Dispatches From The North

The sun shines, out of a pellucid Scottish sky. The beeches have turned a colour for which I have no word. Scarlet would be paltry and insulting. Outside, men are doing manly things, mostly involving tractors and those huge machines with the vast digging claw at the front. I just ran into two fellows who were chopping up socking great trees. They were so pleased with their own manliness that it made them laugh.

I’m always a bit startled by this sort of thing. I spent most of my life surrounded by metrosexuals and homosexuals and trannies, before I came up here. Admittedly, I did grow up amongst hardy racing people, but all my brothers and most of my male cousins are tremendously camp. The butch male in full cry is mildly surprising to me.

I try to get on. I run errands. I make mushroom soup for my mother, in a blatant attempt to get to the top of the children’s list. I think about work. I do not actually do any work, but I think about it, which is a humming step in the right direction. After my father died last year, I could not work properly for three weeks. All my concentration was shot. I am in awe and wonder of those people who quickly get back to normal after a bereavement. Robert Peston lost his wife not long ago, but there he is, on the BBC, still knowing everything about the economy, his distinctive voice strong and steady, even making jokes with the presenters. That’s real Blitz spirit, I think.

I’m not near normal yet. The world swings on, but mine has a space in it. I really, really miss my dog. I veer between thinking this is perfectly normal and scolding myself for overcooking the whole thing. She was with me every day for ten years, I suppose. That’s a lot of companionship. Because I work from home, and rarely venture far from Scotland, in terms of sheer hours I probably spent more with her than with any other sentient creature. Even in the house, she was my faithful shadow, following me from room to room, patient and questing. I miss odd things, like the sound of her paws on the wooden floor, and the sheer beauty of her. I am suffering an aesthetic lack, so I stare very hard at the hills to get my share of loveliness.

On the other hand, I am aware that this is a most ordinary, small grief. I once looked up the number of human deaths in Britain each year, for a book. It was around six hundred thousand. I remember being astounded by the thought of all that mourning. That’s an awful lot of funerals. That’s a lot of empty rooms. And yet everyone goes on, without making a fuss. I must not make a fuss, I think.

In the flower shop, in the chemist, in the newsagent all the kind village people remark on the weather, which is fine, and ask how I am. ‘Very well, thank you,’ I say, lying. I want to say: MY DOG DIED. But you can’t say that, because it sounds silly, and no one knows what the correct response is. The dog people get it, but everyone else would not really understand.

The horse gets it, oddly. Horses are amazingly telepathic. She follows me about the field, whickers sweetly at me, lays her head over my shoulder, gently pushes her forehead into my chest. She is as soft and dopey as an old dog herself. The furry Welsh pony, on the other hand, has no time for sentiment. She just wants the pony nuts she knows I have in my pocket, and cooks up four different plans to get them. This ruthless streak makes me laugh.

I cast about for a good last line. There must always be a good last line. My old teacher, Mr Woodhouse, taught me that, when he was training me to write history essays. I don’t have a good one, so I’m going to steal a great one. This is what just came into my head, from the end of The Great Gatsby, a book I used to read once a year, when I was in my twenties and quite obsessed with F Scott Fitzgerald. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ Yes, I think; that will do.

My darling old dog is in her last days. She has developed an incurable condition and the vet has said the dread words: she shall have to be put down. It may be this week, it may be next, but it is coming.

I fall at once to pieces, overwhelmed by idiot grief. Her sister died last year, and the thought of an empty house, with no glorious canine presence in it, is almost unbearable. It never ceases to amaze me, the animal love. The four-legged creatures trot and canter their way into my heart, and set up shop there, and it doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself that it is not the same as a human, that there are much greater griefs out there, the sense of loss is dark and deep.

Then I pull myself together, because life must go on. In order to distract myself, I write some grant proposals for HorseBack UK, a local charity which I support.  It does sterling work with men and women who have been wounded in war. I can’t remember if I have told you of it before. It is an extraordinary organisation. The veterans come and work with American Quarter Horses, in the blue Deeside hills, and the combination of the beauty and peace, the equine therapy, and the fact the courses are run by those who have been injured on the front line themselves, produces an amazing healing effect. Working with the horses in particular seems to restore a sense of self. Men with no legs can get up and ride out into the hills; a veteran with acute post-traumatic stress told me the other day that he had his first proper night’s sleep in six months.

This proposal thing is a new kind of writing for me. My default writing mode is quite emotional and even, on occasion, a little flowery. If in doubt, I go for the poetical. If I can cram in some Shakespeare or Eliot, so much the better. But if you are asking a serious organisation (in the most recent case, the British government) for money, you can’t do hearts and flowers. In my own personal writing, I dare risk people thinking I am a bit of a flake, but if someone in the Ministry of Defence thinks it, then the jig is up.

I have to learn to rein in my excesses, and be businesslike and empirical. At the same time, because what HorseBack does is so out of the ordinary, I have to try to express that. The sentences cannot be bog-standard, because the organisation is not standard at all. I flip back and forth between the extravagant and the workaday; I ruthlessly examine adjectives for utility.

I am so impressed and enchanted by this operation that I have become quite zealous on its behalf. I dream of meeting a billionaire at a party, and so bewitching him with tales of horses and soldiers that he will at once donate half his fortune to the cause. This is unrealistic on several levels. I rarely go to parties, and I have never met a billionaire in my life. There aren’t too many of them running round the Aberdeenshire hills. Still, that appears to be my new dream.

In the meantime, I apply to foundations and government departments, hoping that if only I can get the words right, the cash may come. It is the most serious form of writing I have ever done. Until now, all that was at stake was my amour-propre. Now, something I type on a page may translate into an actual good, for actual humans, who really need it. It is the best corrective I have ever found for a burdened heart.

The old dog is sleeping beside me. She chased her stick this morning. As long as she does that, I know there is a little life force left. I shall make these last days as sweet for her as I can. I am profoundly sad, but she has given me so much joy. She owes me nothing. I wish she could live forever, but when the time comes, I must send her gentle into that good night.

A tentative email arrives from the editor. I forgot to do the blog. I FORGOT THE BLOG.

This is not good. This week was supposed to be my organised week. I have about eighteen things to do and no hours to do them in. It was going to be multi-tasking a go-go.

Who started this stupid rumour that women are really, really good at multi-tasking? Who came up with the hideous word in the first place? All it actually means is doing lots of things at once. It carries a subtext too, although this may be an inference too far on my part.  The subtext is that the females are not only really good at doing lots of things at once, but they do not complain about the lots of things. This is our great talent, we must be true to our calling. No moan shall escape our lips; no, no, because we are ladies, and we work like little pit ponies, clip-clopping up and down the livelong day.

A woman from ASDA was on the Today programme this morning. I’m sure she is a perfectly nice person and very good at her job, but she said something that really rubbed me up the wrong way. She said that the supermarket’s greatest concern was for ‘our busy mums’. Perfectly harmless, you might think. It’s not as if ASDA is raping the land or depriving grandmothers of their pensions. But something about it made me crazy. It’s that chummy ‘mums’; it’s the slightly patronising nod to them all being so very busy. I thought, furiously: what about the fathers? And the good-for-nothing singles, which is my cohort? Are we to be ignored by the retail giants?

I tweeted crossly on the subject, and one of my fellow twitterers wrote back: ‘Having it all = doing it all.’ Back I circled to the evil rumour of the ladies and their brilliance in multi-tasking. I can’t believe I am completely unrepresentative of my gender, but I have no ability at all to do more than one thing at once. In a week like this week, when I have four different deadlines, a book to write, at least one new secret project (there is always a secret project), and slightly odd things like the building of a new feed shed to oversee, everything goes to pot. Piles of paper mount on my desk, faint panic gallops by my side like a grumpy bronco, vital telephone calls go unmade, my hair looks like I have been dragged through a briar patch, and my email inbox resembles feeding time at the zoo. I also, as you can see, fall into hyperbole, mixed metaphors and insane similes.

I suppose it’s too dull never to generalise. I do it myself. Women do this, I have written in the past; men think that. A little generalisation can add to the gaiety of nations, and conversation would be very stilted and pedantic without it. But some sweeping statements are pernicious, hardening prejudice and bolstering bigotry. Old, ugly ones have gone into the file of things that decent people no longer say. The idea of the ladies with their excellence at a multitude of tasks is one of those that sounds like acompliment, but in fact is more of a curse. If we females are so fine at doing everything at once, the implication is that the big old fellas must do one thing at a time, and that thing will be the serious, important article, like running the country or heading the United Nations or discovering the Higgs Boson Particle.

I may be over-egging this. Trying to cram in too much makes me fractious and prone to over-reaction. It may just be displaced angst because I FORGOT THE BLOG. But, for what it’s worth, that is my small, cross theory of the day.

The weather has suddenly grown deathly serious. This morning, the temperature was minus three degrees. That is proper, no messing cold. The thing that interests me about weather is how much difference height makes. I know this is an obvious point, and if I had any meteorological knowledge it would not surprise me so, but it does. My horse lives three miles from my house, up a hill. As I drive to see her each morning, I watch the degrees drop, their little red numbers falling on my car dashboard. It is usually two or three points colder up there, just because of a short climb. The mountain shows the difference height makes, too. It is already wearing its demure cap of white, where the first snow has come.

Because this is the first Scottish winter with my mare, I am thinking about the weather in a completely different way. Normally, when the mercury falls, it is just a question of battening down the hatches and making sure I have enough heating oil, and dreaming of stews and soups. Now, it is a whole different ball game.

It’s all the general equine stuff: rugs, extra food, sourcing a good supply of hay. The hay has been a nightmare this year because of the wet harvest. I have not thought seriously about hay since I was fourteen years old. Now, it haunts my dreams. And then there is the human stuff. As I get older and creakier, I find that my hands do not work well in the cold. I have to make some serious glove decisions. Usual woolly ones won’t do because they will get wet and dirty; leather ones are too clumsy and stiff for doing up rug buckles. I used to obsess over writing the perfect sentence; now my mind is filled with the perfect glove.

There is also the glamorous question of thermals. There shall be the purchasing of industrial quantities of socks. Luckily, I have found the ideal coat, a lovely puffy thing with a fur hood, so that I look like Nanook of the North. I bought it over the weekend and, when I first went up in it, I must have looked so much like a terrifying Eskimo that the small Welsh pony actually ran away in fright. It took me about ten minutes to convince her that I was still the same person who gives her her tea and scratches her sweet spots.

Winter this year shall be an outdoors operation. There will be dark mornings when I may rue the day I rashly bought a horse, when the sleet is falling and I am hock deep in mud. But mostly I think it is a rather lovely, healthy thing. I like the fact that I shall not be stuffing indoors, but shall stride out in the elements, however extreme they might be. As if to encourage me, the mare was at her sweetest and best this morning. We rode through the hoar frost in easy harmony, with the white-capped mountain gazing down on us in benediction. Her head was down and her neck was relaxed and she carried herself with quiet grace. That’s what makes it all worth it. I grew up in a stable; one of my most vivid childhood memories is of my father getting up at five-thirty every morning to do the horses. I used to follow him out in the pitch dark, to help. Now, forty years later, I am back to that stern regime. It’s just a bit of weather, I think; I can take it.

Autumn has suddenly come roaring over the hill. For the first time the mercury has tumbled below zero, and yesterday a glittering white frost fell on us. I stamp my feet and shake my hands to get the circulation going; I contemplate the purchase of a serious winter hat. Working with the horses gets a little tougher, as I fumble with buckles and drop brushes from frozen fingers.

The cold ushers in outrageous beauty. The giddy Scottish sun shines down out of sapphire skies, and the leaves are just starting to turn, and the mountains take on the deep blue aspect that they assume at this time of year. The geese are beginning to migrate, appearing suddenly over the hills in their mighty v-shapes, calling out in wild unison as they go.

Every year, I mean to look up exactly where it is they have come from and where they are going to. I am mildly ashamed that I do not know. For some reason, I have it in my head that they are going to Russia. They are certainly bound for the east, but for all I know it might be Stonehaven, not Vladivostok.

I love to think I am in touch with nature. As I get older and more absurd, all I want is to be rooted in the earth. I am still shatteringly impressed if I meet someone who once worked at Chatham House, as one brilliant woman in our village did, or who does something with military intelligence, as does the man who sat on my left last night at dinner. But oddly, what really thrills me the most is when I wave to the farmer, driving by in his muddy Landrover.

There, I think, grinning like a loon, is a fellow who really knows valuable things, about weather patterns and the psychology of livestock and the breeding of rams. There is a man whose head is full of honest, true things, whose hands are mapped with the ancient black of the Scottish soil.

You can see I have a fatal tendency to romanticise. I have no idea why the idea of the earth appeals to me so much just now. It might be because now I have horses I am working outside for long hours, getting filthy and muddy instead of staring at a computer screen. It might be because the world seems rather alarming and unknowable. No one has any idea what to do about the economy, about the crashing Euro, about the labyrinthine situation in Syria, about Iran’s nuclear programme. People come on the wireless with all the bad news and no good answers. Today, the Taliban shot a 14-year-old girl, apparently because she was ‘promoting Western culture’, whatever that means.

I don’t understand a word of it.

But I understand that the soil will still be there tomorrow and the mountains will not move and perhaps that is restful to a battered mind.

There was a terrible fuss the other day when the Prime Minister forgot what Magna Carta meant. I know it’s important to know a bit of Latin; I know that a grounding in Classics broadens the mind. I know also that knowledge is not relative; one form of it is not better than another. But just now, in the mood I’m in, I would be much more impressed if Mr Cameron could tell me where those crazy geese were going.

There are two orange sheep in the field.

This is not necessarily a sentence I ever anticipated writing. Nonetheless, two new sheep have arrived, and they appear to be the colour of mango flesh.

When they were first sighted, on Friday, I could only see the flash of orange backs over the dry stone wall. There have been young cows in that field for the last few weeks. Some of them are a kind of amber colour, and my addled brain wondered if some new dwarf strain of cattle had been introduced. It was only when I got right up close that I could see they were two bonny sheep, quite the smartest pair I had ever seen, as if someone had been combing them every day. I had no idea what they were doing there, and wondered if they had escaped from some kind of cloning project and galloped to freedom over the mountain.


My mare is still quite astonished by them herself, casting them a suspicious look every so often, as if they are, literally, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their presence on the other side of the wall was actually quite helpful this morning, since we were doing desensitising training. This is a faintly paradoxical method where you scare your horse in order to show it that there is nothing to be afraid of. The mare is prone to theatrical spookiness out in the stubble fields, and I decided it was time to do something about it.

I found an absolutely terrifying plastic bag. It is of thick, crackling material and makes a loud noise when scrunched. It is also coloured and shiny. Oh, the horror. The theory is that you crinkle it and wave it about, and then the moment the animal stops backing away, you hide it. It’s a pressure release method, and it’s astonishingly effective. Patience, patience; small steps; and then, by the end, she is sniffing the alarming object and will allow me to run it all over her body.

There are two parts to this technique. One is to show that you yourself are not alarmed, so that really there is no possibility of the thing being a predator. The second is to demonstrate that the item will not eat her. One great horseman I know has got his horse to the stage where he can ride it in fast circles whilst lugging a huge, flapping tarpaulin behind him on a rope.

As always, I extrapolate from horses to life. There should be desensitising training for humans too. People do not have the same ancient predator response that horses hold, but there is a tendency to catastrophise. So often, the worst thing assumed does not, in fact, happen, and one is left feeling relieved and slightly foolish. Or, the bad thing does happen, but it’s not the end of the world. One finds an inner resource; one bashes on through. The mountain lion might have shown its claws, but it did not eat one for breakfast.

So many imagined terrors exist only in the mind, and never materialise. Just as, at first, my mare truly believes a small plastic bag will be the end of her, until I prove to her that it is no threat, so humans will conjure imaginary demons or disasters or hurts or slights or failures that never come to pass. Sometimes, the bag just is a bag.

The orange sheep, despite my wild conjectures of radioactivity or cloning, are, in fact, merely dyed. Apparently, it’s a thing that people do with some ovines before they go to market. I had no idea. It’s not a freakish scientific experiment gone wrong; it’s just a sales technique. For some reason, this feels symbolic of something, but I’m not sure what. Perhaps, like the bag, orange sheep are just orange sheep, and I may now learn to slot them into my category of things that I take for granted.

The swallows have gone. It has amazed me how long they have stayed this year. I always think they fly south at the end of August, but this may be fantasy on my part. Perhaps they always wait until September.

They have been mustering like crazy for the last two weeks. All the different families come from their various nest in the steadings and sheds and outbuildings, and have an evening rally over the field where my mare lives. Sometimes I just stand and stare at them, gaping like a loon. They are so fast and athletic and certain. They seem to have a rigorous regime, getting racing fit for the thousands of buffeting miles to Africa. Every year, I find myself in awe and wonder at the great journey the tiny, delicate creatures make.

I saw them last night, when I went up at about six for evening stables. ‘Ah,’ I said out loud, as they filled the feed room with their swirl and chatter, ‘you are still here.’ And then, today, suddenly something was different. It took me a moment to work out what it was. It was: silence. The birds had flown.

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That clip-clopping sound you hear is me, trotting back to the drawing board. One of the things that strikes me most in life is how one can know something in one’s head, but not quite register it in one’s gut. The intellect understands; the instinct rebels.

I know perfectly well that life is not an easy upward progression from one achievement to the next. It is not always rational: A does not always follow B. But the odd Whiggish tendency in me often thinks it is. I may learn this thing, or understand that, and then on I go, towards the sunny uplands. In fact, I often have to remind myself that life is mostly about rolling back down the hill, and having to pick oneself up, brush oneself off, and start all over again.

Oddly, it is my horse that reminds me most of this. I’m ashamed to admit I had got a bit swanky about my abilities. Oh, look at me, with my no hands and my whispering skills and my knowledge of herd dynamics. Watch me make her turn on a sixpence with only a shift of my body, or back up with only a twitch of my finger. Observe us, after only six months of work, in perfect harmony. I’m afraid I even bragged a little of this, only yesterday. I’m pretty good at groundwork, I wrote, foolishly, to someone.

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I return to Scotland, after ten days away in the south.

I saw Frankel.

That sentence needs to stand by itself, surrounded by awed space. To see Frankel is one of those things that shall be told to the great-nieces and the future great-great-nieces, when I am crabbed and cranky and loquacious with age, until they roll their eyes and beg me to stop. The funny thing is that most people do not know who Frankel even is. Perhaps he plays golf, they might wonder. Is he that chap who once went out with one of the Spice Girls? Or a fashionable spinner of discs, the go-to DJ for the boho set?

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In the post-Olympic world, everything creaks and groans and settles itself back to normality. Mr Mitt Romney has chosen his running mate, a tremendous devotee of Ayn Rand called Paul Ryan. France and Germany have released their economic growth figures to reveal that there is no growth. (The markets were braced for much more dire results; no growth is now regarded as a triumph, and the bourses and exchanges all went up on the news.) If you want real bathos, the number one most read story on BBC Scotland’s news website has the headline: Women injured in toppled toilet. Some mean youths, defying the Olympic ideal, pushed it over for a lark.

The weather has reverted to its previous sulky state. Practically the moment Boris handed over the flag, it started raining again, as if the very sky was mourning. I went up to the horse this morning through hills swathed in cloud. You just drive into the cloud, and stay there; it’s quite disconcerting.

And yet, I keep getting happy little flashes of the last two weeks. They are mostly undifferentiated ones of ordinary people smiling and whooping, of crowds going wild with delirium and waving their flags, of walls of sound. (My niece’s husband worked as a technician in the Excel centre, and reported that during the boxing he clocked the crowd noise at the same number of decibels as a Formula One racing car. ‘I think it’s actually illegal,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised health and safety didn’t have something to say.)

I remember the ecstatic rowers and the weeping cyclists and Wiggo and his sideburns and the way his fingers caressed the handlebars of his bike as if he were playing a Bach suite. I remember the horses, jumping and dancing and running their hearts out. I remember the amazed athletes, who never thought they would get near a medal, and the crushed ones, who wanted the gold so much that silver was no consolation. I remember one little boy, caught on camera by the BBC, right at the beginning, saying: ‘It’s like being in Wonderland.’

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