Tania Kindersley's Blog, page 7

Nobody knows what is happening.

Last night, I put on my special Hat of Democracy and went out in the pouring rain to vote. I did not go with a dance in my step. I went grumpily, out of duty to the Pankhursts.
But the funny thing is that it was like a party, at our tiny village hall. There were dogs and helpful people with umbrellas and the old and the young. Well, I thought, rather startled, the democratic process is still in rude health. This cheered me immensely. I’m not tribal. I gave up tribalism years ago, because it was so tiring and often led to shouting. I want a government that works and gives people a chance. It’s not very sexy, but that’s what happens when you get to fifty and won’t leave the house without a hat on. That people were there, voting, minding, leaving their mark, seemed to me a great good.
In the small hours of the morning, the democratic process, in its rude health, came out and did the fandango. It got stroppy. It punched a few people on the nose, because it could. It confused all the pundits and the pollsters and the psephologists, and it made David Dimbleby say ‘bloody hell’ on an open mic. (For my foreign readers, this is a bit like The Queen saying bugger.)
Twitter overheated and had to go in for repairs, its broken engine letting out great gasps of steam. All over the country, people who had planned to go to bed did not go to bed. Nobody knew what was happening. Jeremy Corbyn went in and out of his house like a jack-in-a-box, at least one MP appeared to be drunk on national television, and Ken Clarke stood square in his Hush Puppies and called everyone an idiot. (I love those elder statesmen, in the twilight of their careers. They have nothing to lose and no reason to stay on message, so they come out and say exactly what they think, and it’s like a tall glass of water.)
In the morning, the rumours started: on the telephone, on social media, in the street, on the email. ‘Did you hear?’ said the gossips, in shock and delight. ‘Did you hear?’ Did you hear that one Tory described Theresa May’s bus as the Bus of Fucking Failure? Did you hear that Conservative ministers are saying they did not know what was in the manifesto until they saw it on the BBC? Did you hear that Boris is already on manoeuvres? Did you hear that May would not consult anyone except for Nick Thing and Fiona Thing? The fierce rain of criticism rained down on the Prime Minister for a campaign that left people utterly baffled. The strange psychological power of expectations meant that Labour were being hailed as dazzling giant-slayers, even though they actually lost. Never was a defeat celebrated so much as if it were a victory. Everyone on the Left was dancing in the streets, because the young people came out, because even some of the Scots came home, because the hard Brexit landslide turned out to be a chimera.There were wild conspiracy theories that the Conservatives had thrown the election on purpose because they knew, in their secret hearts, that they could not climb Mount Brexit. Here in Scotland, the SNP juggernaut was picked up as if it were a Tonka toy and thrown off the road. There, said the voters, fed up with independence obsession and dire education results and the bonkerness of the Named Person plan, take that. The glittering, gleaming irony was that it was Scotland that stopped a complete Tory meltdown, even though the joke was for many years that Scottish Conservatives were as rare as giant pandas. The DUP, a small group of Northern Irish politicians, came blinking into the spotlight, like people who had spent many years living in a cupboard. Everybody had to scramble to remember who they were and what they stood for. Now, they were the kingmakers, the only people who could keep the government alive.‘What do you think,’ said a friend, pensively, ‘that the Queen is going to say to Theresa May?’Nobody knows, I think. Nobody knows anything. I have absolutely no idea what the electorate was trying to say or what this election means or where dear old Blighty will go from here. The democratic process, having had its little joke, has caught a bus to the seaside and is eating Brighton rock, leaving the country to wonder and ponder and gossip and speculate and bitch and celebrate and mourn.
I dream, idly, of a government of all the talents, a little like the one we had in the war. There were a lot of very poor performers in this election, but, in tiny offices and unsung constituencies and dark Whitehall corridors, there are good men and women of thought and talent. There are interesting people who did interesting jobs before they stood for parliament – doctors and soldiers and experts in foreign affairs – and when the government totters, as I suspect it will, I dream that they might all be called up, from across the party divides, to steer the ship through the stormy seas. That would never happen, of course, but wouldn’t it be lovely? These are serious times, which call for serious people. Nobody out in the front of these campaigns seemed to me very serious, or not serious enough. I yearn for a Dream Team, who would make all the nonsense make sense.

The New Rules. Or, The Battalions of the Ordinary.

Right. Britain has had three of these outrages in short order and I see that already a set of mores is being established. The British have an odd relationship with rules. They love rules (we Britons have unspoken rules for everything, especially saying sorry when someone else has bumped into us) but at the very same time, there is a cussed British desire to break the rules. However, there are, out there, floating in the zeitgeist, a new set of tacit rules being born.
As the first shock and sorrow settles, the shoulders are straightened and stoicism reasserts itself. There is a game of Second World War bingo as the Blitz spirit is invoked, Churchill is quoted, and someone says that if the Nazis could not finish us off then a rag-tag of nihilists aren’t going to do it.
There is the first slightly inappropriate joke. The joker says: too soon? Sometimes it is too soon, sometimes it isn’t.
Donald Trump writes something completely asinine on Twitter.
Someone unexpected – after Manchester it was James Corden – captures the spirit of the nation and goes viral.
One idiot who has been at the gin talks about ‘bombing them back into the stone age’.
The police and emergency services are brilliant. There is a warming glow of national pride at the brilliance. Every time, there is amazement and awe for the people who run towards the danger.
People help. The stories of the helpers start spreading and everyone concentrates very hard on those stories, as the best kind of silver lining.
There is a great deal of carrying on. We must carry on shopping, working, going to the park, going to the pub, walking the dog, voting, watching the football, or the terrorists have won.
The left say it’s nothing to do with religion; the right say it’s all to do with religion. A few bigots with no social skills get very excited because they think they were right all along.
Everybody says something must be done. Nobody quite knows what that something is.
Hard-liners who clearly have no friends start politicising a tragedy. Good-hearted people with many friends tell them to shut the fuck up.
In America, a pundit or broadcaster or newspaper will choose an infelicitous phrase or display a tin ear or get completely the wrong end of the stick and the Ordinary Decent Britons, as one, rise up in indignation. They punish the folly with devastating irony.
Some brilliant person will start the perfect hashtag. This time is it #ThingsThatLeaveBritainReeling. The resulting running jokes revolve almost exclusively around the great British talent for embarrassment. There will always, always be an unexpected item in the bagging area.
The BBC will be magnificent.
Everybody wants to chase Katie Hopkins out of town with pitchforks. She appears not to care.
JK Rowling will usually win the internet. (Four minutes after I wrote that sentence, she just did.)
A small, faintly obsessive subset of the population breathes a huge sigh of relief when it hears the theme tune to The Archers. If The Archers are still on, then the world must still be turning on its axis.
There will be a great deal of talk about love and community and standing together. There will be someone who gets furious about this and writes an impassioned article about how sentiment is not enough. That person will be right and wrong at the same time. The people who believe in love and community and togetherness will go on believing in those things.
Those who have hastily changed their profile picture on Facebook must wrestle with the excruciating dilemma of wondering how soon they can change it back without looking callous.
Tea always features strongly, in all its incarnations. In the secret heart of every Briton is the humming belief that the cure to all ills is a nice cup of tea. I don’t even like tea and I believe this.
Those of us of a certain age will remember the dark days of the seventies, when the IRA made bombing seem a fact of almost daily life. I remember my father swearing at the nine o’clock news as yet another act of violence was reported. I thought that would never end, not in my lifetime. Yet somehow, it did.

Slowly, carefully, small seeds of hope will sprout in a million hearts. As the worst side of human nature explodes into a quiet evening, so the best side of human nature will rise to brighten the dawn. 
There is the curious power of ordinariness. Social media will be filled with responses to the latest attack, and some of those responses will be mad and some will be magnificent. But alongside that, there will be the glorious, galvanic power of the ordinary. People will post pictures of their children, their dogs, their ponies (obviously the ponies are the finest tonic), of a family trip to the local or a walk on the beach. The punters will be trying to figure out who will win the 3.10 at Listowel and the psephologists will be puzzling over the latest polls and the pedants will be wincing over every misplaced apostrophe. I quite often say that love conquers hate, because I have to believe that is true. But today I think: what really wins is the very, very ordinary. There is a defiant glory to the ordinary. The battalions of the ordinary, I think, can match any army in the world.

Breaking news.

1.45am. Across the way from my house, there is a grand old cow barn. It was built in the nineteenth century, by a gentleman who adored his cows and wanted them to have a palace. It is known as the Coo Cathedral and now it is a place where weddings are held. Tonight, there was such a raucous party going on that I could not sleep. I went out just now to take the dogs for a walk and found a magical sight. The entire granite structure was lit up and music was pouring out into the still night air. As a happy band sang The Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond, a sinuous mist rose from the ground and a bright moon sailed in a dark sky. I looked at the scene, trying to take a snapshot in my mind. It was one of the most magical things I ever saw.I came back in and took one last look at the internet before bed. Somebody said something about London Bridge falling down. Another person said they were praying for London. My brain went into its familiar state of incomprehension. For moments, I did not understand. Then I checked and checked and went to the BBC and I could see that something shocking and strange and terrifying was happening.I had been thinking about Kabul, in the last few days. I did not know what to think about that or what to write about that. Kabul was on fire, and the atrocities came, one after another. They were bombing funerals. I had written about Manchester, but there are times when you run out of words. I thought about Kabul, but I did not know what to say about Kabul. Humans are flawed, and frail, and there is only so much shock that can be processed in any meaningful way. Distance should not matter, but it does. The things that happen close to home strike harder, because, well, home is home.There’s also the blind nature of hope. If I keep putting one foot in front of the other, keeping on with the normal, concentrating on the ordinary, everything will be all right. Equilibrium will return. I think most people believe this, and it is a blatant survival mechanism.
London was my home for a long time. I knew that great city like a sister and I loved her and she made me laugh and gave me joy. Borough Market and London Bridge are instant familiars, with cultural markers and known associations. And yet, I am five hundred miles north, as this news breaks. As this news breaks, I have come in from one of the most glorious, magical Scottish nights I ever saw. That’s the dissonance. That’s what makes my brain start to snap and sizzle, as if the neurones are exploding in incomprehension and disbelief. How can there be such peace and loveliness here and such carnage and panic there? As I get older, I sometimes think it slightly comical that I know nothing. When I see such news, the knowing nothing becomes a black, blank space. 

The Derby.

The minds who invented The Derby were fiendish minds. I love their fiendishness, and thank them across the almost two hundred and fifty years since they came up with the idea. It really did come from a dinner and then a party. I suspect drink was taken. The race was named on the flip of a coin. I doubt the gathered company knew they were starting the most famous, most coveted, most idiosyncratic flat race in the world.             Every year, when I think of The Derby, I wonder that any horse can win it, ever. You need so many qualities, an almost impossible package.             The horse has to have power and balance. The cambers of Epsom are brutal. At the beginning of the race, the course climbs swiftly to a height of about twenty double decker buses. The first thing these fine thoroughbreds are asked to do is slog up a hill. Then, as they crest the rise and catch their breath, the ground drops away from them. For a long way they are galloping flat out downhill.            Have you ever galloped down a hill on a half-ton flight animal? I’ve trotted my sweet mare down hills and even that is pretty hairy. She is fourteen years old, was slow as a boat when she raced, and is now a poised dowager duchess who teaches children to ride. But even so, trotting her down the Tarland Way is an act of trust. The ground falls away in front of me and I have to sit back and trust her completely to find her footing like a mountain goat. I imagine doing that perched over the withers of a race-fit colt, bred to be the best of his generation. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like, and imagination is my business.            You need a kind of brute strength too. The cambers and turns lead to jostling for position. A horse might get bumped in to, thrown off his stride. In a big field you can get boxed in, and a horse might have to forge his way out of the melée.            You need the tensile balance of a dancer. As the terrain shifts under him, that horse must stay perfectly balanced, change his legs, keep his body together, maintain his rhythm.            You need courage. Those horses are being asked the biggest question of their young lives, and they need proper guts.             You need speed, but you need stamina too. It’s a long mile and a half, so the thoroughbred has to stay, but has to have the quickness to put on a burst of velocity and fly to the line.            You need manners. From the moment the horse comes into the paddock, to being saddled up, to parading in front of the stands, to the hurly burly of the race itself, that horse is going to be asked a huge amount of questions. The polite horse says yes, of course. If you get a horse who is saying no, no, no, a huge amount of energy is going to be wasted. Some of the greatest of the greats have got away with being tricky, because they were so much better than anything else. Nijinsky was famously complex, but he could still skitter about the paddock and then go out on the track and boss his field. All the same, courtesy is a huge advantage.            A lot of people think having intelligence helps too. The intelligent horse will take all the jamboree in his stride, looking about with interest rather than becoming overwhelmed by the spectacle. And with intelligence comes temperament. A horse who is easy in his skin, at home with himself, will take the wild preliminaries with sanguine grace and save his power for the moment the starter lets him go. Sheer talent is not enough. There was the sad sight of Dawn Approach boiling over so that even the soothing hands of Kevin Manning could not reassure him. A brilliant horse threw away his race, because the occasion was all too much for him.            Epsom is a roiling cauldron of humanity. Very few courses have an antic infield. At The Derby, there is not only the seething crowd in the stands, but over the other side of the course there is a funfair, massed ranks of gleaming buses, and a roaring party. Horses used to the gentle heath of Newmarket will never have seen anything like it in their lives.            And, of course, you need raw talent. You need the diamond brilliance that comes with three hundred years of breeding. You need that extra special something, that sprinkle of stardust, the mysterious element that makes you catch your breath.            All that, in one ravishing equine mind and body. That is why whoever wins The Derby is a horse of horses.             I’ve no idea which shining star will emerge today. It’s an impossible Derby. There are more question marks than I can shake a stick at. I can make a good case for at least ten of them. I would not be at all surprised if something scooted home at 40-1. It’s that kind of year.            I’m not going to try and be clever. There’s no point poring over the form. I’m going to have two little love bets. I’m backing the horses that I want to win. I’m on Permian, even though I think he might not quite be top, top class. But he’s tough, and courageous, and willing, and he tries, and he’s improving all the time. He’s got a fighting heart and a lovely mind. And I’ll put a little bit on Eminent, although I’m not sure he’ll stay. He’s a very bright horse, and he’s a Frankel, and he’s got great power and scope, and he’s absurdly handsome. I love the way he goes about his business, and he, like his trainer, is a great gentleman.
            The Derby. It’s bonkers. Those fiendish minds really did come up with something for the ages. 

The Secret Environmentalist.

A very, very bonkers theory comes into my head and does a little dance. 
The bonkers theory is that Mr Trump has been doing a massive double-bluff all this time. I think he might be the greenest President ever. All the years when people thought he was merely living in golden towers and building vulgar resorts and pissing off the people of Aberdeenshire, he was in fact secretly hugging trees and reading Silent Spring.
When I first heard all the nonsense about Pittsburg not Paris and the bizarrely plaintive and oddly Freudian question ‘At what point do they start laughing at us?’, I felt the cold stone of despair sink in my stomach. There go the polar bears, I thought. The ice caps are buggered. Everyone had better start learning to grow their own food and begin stocking up on tinned goods. I put on my end of days hat and wondered where I had stashed the strong liquor.
But then I watched as the internet started to reveal a startling festival of defiance. Everywhere I looked, on the news, on the online newspaper sites, on the social media, people were standing up and saying no. It was like the iconic scene in Spartacus. Everyone was Spartacus.
What was so extraordinary was that it was not just the usual suspects. It was not the hippy dippy cohort in their beanie hats who think that Big Business would like to flood The Maldives with their bare hands. It was Big Business. It was stiffs in suits, the kind of people one would normally assume do not give a damn. It was China, for goodness’ sake. It was old school Republicans and rampant capitalists. The governors and mayors were digging in their heels, because the states and the cities would have their say. Newly minted President Macron stepped forward and had a dazzling moment in the sun.
I suddenly thought that poor old Bono and Leonardo di Caprio must be weeping into their tea. They’ve been trying to rally the troops for years, but they could never achieve anything like this. No concert or campaign or publicity stunt that they could muster would come close to uniting the entire world in a resolution to save the world. In one master-stroke, an elderly, incoherent, orange gentleman had brought the globe together. Donald Trump, madly, was teaching the world to sing. No other individual could get Mark Zuckerberg and Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil to read from the same page. On one side was Bashar Assad and some die-hards in Nicaragua and the American President and the mysterious entity that is Steve Bannon, and on the other side was everyone else.
The environment can feel very demoralising. What is happening to it can seem so big and inevitable and unstoppable that one puny human can feel powerless in the face of it. The moral conundrums are twisted and legion. Are you really going to tell a developing country that it can’t burn fossil fuels as the rich nations rest on the power that those very same fuels have provided for decades? Some of the renewables are beset with boondoggles and dodginess as subsidies reward those who need the money least. The local environment can feel at odds with the global environment. Good intentions get lost in the maze of politics and money. The head begins to ache, and many people retreat into a despairing apathy. However many eco-friendly lightbulbs I use, thinks the baffled human, I can’t save the polar bears.
The latest galloping Trumpism has galvanised those despairing humans. If the Chinese and the CEOs and lovely Justin Trudeau and the Mayor of Pittsburg are all in it together, maybe the planet is not doomed. The saving of the planet is suddenly at the front of a billion minds, and those minds are defiant and determined. Trump has turned worries about climate change from the low hum of background noise to the headline act.
I am an irredeemable optimist. This sounds perfectly charming, but in fact it’s very tiring. I hunt for silver linings like a pig hunts for truffles, and often my silver linings turn out to be made of lead. If you believe in the best – of people, of the world, of the human heart, even of history – you court an awful lot of disappointment. There is a great deal of picking oneself up and dusting oneself off and starting all over again. I may have gone too far this time. Perhaps, after all the kerfuffle, everyone will return to their default mode, which is sticking their heads in the sand like a flock of tired old ostriches. But I think this might be a sea change. The sight of the most powerful man on earth saying he does not give a bugger has made people realise that they really do give a bugger. They have woken up to find some surprising bedfellows. A furious cussedness is spreading, everywhere you look.

Perhaps this is an utter disaster, and that’s all she wrote. But I think there is a much more interesting and hopeful story. I think there is something shining and galvanic and surprising, between the lines. Perhaps, bizarrely, Mr Trump has made Thracian gladiators of us all. Perhaps this is the moment when millions of souls realise they have nothing to lose but their chains. 

The car is crashing.

Somewhere, in a darkened studio, not long after ten o’clock this morning, Jeremy Corbyn had a car crash. It was the kind you hear from miles away. They will have to close both lanes. The scorched tyre marks will never come off that road.
I don’t write much about politics, these days. I found the whole tribal loathing that was unleashed by the Scottish independence vote and then the referendum so tiring and saddening that I retreated into my cave and stared dolefully at the flickering shadows on the wall. Social media can be vastly entertaining in this area but also savage. If you say something even mildly political on Twitter, the hounds of hell may be unleashed. They are too barky for me. I tend to stick to racing. There’s no controversy in writing about the beauty of Winter soaring over the emerald turf of the Curragh.
But I happened to hear the screeching tyres and the shattered glass of the Corbyn interview. I listened in astonishment, thinking for a fleeting moment it must be some kind of spoof. It was lovely John Thing from Dead Ringers. (I’m like my dad now, I can’t remember anyone’s name. Everyone is Mr and Mrs and Ms Thing. Occasionally, there is obviously a Duchess of Thing.)
Apart from the fact that the interviewer actually told Mr Corbyn, in some astonishment, that he had already taken one telephone call and was now looking up things on his iPad, apart from the fact he had no figures to back up one of his main policies, there was something else which amazed me. It was the faint, sulphurous whiff of arrogance. Perhaps I was over-thinking this. Perhaps the poor man was just exhausted. I don’t think he likes campaigning very much. All those inconvenient questions about things he said thirty years ago, all that forensic examining of his positions, all that insistence on numbers actually adding up: no wonder he sounds cross. But there was a part of me that wondered whether there was a subconscious thought that going on a show with the word ‘woman’ in the title would be a breeze. That charming blonde female with the mellifluous voice would surely be a walk in the park. As Emma Barnett started to out-Paxo Paxo, I could hear a note of almost resentful amazement creep into Corbyn’s voice. The women were supposed to be a soft gig. Promise them all a pony, mention cupcakes and shoes, and then go home.
I’m sure I’m being unfair. There was something about that car crash interview that made me furious and it’s not to do with Corbyn himself. It’s not to do with left or right or men or women or Brexiteers or Remainers. It’s the whole shower. I’ve spent my entire life believing in government, having faith in the state, in a mixed economy, in the Scandinavian miracle. (People are starting to say now that it’s not such a miracle after all, which is yet another hopeful illusion dashed.) I always stuck up for politicians, even when they were making a horlicks of everything with the expenses fiasco. I was absolutely not one of those people who shook their heads and sucked their teeth and said ‘they’re all the same’.
But in this election, I’m fed up with the whole damn lot. There isn’t a single clarion call, a single ringing voice, a single galvanising mind that makes me want to leap to the barricades and plant a flag. There’s pretty rubbish, slightly crap, and rather disappointing. The Tories are doing robotic on-message with a side order of bitching and Labour don’t seem able to write fuck on a dusty blind. I don’t even know what the Lib Dems are doing, and I’m not sure they do either.
Meanwhile, there are children in poverty and old people who can’t afford care and Donald Trump running around like an infant who has had too much sugar and fundamentalists who would like to blow up the world. Who is going to pick up the reins and make sense of this crazy hill of beans? (I’m so cross I’m mixing my metaphors; always a sign of strong emotion.) I want so much to have faith in someone. And there is nobody who inspires faith.
I understand that politicians are caught always between voters and reality. Voters are both eminently sensible and quite naughty. There is a fundamental fairness in the British electorate. They tend to give one side a go, and then, when that side runs out of steam or mucks things up or becomes moribund, they give the other side a shot. But the voters also do what all voters do, which is want stellar public services and low taxes. That’s the rock and the hard place. That’s the naughty part. That’s the reason that politicians won’t answer the question. They dare not address the huge truth which is that you can’t have both. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have the numbers, because nobody has the numbers. Everyone shades the truth and trims and changes the subject. The great ship that is the NHS creaks and groans and takes on water and no-one really knows how she is going to go on sailing over an increasingly stormy sea.

That car crash was a universal car crash. It could have been any politician on any show. They are not all the same, but, in their different ways, they are not doing the people of Britain proud. This is the first election I can remember where I really don’t want to vote. I cherish my vote, because so many women battled for me to have it. They chained themselves to railings and submitted to the Cat and Mouse Act and faced down hatred and calumny so I could put my cross in the box. When I go into that little wooden booth, I take the Pankhursts with me, every time. All I have, this year, is Least Worst. It is not a choice that makes my heart sing. I know that politics is not unicorns and stardust, but it feels as if this election is hitting a new low. I shall go into the Victory Hall on the 8th of June and make my mark, with slow fingers and dragging steps and a heavy heart. It won’t feel like victory. It is the very epitome of making do. The British are awfully good at making do, but I’m sick of it. 

Manchester

For the last ten years, I thought that radical fundamentalist terrorists were amateur hour. Every single death is a tragedy; every single loss breaks someone’s heart. But if you are trying to bring down Western civilisation, I thought, you’ve got to try a bit harder than this. After every outrage, every cruel, pointless killing spree, everyone went back to normal. They did not throw up their hands and say: you were right, bring on the Caliphate. They did not shroud themselves in yards of cloth and stop sending their girls to school. It’s not quite normal, of course For some people, for the bereaved, for the wounded, for the traumatised, there will never again be normal. But France and America and Britain and Belgium and all the other seats of Satan went on shopping and squabbling and voting and joking and working. People still got drunk on a Saturday night and weeded the garden and felt the jolting miracle of new life when a baby was born.And then there was Manchester. For a moment, this did not feel like amateur hour. But then the voice of rage in me said that was exactly what it was. The furious voice said: it was the act of the craven, the howl of the already defeated, the addled shout of the lost argument. You want to tear down Britain, for whatever crazed reason, and you kill our children. You choose the softest, most innocent target. Is that what you call the big league? Do you really think that is going to work? Whoever did this has broken human hearts into a hundred smashed pieces. They have engendered shock and grief and perhaps fear. They have disrupted ordinary life on the streets of an ordinary city on an ordinary Monday night. But they have achieved nothing. I don’t know whether they do this truly in the name of some notion of religion, in the shadow of some great god, or whether it’s just the spasm of a nihilist death cult. I don’t know what it is they really want. Perhaps their spirits are so curdled with hate that they simply want hate to win. Hate never wins. I got to the feed shed this morning, on a quiet sunny day in Scotland, and found my friend already there, making the horses their breakfast. It seemed impossible that there was death and destruction out there in dear old Blighty. We looked at each other with tears glittering in our eyes and then we exploded with rage. We were so furious we were shaking. My friend has a daughter who adores Ariana Grande. ‘They are killing the children,’ we said, in fury. Those daughters were my friend’s daughter. Those daughters were my little Isla who comes to ride the red mare every Sunday. We don’t know those children but they are our children. We swore and stomped our feet and could not stand still. Some stupid fuck thought it was a good idea to blow himself up and take undefended innocents with him. We talked of Manchester. There is something about Manchester. You don’t mess with Manchester. Its people did not cower behind closed doors, but came out onto the streets, to help. Mancunians were opening their houses to the stranded, giving blood, offering lifts, guiding lost people through the cordoned-off streets. Taxi drivers from Liverpool drove over to give free rides to those who needed them. The Luftwaffe tried to bomb Manchester into submission and that did not work. The IRA gave it a go, with even less success. This new attack will not work any more than those others did. Hope, cussedness, life itself, will rise again.The dealers in death can kill. That is all they can do. They don’t build anything up or make anything better or leave any enduring legacy. If they want to bring Blighty to its knees they will have to get every single school dinner lady, every farmer, every nurse. They will have to get the beekeepers and the physicists and the poets. They will have to take out the studio managers who keep Radio Four on the air, and the people who save endangered species, and the vets. They will have to smash the Chelsea pensioners and the buskers and the bobbies on the beat. They will have to destroy every single one of Shakespeare’s plays, and every one of Churchill’s speeches, and every line Jane Austen ever wrote. They will have to cut down the old oak trees and demolish Stonehenge and reduce the Tower of London to rubble. They will have to crush the indomitable spirit of the people of these rocky, rainy islands, and I don’t like their chances. I am so angry I am shaking. I can write these defiant words, and I do feel defiant. I do believe, in my deepest heart, that love will always conquer hate. But that does not bring back the dead. Four hundred miles south, there is a parent whose life will always have a piece missing. I think of those mothers, those fathers, those sisters, those brothers, those friends. Their lives just got torn up, like a piece of paper. And for what? For some twisted idea that the haters hardly even understand themselves? It’s so much waste: wasted lives, wasted tears, wasted, aching hearts.Britain is a tough old bird. It is an ancient country, and it’s taken its blows and survived. I read a lot about the Second World War and I’m reading yet another book about Churchill at this very moment. Every time I trace that part of our island story, I can’t quite believe that Blighty came through that darkest hour. I don’t know how the people of London survived the Blitz, or the citizens of Coventry came through their firestorm, or daily life reasserted itself in the beleaguered cities and ports. I don’t know how those young boys went out on no sleep to fight off the swarming Messerschmitts on mockingly sunny days in 1940. I don’t know how Britons dealt with the daily fear of invasion, when it seemed that nothing stood between them and the unleashed fury of the Third Reich.
They must have been angry too, and tired, and frightened. Somehow, they stood together, and prevailed. Hate, I think, does not, must not, will not win.  

(The picture is of  the Manchester Blitz, and is from the collection of the Imperial War Museum.  Sadly, no photographer is credited, but someone was out there on the streets, doing sterling work.)

One For Arthur.

Yesterday, a rather curious thing happened. The horse who won the Grand National was not even mentioned in running until just before the second last. I had backed the horse who won the Grand National, but because I could not see him and nobody mentioned him, I spent most of the race thinking my money was down the drain. About half way through I spotted a loose horse with a white face a bit like his and thought, oh, he’s fallen and nobody saw it. Hold on a second, I thought, One For Arthur doesn’t fall. In his entire racing career, he’s never had a single fall. I thought: what on earth is going on? I madly squinted at the screen, but I could not see him. It was all happening too fast. I kept looking for his white cap but I could only see the pale blob of the McManus colours.Afterwards, as I watched the race back, I realised that if I had been watching Racing UK instead of ITV, I would have been more reassured. Their commentator mentioned One for Arthur at the thirteenth fence. But even there, I would have had trouble. It wasn’t the commentators’ fault. Arthur was so far back in the field that he often dropped off the television picture altogether. I had put my money on One For Arthur because I loved him, because he’s one of the most honest horses I’ve ever seen, because despite being a gentle stable favourite he’s tough as old boots, because he won brilliantly at Warwick last time out over a marathon trip, and because he is Scottish. One for Scotland, I kept saying. Of course Arthur isn’t really Scottish at all. He’s an international man of mystery. He was bred in Ireland and both his grand-sires were American. His great-grandsire, Northern Dancer, was Canadian. He is, like many thoroughbreds, a citizen of the world. Despite his kind, honest face, his journeyman racing style, and his absolutely enormous loppy ears, he turns out to be unbelievably posh. He’s got aristocrats of the flat all over his pedigree – champion milers and Derby winners and conquerors of the Breeders’ Cup turf. I know absolutely sod all about breeding, it’s such a recondite art and science, but that seems to me an astonishing heritage for a horse who has just won a race over four and a quarter miles. (If the brilliant Jim McGrath were here, he would no doubt shake his sage head and smile his twinkly smile and show me the bags of stamina that exist on the bottom line.) But Arthur is trained in Scotland, in the green fields of Kinross, by the admirable Lucinda Russell and her assistant, Peter Scudamore. So he counts as Scottish, for his friends in the north. One For Arthur is one for Scotland, the first National winner trained north of the border since Rubstic, almost forty years ago.It was the Scottishness that excited me as I gazed out over my own Scottish hills and woods and valleys, but it was that victory at Warwick which really gave me hope. As the race grew closer and I went through the form over and over again, I felt sure that Scottish flags would be flying. Almost every horse had a question mark, as they so often do in this race. The ones who had been here before, like Saint Are, were getting a bit long in the tooth, or were, like The Last Samuri, heavily weighted. There were some who had questions over their stamina and some who did not much like big fields (some horses get very claustrophobic and hate to be crowded) and some who were not the most reliable jumpers. One For Arthur didn’t seem to have that many questions. He’d been over these fences before, and closed like a train in the Becher Chase, and although he’d never run over this far before, he had finished over a long distance in his last race ‘like a fresh horse’ as the commentator said that day. The only thing that started to worry me, as the sun shone and shone and shone on the antic Aintree crowds, was that the ground was drying up. Arthur had form on good ground, but the consensus seemed to be that he liked it soft. Peter Scudamore admitted that as the ground grew firmer in the sunshine he wouldn’t have minded putting Arthur in the lorry and driving him straight back to Scotland. It wasn’t just the rattling hooves that made me fretful. I knew that the drying ground meant the field would go off at a hundred miles an hour. One For Arthur is not a flashy front-runner. He tends to mosey round at the back and make his move late. I was fearful that he would not keep up with the frantic early pace and get too far out of his ground and then it would be too late, and all his honesty and all his heart would be in vain.In the old days, National heroes often used to hunt round at the back for the first circuit, getting into a nice rhythm, keeping out of trouble, waiting for the field to thin out, and then pick up the tired horses towards the end. The received wisdom is that, as the race has changed over the years, a jockey can’t do that any more. The rather wonderful thing is that Derek Fox, only twenty-four and having his first ride in the race, rolled back the years and did absolutely precisely that. He might have been John Oaksey or Michael Scudamore or Bob Champion. For all his youth, he did it the old-fashioned way.So there I was, trembling hands clutching my pint of Guinness, staring and squinting at the television screen, unable to see my brave boy, convinced he had been lost in the melée. Blaklion, one of the favourites for the race, was blazing off in front, jumping for fun, and seemingly full of running. And then, suddenly, there was Arthur. He seemed to appear out of the pack like magic. Two fences to go, and the commentator spotted him for the very first time. ‘One For Arthur is making significant progress,’ he said, a faint note of surprise in his voice. Significant progress was right. The bonny fella was swinging along, and, in a gloriously bold manoeuvre, he rolled past six, seven, eight, nine horses as if they were standing still. Derek Fox didn’t even have to ask him a question, he simply pointed him in the right direction and Arthur said: yes, yes, let’s go. And then, just as he was finally getting into contention after that long, long hunt at the back, as my heart was beating and my hopes were rising, he jumped the second last and went smack into Blaklion, who was slowing down. This would be enough to bring lesser horses to their knees. Even if they could stand up after a thirty-mile-an hour collision, many of them would have entirely lost their stride and their rhythm and their momentum. Some of them would find their confidence faltering and would need to be nursed back into the race. Arthur did not even blink. He did not deviate. He simply kept on galloping as if Blaklion were not there.I remembered vaguely having seen him get hampered and pick himself up in exactly the same way somewhere before. He’s not a great big slab of muscle who looks built to shoulder aside other runners, but he is fiercely tough. He seems, if it is not too fanciful a thing to say, to have a rather sunny view of the world. He can have an early race stumble or a coming together and he doesn’t let it fret him. If he were a human, he would be an optimist. Yes, he seems to say, life happens, but I’m still going to run at it at full tilt. Many great horses have a mental resilience as much as a physical strength, and good Arthur, for all his reputed sweetness (‘a real gentleman, a massive softie,' they say of him at home), seems to have that streak of mental steeliness in spades.
Coming to the last, he forged into the lead, almost hurdled the final fence, roared round the murderous Elbow where so many horses hit the wall, found the rail, stuck his neck out, pricked his ears, and ran straight to the line, leaving the field streaming behind him like fluttering banners in a light wind. His only conceivable danger was the gallant Cause of Causes, rallying in second, but Arthur was not for catching. He won by four lengths and you felt he could have made that six or seven if he’d wanted to. He’s not a swaggery horse. He didn’t need to prove his point. He’d done exactly what he needed to do and that was enough.After the post, he came back to a nice trot, tilted his head politely at the people who came rushing up to put water on him on this hot day, gave a little look at their buckets and sponges as if to say: don’t mind me, you go ahead and do what you have to do. I had been shouting ‘GO ON ARTHUR’ at the top of my voice. Now I shouted: ‘I DON’T BELIEVE IT.’ And: ‘Arthur did it.’ And: ‘Oh, oh, oh, you beautiful boy.’ And then I burst into tears, because brave horses like that always make me cry and I had thought all was lost and the dream was over, and then that dream came to shining, shattering life at the very end.One For Arthur was not really an underdog, when you looked at what he had done. He ticked, as they say, an awful lot of boxes. But somehow he felt a bit like an underdog. He was trained in one of the smaller National Hunt yards, north of the border, not one of the huge operations in Lambourn or Ireland. His trainer had spent the night before the race not in a swanky hotel, but in her camper van in the car park. He was not ridden by a household name, one of the giants of the weighing room, but by a young man who had broken his wrist only a month before and had barely passed the doctor. He was owned not by a plutocrat or a multi-millionaire, but by two very jolly women who had known each other from childhood and who, by their own account, decided to buy a horse together after having a few gins. Ed Chamberlin of ITV Racing had got very excited about The Golf Widows, as they call themselves, after their victory at Warwick, liking the fact that you don’t have to be a super-rich owner with a string of stars to win some really nice races, and there had been a bit of publicity about them and their good horse in the weeks before the race, but, for all that, Arthur was hardly mentioned in the preliminaries. The talking horses were Blaklion, Vieux Lion Rouge, and Definitly Red. (The story went round that Definitly Red was spelt like that because the man who registered his name filled in the form after having a few drinks in the pub. I’m sure that’s not true, but I’d rather love it to be true.) There was a bit of chat about the mighty Mullins/Walsh combination and the Gigginstown posse. In the Racing post, of the six top tipsters only one chose One For Arthur. There was someone on Twitter who loved Arthur so much they had taken the Twitter name One For Arthur and backed him off the boards for weeks. And at fourteen to one, he was high enough in the market, not a forlorn hope at 50-1. (There was some suspicion that it was patriotic Scottish money and people who were called Arthur or knew someone called Arthur. A lot of Grand National betting comes down to the name, as the once-a-year punters pick their fancies not on form but on superstition and whim and sheer what the hell.) So staunch, stalwart Arthur had rather slipped off the radar, and as he gently hunted round at the back nobody had thought to look for him. As he came from the clouds, from that impossible position, having made no fuss, getting on with the job in his reliable, likeable fashion, it seemed as if the forgotten horse was suddenly being recollected. Here I am, he said, still going. Remember me?Oh, yes, I said. I remember you, you absolutely brilliant boy.As the dust settled and my mind cleared and my heartbeat returned to a vaguely normal rhythm, I went back over the replays, trying to see how it had been done. He had the jumping, that was for sure. I don’t think he touched a twig. He had the toughness, as he forged on after that incident at the second last. He had the stamina and the fitness and the enthusiasm. He had a great partnership with his jockey, was given a lovely, sympathetic, patient ride. Fox did not panic, did not hassle his fella, but let him find his rhythm (rhythm wins races, the sages always say) and gave him all the time in the world. Those two knew each well and had faith in each other, and that counts for an awful lot.In the end, I think that a lot of that great victory was a victory of character. If horses are understood and handled well, they grow easy in their skin and at home in the world. They reflect what their humans put into them. The team at Lucinda Russell’s yard have made Arthur what he is. I think he is a naturally honest, open, confident horse whose innate character has been allowed to shine because of the way he’s been treated. I thought of this because of what happened just before the race. As the build-up grew, some horses and jockeys got excited and charged the tape and the starter had to call them back. In the front line, there was One For Arthur, who moved immediately into a willing canter, thinking it was time to go. As the false start was called, his jockey circled him back around. A lot of horses at this stage, hopped up on adrenaline, throw their heads in the air, resisting the instruction from the saddle. They are the products of three hundred years of breeding, for speed and strength. They are flight animals, and their ancestral voices are calling to them. Sweet Arthur, as courteous as a courtier, bowed his head and turned gently around, as if he was saying: fine, Derek, whatever you say. No rush, he seemed to be saying. Looking back, I almost think the race was won there. That horse was so cool, so poised, so polite, so responsive that he wasted no energy: not in the paddock, not in the parade, not on his way down, not at the boiling cauldron that is the start. Any racecourse is ludicrously designed to make a horse wig out. Horses are biologically programmed to be suspicious of sudden movement, of unknown environments, of shadows (they have poor depth perception and can see shadows as canyons), of random noise. That is what kept the species alive over thousands of years. On a big day, such as the Grand National, all this hullabaloo is ratcheted up to a Spinal Tap eleven and some of the more sensitive types can go over the top and lose their race before it even starts.Some horses have more sanguine temperaments than others. They are individuals, just like humans, and, just like humans, there are some who can barrel their way through life, blithe and bonny. Some are naturally more wary, more prone to lose their confidence, more likely to become unsettled. If those horses have good humans around them, who understand them and listen to them, they learn to build confidence and have trust.I think One For Arthur is a genuinely nice horse, but he also has a team around him who are horsewomen and men to their bones. So he can go into the crazy atmosphere of the big day, with the tannoys and trumpets and teaming crowds and still say: yes, Derek, whatever you want. He has read his Kipling. He knows how to keep his head while others are losing theirs. Brilliance in horses is a mysterious thing. It’s hard to say that One For Arthur is not a creature of joyful natural talent, after what he did yesterday. But on paper, he was not the classiest horse in the race. He may, however, have been the most straightforward. He stayed entirely unruffled, sweetly willing, gloriously genuine, answering every question with a mannerly yes. A picture was posted later that night of him back at home in his box, looking as composed and relaxed as if he’d just come back from doing a quiet bit of work on the gallops. It sounds too bonkers to say that Arthur won the most famous race in the calendar because he’s a really nice person, but I have an irresistible suspicion that his niceness and his goodness and his willingness all helped give him wings.
After all the jubilee and turmoil and wild celebrations were long over, I went down to the silent field where my own thoroughbreds were dozing, waiting for their tea. I smiled at my sleepy red mare. ‘Arthur did it for Scotland,’ I said. She gave me a look. She blinked, entirely unimpressed, because she does not speak English and she does not know what the Grand National is. I laughed, and put down her bucket of feed. She whickered happily. The rattle of that bucket is a language she does understand. She never saw the point of racing, but she sees the point of a damn good bit of food. I felt reality return. I get tremendously carried away by the big days. One For Arthur is a great athlete who went out and did his magnificent job, but he, just like my slow red mare, will care not for the glory or the silver trophies or the heaps of newsprint that will be written about him in the wake of his flying victory, but that his reliable human will be pitching up with his own bucket. I suspect it might have an extra carrot or two in it today. 

Absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. (It appears to have something to do with cardboard boxes.)

The work storm is still blowing a hooley. There are now 19,000 new words. This is easily the craziest project I ever started. At the end of each day I feel as if someone surgically removed my brain and hit it with a baseball bat.
The small things continue very small. The pied wagtails have arrived. Mr Wagtail, for I think it is he, smiles and bows at me in the field each morning. I have heard the first woodpecker, the first cry of the oystercatchers, but not seen the birds. They remain ghostly presences, calling out their different songs. I did some HorseBack work and wrote something for the red mare’s Facebook page. She has a book to promote, so there must be stories to spread the word. Also, I always think that she could die at any time. I don’t mean this in a ghoulish way, but in a realistic way. Horses are fabulously fragile: one random infection or a false step in the field can do for them. She is the love of my life and because she is written down she’ll always live with me.
I do actual chores. I’m crap at chores. No, no, I think to myself, I can’t possibly do chores now, I shall do them tomorrow. Today’s chores are not glamorous. There is a lot of sweeping of floors and taking vast cardboard boxes to the incinerator. Because clever Amazon Prime has me in its beam, I now buy everything from dried Marigold flowers (good for the mares’ digestion) to Wagg liver treats (good for the dogs’ training) from there and smiling women and heavily tattooed men arrive at the door with boxes big enough to enclose a small tractor. The boxes are so big that they often can hardly fit into the door. I then have to manhandle them into the car (also quite small) and take them to the great pit where my neighbouring builders burn their rubbish. The slots of the recycling skip in the village are far too pathetically small to even entertain such monsters.
I love the convenience of the deliver to the door. I curse and loathe those absurd boxes. I stare at them balefully as they loll drunkenly about the house, making it look like one of those places to which ITV sends decluttering experts who purse their lips and mutter under their breath.
Today, I grasped the fuckers with both hands and got rid of the lot. This is not exactly a prize-winning achievement, but I have a holy sense of satisfaction, as if I have done something properly good. The small things, it turns out, do not only have to be love and trees and moss and whickers. The dullest chores can sometimes make me feel like a saint.

I even listened with attention to PM whilst I tidied the kitchen this evening, so I have some hazy idea of the rewriting of twenty thousand European laws. When I was very doleful about Brexit I said to the dear Stepfather, with a slightly hollow bravado: well, at least the lawyers will be pleased. There will be lots of work for the lawyers, and lawyers spend money, so they’ll keep the economy going, I said. The lawyers will buy Maseratis and go out for expensive coffee and raise consumer confidence, I insisted. I was joking. But now I think I might have been closer to the mark than I knew. 

The perfect storm.

I find myself in a sudden work storm. I’ve been searching about for the impetus to go ahead with a new project. The problem is that I had four on the go. One is an old one, half finished, to which I could go back. One is new, just started. One exists, but needs a huge amount of editing and reworking and ordering and I’m not convinced it is viable anyway. (I think it was one of those ones that sounded good on paper, and does not quite work. Sometimes I have to be ruthless with those ones.) I’ve been dithering about, moving back and forth between all these not entirely satisfactory projects, rather uninspired and feeling as if I were wading through mud. Then, out of the blue, lightning struck and the one I really wanted fell into my head, fully formed. This happens sometimes. I just have to take dictation.
So I started writing it. It’s rather eccentric, like so many of my favourite projects, and I don’t care. It’s rolling out like a great, cresting wave. I’ve done thirteen thousand words in six days. This is an absurd amount of words. Usually, when I’m writing that fast, I go back and find it is all buggery bollocks. But I like these words, as I read them back. Yes, I think, those really are some words.
When a storm hits like this, it takes me out of the world. I turn on the wireless and I hear the news, but my brain does not process the news. I look at my Facebook timeline, where I subscribe to every single site about American politics, British politics, and world news. I read the sentences, but my brain does not process the sentences. I know vaguely that people are very cross about The Daily Mail and Nicola Sturgeon’s legs, that Donald Trump and the Republicans have screwed up their healthcare bill, that Tesco has done something unspeakable, and that everyone is very cross about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. These things exist in a liminal state, on the edge of my consciousness. Normally, they would be things that would interest me deeply. I’d want to look them up and find out more about them and have informed opinions on them. As it is, they scroll past me as if they are on some kind of blurred tickertape. I’m not even watching the racing. I can’t tell you whether it is Kelso or Market Rasen today or who is running.

All that exists is this book in my head and the ground under my feet and my good animals. The animals become very real in this odd, twilight mental state. They are my anchors to reality. When I walk the dogs or work the mares, they are animate and present and vitally important, pulling me back into the moment. Everything else is glimmering, shimmery shades of grey.