing to do.

Magnificence, AP, and the kindness of strangers.

Be magnificent, said the voice in my head as I woke up this morning.

Actually, that was not the first thing it said. The first thing it said was: ‘Why are you dreaming about Kind?’ Kind was Frankel’s dam, and reportedly one of the best-named broodmares ever, as sweet and gentle as the day is long. She was the star of my dream last night and the voice in my head thought that was quite peculiar.

Then the voice moved swiftly on to the magnificence.

The Be Magnificent thing is because I have had quite a lot of angst and fret lately, about a variety of matters too dull to bore you with. These are matters with which I must deal. In times like this, my instinct often is to try and explain myself. I forgot that or neglected this because I was working to a crazy deadline or my brain went phhhtt or I’m desperately trying to wrangle my career back on track after a professional setback of fairly shocking proportions.

I wish always to be understood, which is why exposition is my default. But the problem with explanations is that they often sound like excuses, and in a way they are. I decided that that magnificent thing to do was not to twist on a pin but to apologise with grace, and correct the omission, and leave explanations for the birds. It did, I freely admit, go against all muscle memory.

The next thing I asked myself, in my drive for magnificence, was: ‘What would AP do?’

(For those of you new to the blog, or who have no racing interest, AP McCoy is the most champion of champion jockeys Britain has ever seen.)

This is a novel thing for me, but it’s been cooking for a while, in the echoing back corridors of my mind. In America apparently there are some very religious people who always ask themselves What Would Jesus Do? Sometimes, to remind themselves, they abbreviate it to WWJD and put it on t-shirts. (This may be apocryphal.) Since I do not have a deity, I decided to ask myself what The Champ would do. He is a man of stoicism and steel. He buggers on where lesser humans would throw up their hands. He does not brag when things go well, and he never complains when things go wrong. I also suspect that he may be in possession of a most excellent Occam’s Razor.

I told my mother this at breakfast. She put her head on one side and regarded me quizzically.

‘What would AP do?’ she asked.

‘Ride another winner,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘he would not give in to angst and navel-gazing and midnight fretfulness. He would never make excuses. He would just go out there and ride another winner. You see?’

I’m not quite sure she did.

Up on the hill, with the sun pouring down like honey, and the red mare at her most glorious beneath me, I gazed over the blue landscape between her pricked ears and thought: you are my winner. As she gave me, with all the sweetness of her generous heart, the most beautiful, collected, smooth sitting trot I’ve ever felt in my life, I thought: this is that winner. And I am riding her.

Then I went home and wondered if I could be magnificent. It’s so much easier to be chipped about the edges and a tiny bit second-rate and messily ordinary. It is easier to make excuses and point to reasons and demand exculpation. I would have to pull myself up to my full height and draw on all my resources.

And then, at that very moment, someone else did the magnificence for me.

A person I know only through the internet recently asked for my address. I usually would never give out this information, despite being surrounded by fierce guard dogs and neighbours who go out lamping half the night, but this particular gentleman seemed so intelligent and kind and funny that I decided to err on the side of trust rather than caution. You get out what you put in, after all.

The thing he wanted to send me arrived today. I opened it. I stared. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It is a little book by US Cricket Guy, the funniest spoofer on Twitter by a country mile. He galvanises the Ashes by referring to decision timbers instead of wickets and cries ‘Let’s play CRICKETBALL!!!’ when things are getting tense. He makes me collapse with laughter.

A complete stranger had gone to the trouble of tracking the book down, buying it, packing it, addressing it, and sending it all the way to Scotland, just because he knew from my intemperate Ashes tweeting habit that I love test cricket with the adoration of a true believer.

That is magnificence.

It makes me smile and smile, even as I write it. The kindness of strangers never gets old for me. Each time it takes me by surprise; each time it is as keen and new and lovely as the very first. Each time, it restores my faith in human nature. I doggedly believe that most humans are mostly good, and sometimes this rickety faith has to be held together with baling twine. Today, it was bolstered with Corinthian columns and flying buttresses.

The only problem is that it sets the magnificence bar very high. My kind internet friend has raised the stakes with his immense generosity. I shall now have to leap as if I have springs in my heels. But then, that, that is what AP would do.

 

Today’s pictures:

Apologies to the polymaths. It’s late and I still have not finished my work so there is only time for the rampant loveliness that is my furry, muddy, scruffy, magnificent red mare:

Despite this season of fretfulness, when I am on her back, everything is all right. It is as if I have come home.

The education league tables are out. Everyone panics.

On the radio, a nice, intelligent, articulate man says: ‘I have worked with thirteen ministers of education and none of them has done much good.’ He is not making a party political point. He is making a why the children are not learning point. The international league tables are out and poor old Blighty languishes in the doldrums. The gnashing of teeth can be heard from three fields away.

The shadow education secretary was on the Today programme this morning, and all he could offer was his worry that teachers are not qualified enough. He had no explanation for why all the money and attention spent on education through the Labour years seemed to have so little effect. People got terribly cross with Tony Blair about many things, but I remember my real rage being that the children still could not read. I was one of those who was all fired up about New Labour. I believed Blair when he said education, education, education. I was ready to be delighted, and then the great leap forward never came.

The good news is that the rankings themselves are not completely reliable. Statisticians are casting doubts. Perhaps Britain is not doomed after all. But at the same time, there does not seem to be the shining city on the hill that one hoped might be built, full of bright-eyed pupils in shiny classrooms, their teachers gleaming with enthusiasm and devotion.

All governments of all political kidneys have had a crack at it. Neither the left nor the right has any stranglehold on cleverness or correctness. My excessively unfashionable opinion is that most politicians and ministers are people of goodwill who want the best for the next generation. They study excellent models elsewhere; they get advice from brilliant experts in the field. They do not go into Whitehall in the morning thinking bugger it, who cares whether the children can read?

If it is not as simple as hopeless politicos or failed ideologies, I wonder whether it might be a more profound cultural problem. Britain is sharply contradictory when it comes to education and cleverness. On one hand, it is rightly proud of having Oxford and Cambridge, two of the best universities in the world, setting gold standards since the middle ages. On the other hand, there is little an Ordinary Decent Briton hates more than someone who is too clever for their own good. There are rumblings about elitism, which has become a dirty word; newspapers regularly run pieces about how the country is run by Oxbridge elites, who, apparently by definition, can know nothing of the Real World.

When I was a little girl, I was a swot. Even at the age of nine, I was keenly aware that this would make me hated. I compensated by becoming a jester. If I could make the class laugh, then I would not be persecuted for all that prep I did. On a wider scale, the British have always been intensely suspicious of intellectuals. We are not like France, say the old guard, laughing scornfully. Very few national treasures are beloved for their academic brilliance. I suspect that Britain would much rather win the World Cup than a Nobel Prize in physics. Cleverness generally should be covered up, hedged about with self-deprecation, masked by jokes or eccentricity.

And there is a broader argument still, about different forms of intelligence. Thoughtful people rightly make the point that empathy and emotional intelligence and creativity are as important to the good life as knowing what Einstein said or when the Battle of Hastings was fought. When these annual league tables come out, and hares are set running all over the shop, someone always comes up with the hoary old chestnut about this entrepreneur dropping out of school, or that brilliant musician never passing an exam. And then the whole thing falls into a mess of he said she said and no useful conclusions are drawn.

I am not certain I have any useful conclusions myself. I wish that dear old Britain was not floundering below Lichtenstein and Estonia and Slovenia. I do think there are severe problems in education here, and I believe in education as an article of faith. Yet America, which has more Nobel laureates than the next ten countries put together, is in an even more lowly position, nine full places below us. This makes me wonder whether a single test can really rank entire nations in any satisfactory sense. Perhaps the criteria are too narrow; perhaps the whole idea of grading in such a way is reductive and misleading.

What about the other things which make life worth living, like songs and novels and manners and the countryside and a sense of humour? If there were a league table for bands or comedians, Britain would be surely higher than South Korea, which beats us hollow in maths and science. Even those of us who believe passionately in learning must admit that learning is not the only thing which counts. On that awful Friday night in Glasgow, ordinary citizens ran into the scene of the helicopter crash, to help their fellow humans without thought for their own safety. A sense of community, which the doomier commentators say is now confined to a mythical golden age, still coheres. People are kind and generous and good in this country. I believe this to be true on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, but there are objective proofs. Britons are the second most generous people in the entire world, with 76% giving money to charity. That good news never made headlines, but it is a keen reminder that competence in maths is not the only mark of a good life or a civilised society.

I do not have a nice, neat final sentence for this. I have no definitive conclusion. I think the children must read. But I also suspect that perhaps the picture is less bleak than it is being painted. I am channelling Dad’s Army, and saying quietly to myself: ‘Don’t panic.’

 

Today’s pictures:

Too gloomy for the camera today. Here are some snaps from the archive:

This one looks as if I have put it into black and white. In fact, those were the actual colours that day:

Can you believe I wrote an entire blog post without mentioning Red the Mare? Goes against all muscle memory. She was glorious this morning, before the rain came, doing her dowager duchess canter up the hill. She was happy too, deep in one of her Zen calm moods, the ones which make me love her more than almost anything else:

Although I say Don’t Panic, I am of course in a small panic of my own. The panic is always that when I write a serious piece on a subject such as education, I may include a most uneducated grammatical error or typing mistake. And then people shall laugh and point. I squint at the text, desperately searching for howlers. I know I will have missed one. Ah well, I think – I must publish now and risk it for a biscuit.