Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 66

No blog today.

Too tired.

Just some trees.

And a face.

Someone I have never met said something very kind to me today, in one of those social networks at which the newspapers like to sneer.

It touched my heart and cheered me up. I suppose that ‘internet can be really nice’ will never make headline news. Much better to scare everyone with the trolls and stalkers and green ink loons and extreme porn. But there is an awful lot of kindness out there in the ether, if you know where to look, and I don’t take a single word of it for granted.

The sneerers say the whole thing is narcissism and showing off, as shallow as a puddle on a slick city pavement. But every time you bother to write a generous comment, or like a photograph someone has taken, with one of those little thumbs ups, or put a favourite star by a tweet, you are adding some tiny increment of goodness and generosity to somebody’s day. That somebody is quite likely a complete stranger to you. You are making that unmet human smile. You are giving the gift of encouragement, which has a price beyond rubies. You are sending out little arrows of love across the known world.

Think of that. It’s a bloody miracle.

The beautiful red mare makes me proud.

The pride I feel for my red mare runs through me like electricity. She’s had a rotten few days, losing her old friend, and yesterday she was as unsettled as I’ve seen her for over a year, when the little American Paint was led away to the far paddock and Red still had work to do. She was calling and circling, her neck stretched and tense, her head up in the air. It took a lot of gentle concentration on my part to bring her back and calm her.

Today, it was sunny but freezing. A quiet Sunday stretched ahead. The Horse Talker and I decided to go for a really good ride, to blow the sorrows away. The livestock have been moved out of the big fields for the winter, so we suddenly have enormous swards of green to play with.

We encountered walkers, children on bicycles and a lady with a huge dog off its lead. The canine apparently had never met a horse before and decided that charging, barking and running up their tails was the best approach. Neither horse turned a hair. You could almost see them thinking: have you met Stan the Man? I silently blessed Stanley, and his months of desensitising training.

Even more remarkable, out in the wide open spaces, where those lunatic thoroughbreds are supposed to take off and pretend they are in the Derby, I eased Red twice into a canter, and she lobbed along on a loose rope (we are such cowboys we don’t bother with such bourgeois things as reins; a halter and a rope will do for us). She came back to me with nothing more than a ‘steady’, dropping politely into a swinging walk, her head low, her ears pricked.

I cannot express what a brilliant thing this is for any horse to do. With inviting flat green grass in all directions, even the dearest old cob might get a little excited. In a mare of Red’s breeding, with her fast jobs in racing and polo behind her, this ease and grace feels to me like a miracle.

I remember the days when she first arrived, and she was not at all sure of me or her new surroundings, and she used to throw in vertical leaps, all four feet off the ground, and wild bronco rears, the stimulus and the strange rider just too much for her sensitive spirit. Used to one of the best horseman in England, she needed me to prove myself to her. So that was what I did, day after day, slow step after slow step. At first I thought I had to prove my superior riding skills, brush up my seat, strengthen my old muscles. In fact, I soon realised that I had to prove something much more profound. I had to prove to her that she could trust me, rely on me absolutely.

Time is the thing. Time and patience and love and belief. You can learn all the technical stuff you want, but without those foundations, it all goes for nothing. But you need a generous horse too, who will respond with willingness and kindness, and that was what I got. That is why I was so proud of her that I whooped into the bright winter air.

And so we find ourselves, my glorious girl and I, out in the rolling Scottish green, entirely in harmony with each other, our hearts so close that they beat in time.

 

Today’s pictures:

Almost too much sweetness for one photograph. Stanley the Dog looks rather proud of his superior horse-training skills, as if knowing that he has made his elegant ladies bomb-proof to even the wildest canine:

My beloved girl:

Autumn the Filly was astonishing too. She is only a novice and was backed for the first time this year. But out she stepped today, as good and relaxed as a veteran of twenty summers:

That’s a little bit of Scottish sky you can see in her eye:

The good companions:

And handsome Mr Stanley, contemplative in the winter light:

Mostly pictures.

Very tired and rather doleful, as you may imagine. But the great kindness of the Dear Readers is astonishingly generous and I am profoundly touched. Thank you.

There is a greater space than one might imagine in the paddock. I don’t think I’d realised how much of a presence the small Welsh person was. There is a huge lack.

The red mare, restless and distressed last night, came back to her main field this morning, called twice, very loudly, waited for a response, her neck stretched out and her ears pricked, scanning the horizon, and then dropped her head in acceptance.

She wandered back to the shed, where we were making breakfast, and stood in the doorway for a long time, occasionally offering her sweet white face in greeting. She and the paint filly were very, very still. They assumed a curious, deep calm, as if they had gone into a low, humming, Zen state. Despite the sadness, I found myself fascinated, watching them, trying to work out what was happening in their horsey heads.

As always, they hold a kind of noble mystery in them, that space between the equine and the human, the place that I cannot go. As always, the loveliness of that singing calm is actual, palpable; it streams out of their strong bodies like starlight. As always, Red gives me her gift, without let or restraint, straight from her fighting heart.

Here are some glorious hills for you, and other autumnal things:

Oh, and one more thing. I hesitate to write it, but my fingers are tapping across the keyboard, almost beyond my volition.

I almost never give unsolicited advice. I hate receiving it, so it would be nuts of me to dish it out. But what I did think last night is: never take time for granted. Tell the ones you love that you love them. Hold the animals close. I think that, like WH Auden, I tumbled into the trap of thinking that love would last forever; and like Auden, I was wrong.

A final farewell.

In every family, there is the one who is not much talked about. Not because they are wicked or shameful, but because they are so good. They do not run off with drummers or take to the bottle; they just get on with it. They do not create drama. They just, delightfully, are.

Myfanwy the Pony is like that in my family. I don’t write about her much here. It’s all about the great journey with Red the Mare, my mighty thoroughbred, with her famous grandsire and her beauty and her great spirit.

Myfanwy came quietly and unexpectedly into our lives because Red needed a friend. And there was this little grey person, with her pretty face and her pricked ears, who almost dropped out of the sky. The lady who transported Red to her first home up on the hill had a pony her children had grown out of, and Red needed a companion, and the lady very generously offered us the loan, and it was as simple as that.

When the small person arrived, my big mare, who had been on her own for a doleful week, whickered and whinnied as if her long-lost sister had suddenly pitched up at the gate.

A few weeks after that, the American Paint filly joined us, and last November we moved the herd down to their new home in the shadow of the green woods, and they have been there ever since, a little trio of calm and joy.

The stories that got told here were all of Red. Quietly, in the background, Myfanwy, in her grand old age, her riding days over, enjoyed her retirement. She settled most mornings under her favourite tree, watching sagely as the younger ones got worked and schooled and educated. We did inculcate her into our school of horsemanship, and she learnt to hook on and back up off a soft cue and yield her hindquarters, and always looked rather pleased with herself when she had done this new work. We sometimes took her out for a good walk in hand, and the little Pony Whisperer would come and give her a grand groom, and only last week I did a join-up with her in the field, and she remembered all the steps as if we had done it yesterday.

But really, she was just a continued presence, with her bright face and her sweet ears carved like commas and her surprisingly low, throaty, Lauren Bacall whicker. She made no drama; she created no three-act opera. She left that to the other two. When the gales came last week, she amazed us by kicking up her heels and doing a perfect bronco display in the wild weather, and the Horse Talker and I looked at each other and said: ‘Well, there is life in the old lady yet.’

Not that much life, as it turned out.

This morning, there she was, standing under her tree, like a little unicorn in the autumn light, waiting for us to come back from our ride, as she always did. We were just about to leave the field, when we saw her stumble and stagger.

I, always convinced that she would live until she was thirty, almost ignored it. Not Myfanwy; she was a tough mountain pony; she could deal with anything. But then I looked again, and I could see something was very wrong.

We thought she had colic, at first. The vet was off on a call, so the Horse Talker and I walked her and walked her, for an hour and a half, round the field. Then the Remarkable Trainer arrived, closely followed by the vet. By this stage, violent streams of mucus were coming out of the poor old lady’s nose and mouth and she was shuddering all over, her small furry body shaken by violent spasms, low groans coming from the very depths of her.

The vet, one of the kindest, most sensitive women I’ve ever met, tried a single injection, and said to see what would happen in a couple of hours. Heart failure, though, she thought; possibly multi-system failure. She held out little hope.

The injection had no effect. The three humans sat in the shelter, which is built up against an old granite wall, filled with soft straw, a place of quiet and safety. The old girl shuddered and went down and got up again, and then stood, suddenly very still, almost in a fugue state.

I made the decision. ‘She is telling us she has to go,’ someone said; everyone said; everyone knew.

The light was failing in her black eyes.

She lay down again and I sat on the packed earth floor with her and gentled her on her forehead, in that exact place that mares nuzzle their foals. ‘It’s all right, old lady,’ I said. ‘You can let go now.’

I said that to the Pigeon too.

It was very quick and very good, in the end. The vet warned us there could be struggles, jumps, spasms, gasps or groans. But there was none of that. She let out one last cry, lifting her head in a final effort and neighing. Her two friends, put safely in the far paddock, called back to her, their voices carrying bright and vivid on the chill air.

Then the needle went in, and she fell straight to earth, with no battle, as if she was so ready that the very ground was pulling her to it.

And she was gone.

She went in elegance and grace. She made it very simple for us. It was her time, and she knew it.

The vet, who is not a sentimental or anthropomorphic person, said: ‘I’m glad she said goodbye.’

We were all slightly surprised. But that last call, and its responding cry, did feel like a final farewell. Horses do not do sentimentalism. They understand and accept life and death much better than humans do. They have a lovely, honest flintiness which I adore.

For all that, I think it was a goodbye, a bookend to that first hello, when the big red mare and the small Welsh pony first set eyes on each other and called out in greeting, as if they were old familiars, as if they were each the one the other had been waiting for.






The last picture I took of her, two days ago, in the lovely November light.

And Red the Mare, who loved her well, and who, when I went down to check on her just now, by the light of the sailing moon, would not be consoled:

Stop dangling those modifiers. Stop, stop, stop, stop, STOP.

Today, in my official capacity as the curator of the HorseBack UK Facebook page, I was going to use the word disinterested.

After some consideration, I deleted it. I was using it in its correct sense, of having no skin in the game. I worried that some people would read it in its new meaning of not interested, and the whole sentence would collapse into a mess of misinterpretation.

I felt very sad about this. I mourn disinterested. I think it is lost to us.

I am not against language shifting and renewing itself. I understand it is a febrile, living thing, and that is part of its thrill. I adore the new use the young people have made of random, which no longer merely means having no specific pattern or purpose, but also weird, unknown and unexpected, often in a comical way. (Interestingly, the young people themselves have already started a backlash against the overuse of this word, and are busy restoring it to its original sense. I still like it.) What saddens me is the loss of a word which cannot be replaced. Nothing else quite gets the precise meaning of disinterested: neutral and impartial carry different nuances.

Nor am I against breaking the strict rules of grammar. I often start a sentence, even, daringly, a paragraph, WITH A PREPOSITION. Strunk and White would faint. For me, the sole, shining purpose of grammar is clarity. Clarity in writing is everything. Play around with language and form all you want: be antic; be bold. But never, ever let the sense be lost.

This is why I grow so wild with rage when I see a dangling modifier. At its worst, the dangler confuses and muddies. The actual intention of the sentence may be completely lost. At its best, the dangler clunks hideously on the ear, even if the sense may be discerned.

I saw two today. One was on the front page of The Telegraph. The Telegraph. Are the subs doing it for a bet? The other was in a newspaper column written by an author and journalist who has been using words in a professional capacity for twenty years. Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

Really. There are days when, if it were not for the spreading sweetness of Red the Mare, I would give up. She, of course, would never dangle a modifier in her life. The duchess in her would not permit it.

 

Too tired for pictures today. Just the hills, and my darling Minnie the Moocher:

Wrote this at the end of a long day. 1169 words of secret project; two other pieces of work; usual equine activity. Whenever I rant about grammatical crimes, I fear that there shall be at least one typo or missing word or mistaken comma. Just so everyone can point and laugh. My eyes are squinting too much to proof-read with any accuracy. But if the howler is there, I suppose it shall simply be the gods of hubris, warning me not to flap my wings. They are flinty and ruthless, like that.

As close as I get to a curative for existential angst

Fretting about small things; fretting about big things. And then I have to go out into the Scottish sunshine and take photographs of the herd up on the hill for the HorseBack Facebook page, and all the frets stop.

Horses are not a definitive or enduring solution for the slings and arrows. How I wish they were. But when you are with them, in that very moment of human existence, everything does go away, so the poor battered brain may have a rest, and gear itself up to fight another day.

They give one not solutions, but respite. They are so actual, so present, so rooted in the moment; their needs are such simple ones, their concerns so filled with clarity. They are absolutely unsentimental, and they combine kindness and honesty and flintiness to a wonderfully paradoxical degree.

And there were the hills of course, blue as blue as blue.

Then, before returning to my desk, I went to work the red mare. We’ve been doing some steady walking in hand and a bit of very gentle riding on account of her leg. Today, I thought I’d go back to basics and run her through her foundational steps.

Foot perfect. She is so clever.

Then we did a little bit of free schooling, in the new paddock, which is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. We have not done that for ages, and I wondered if she would have forgotten how it works and get bored and fall to grazing. Not a bit of it. There she was, her gentle, enquiring face watching my every move, her feet matching mine, all softness and intelligence and harmony.

She was so very brilliant that I am afraid to say I fawned all over her. You are not really supposed to do this. A horse’s best reward is stillness, and space. Some of them love a bit of a rub on the face. Most of them do not especially appreciate having an exclaiming body hurled at them.

The lovely thing about Red is that she does love it. She is as affectionate and tactile as an old Labrador. When I step back, aware that I am breaking every rule in the book, she turns her white face towards me, asking for more. I restore some decorum and stop with the flinging and the fawning and just stand beside her, allowing her to rest her head against my chest, rubbing her cheek so she falls into the familiar swoon of pleasure. We stand like that for a very long time, while Stanley the Dog amuses himself by searching for pheasants.

I go back into the real world, where all the frets still exist. But as well as being a professor and a Zen mistress, my red girl is a doctor. In that fleeting hour, she gives me the best medicine, which is a relief from all existential angst. Sometimes I could swear, as I look at her equine smile and her glinting eye, that she knows exactly what she is doing. Come on, old girl, she is saying, it can’t be all bad; chin up and stiff upper lip and keep buggering on. And she is damn well right.

 

Today’s pictures:

Even though this is completely out of focus, I love the sweet friends together:

My very best beloved:

In which I have no answers.

When the disasters come, I never know what to do. There is a vast sense of powerlessness. Sometimes the disaster is so big and so ugly and so destructive that I can hardly listen to the reports or look at the pictures. Then I despise myself for my softness and privilege. If the people who are in it can go through it, I damn well can look. But what good does that do? One can send a paltry extra bit of cash to the Red Cross, but it feels like a plaster on an open wound. Debates fire up, like hares set running, about whether extreme weather is thanks to global warming, and so entirely the fault of rapacious and heedless humans. I’m not sure that does much good either.

I tried, this morning, to imagine what it must be like to find, from one moment to the next, that you have nothing. I tried to imagine what it would be like to come back from the field and find my house gone. All my clothes and books and pieces of paper saying that I exist; every word I ever wrote, every photograph I ever cherished. If the village had gone and my sister’s house had gone and the water was gushing out of broken pipes and there was no electricity, what would we do? How would a person survive even one day in such circumstances. My brain ran into a brick wall. There is no imagining. I had absolutely no idea what I would do. I have no idea what the people of the Eastern Visayas are doing now, with their ten thousand dead and their ravaged land.

At eleven o’clock, as I stood silent for two minutes, I tried to imagine those boys in Flanders field, those waves of young men on the Somme, in mud and terror and death. On Remembrance Sunday, I think of all the wars. On Armistice Day, for some reason, I think only of the First World War. That, too, is beyond imagining. I don’t care how many books you read or how many facts you know or how many pictures you see or how much Wilfred Owen you can recite, the sheer numbers still make it go beyond human comprehension. One may have a sketch of it, but not the whole thing.

I think about the horses of that war, of course I do, as I gentle my red mare in the November sunshine. I think of the bonny hunters who were taken to front almost as a lark, and the work horses who were led from the quiet green fields of home and shipped into an incomprehensible hades of mire and gas and cannon shot.

When the silence is over, I go and do my HorseBack work and look out over the bright hills, lit with the glancing November sun. I speak to a veteran who was twenty-two years on submarines, who joined up when he was twenty and the cold war was still raging, and can remember the eerie sight of Russian boats going silently by, in the days when people really believed that the Soviets might blow up the whole world.

And then I come back and the Philippines is on the news again, and my brain stretches once more in incomprehension, and I hear one sentence, standing out – that the pitiless storm has destroyed a region which was already poor and deprived to start with. They had very little; now they have nothing. Perhaps because I do not know what to do when the disasters come, and impotence often leads to rage, I feel suddenly, shakingly furious. What world has this much sorrow and pity in it?

I do not know what to do when the disasters come, so I write paltry words, because words are all I have. I scratch a mark upon the page. I will go back, steadily, slowly, to the small things, because in the end those are all that humans may hold on to. I will look at the hills and the trees and gaze on the handsome, eager face of Stanley the Dog, and stroke the teddy bear neck of Red the Mare, as she grows warm and woolly for the winter to come. I will think of the small, potent loves which get a person through the day. I will put my feet on the good Scottish earth, one step after the other. I will realise that I shall never, ever know the answer to The Universal Why. The rage will settle and fall.

I want, as always, to find a fine sentence to finish this. There must always be a ringing final line, which neatly gathers the whole and brings a proper full stop. Today, I do not have one.

I’ll just leave you with the hill, which is always there, as blue and eternal as a blue eternal thing.

Remembrance Sunday; or why I wear my poppy with pride.

Intellectuals can be astonishingly stupid. I love ideas and I love abstract thought and I love the people who trade in them. But still: the great brain can sometimes entirely bypass the human heart.

This happened on Wednesday on the Moral Maze. There was a big debate about should one wear a poppy. The whole thing was rather phoney. I felt their hearts weren’t in it, that they were ginning up the gimcrack simply in order to make a programme of it. Because everyone knows that of course you should wear a poppy, if you wish to mark the dead, and the wounded too, and that if you do not wish to do those things, you should not. Some people wear them and some people don’t . Some people remember in their own way. Some people feel so enraged and lacerated at the very thought of war that they cannot brings themselves to acknowledge Remembrance Sunday exists.

All these are explicable human reactions, and should be left to each human to carry. But here was one of the stupid intellectuals, making a stupid point, in a stupid way. A woman from the British Legion was explaining that the poppy meant many different things to many different people. The intellectual said, crossly, that surely this rendered it meaningless. The woman from the British Legion then told a moving story about a young widow she had met, who told her that every time she saw someone wearing a poppy, she thought that they were acknowledging her small son, and the father he had lost. The intellectual snorted. ‘That woman,’ she said. ‘Isn’t she just kidding herself?’

And there is the stupidity of very clever people, in one sentence.

Of course the young widow might be indulging in a bit of wish thinking, but actually she is not so far off the mark. A lot of people with their poppies will be thinking exactly of fatherless boys like her son. But the point is that she, with unerring emotional intelligence, went to what was the crux of the thing. The poppy is to remember, and, just as importantly, it makes those who have lost their best beloveds feel less alone. That is why it is a communal act. The tearing isolation of grief is lifted, for one short season in November. And at the Cenotaph today, the men and women will march together, and the old comrades will find each other, and the nation will stop at eleven o’clock, as much as one as this old mutt of a country ever gets.

The people who shout about the poppy miss the point. It is not misplaced jingoism, or glorying in war, or mindless conformity. The people who wear it are not, as that intellectual sneeringly said, kidding themselves. The dead are dead, and the grieving are grieving, and acts of great courage and sacrifice were made and have been made and shall be made again, and should be marked. Respect is due.

You can make all the intellectual cases against that you want. Some of them will cohere. But that does not make them true, because they miss the heart of the matter. They evade the human factor. All the arguments in the world fall down in the face of one widow, whose burden is lightened for a moment, because of one flower on one lapel. That is why the poppy is worth it.

Every year, I buy my poppy and it falls off. Then I buy another one. Sometimes I look down at my naked lapel, with its forlorn pin where a flower should have been, and feel fretful, that people will think I did not have one, that I did not care. So then I go and get another one and try and fix it really tight and right and think: this will be the one which stays the distance. For the rest of November, I shall find little crumpled cardboard flowers, in the well of the car, down the side of the sofa, in the feed shed, where they have fallen. My comrades at HorseBack all seem to wear theirs with pristine efficiency, and I wonder how they do it. Marine training, I suppose.

I look at them, and the poppy takes on a whole new meaning, more personal than before. Two of the men wearing them this year have been catastrophically injured by enemy action. One was blown up, and one was shot through the head. I look at them, wearing their poppies bravely and well, and I think: if it is good enough for them, it damn well is good enough for me.

I never use photographs which are not mine. I make an exception today. Sadly I have no photographer for this, but I think it is beautiful, and eloquent.

No blog today.

End of a long week. The sun glimmered and danced and dazzled. The red mare and the little Paint rode together up the avenue and down the avenue and past the blue hills. I’m so happy to be back on my horse I grin like a loon the whole time, and speak, endlessly, of her brilliance. (My companion is VERY patient about it.) It is all ease with her now. She looks for no mountain lions. We swing along in harmony like gauchos out on the plain. All the time and patience and love has come to this. She knows that she is home.

Scotland, and AP.

Scotland looked so beautiful today that she made me catch my breath. I think that I never forget the beauty; I think that I am all about the love and trees; I imagine that I wander about in a perpetual haze of hello clouds, hello sky.

In fact, sometimes I do not stop and look closely enough. To be surrounded by this much beauty is a privilege indeed. The fact that at least a quarter of my day’s work, with my mare and with HorseBack, takes place in the open air, so that I may feel the breeze on my face and observe the indigo hills and watch the colours of the changing landscape, is a greater piece of fortune still.

Today, I really, really looked.

It made my heart expand. It reminded me why I came here in the first place. It was because I fell in love with the hills like you fall in love with a person. Everyone thought I was nuts, and quite a lot of people still do. I don’t care. I have these hills and that is all that matters.

And now, I’m going to recklessly take the whole afternoon off, and watch the racing from Towcester, a course my old dad loved, and see if the mighty AP McCoy may ride his four thousandth winner. No human has ever come close to such a number. Even as I think of it, I can feel the blood rushing faster through my veins. I always become galvanised when I am in the presence of greatness, and this jockey is greatness indeed.

It is not just that he has talent, or that he has honed his skills. Many jockeys do that. He is brilliant in a finish, but he’s not the only one. On a rather rare occasion, you may see him be beaten by another rider.

It’s another quality, something to do with steeliness and drive and desire; something to do with pushing himself harder, seeing the peaks more clearly, wanting them more. The thing he says that he has had to try and teach himself is how to lose. He never taught himself that lesson very well. He minds each defeat; he takes it as a personal insult. I’ve seen him lift horses over the line, convince them half a mile out that they really don’t want to give up. He never says die. He is a titan, and I salute him, and when he reaches his magic number, I shall throw all my hats in the air.