Dispatches From The North

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.’

If I am at all prone to gloom and post-party crash, I just have to think of Mo Farah, and his long, defiant stride, and his disbelieving, ecstatic face. For some reason, he has become my symbol of everything that was good about the games. On sheer physical achievement, he goes right to the top of my list. I can hardly run round the corner, let alone cruise at speed over ten thousand metres. Also, he seems like a really, really nice man.

One of the things that has struck me about these games, about many of the competitors, but the British medallists in particular, is how polite they all were. They were always thanking everyone and paying tribute to the people behind the scenes and apologising if they felt they had let people down. I still don’t really understand how getting a bronze is letting people down, but some of the elite competitors clearly feel that only gold is good enough for a home games. I heard a man on the radio say that the psychology of sport is changing. It used to be that you were told to be a winner you had to be ruthless; that winners were often not very nice people. Apparently that idea has shifted. There is much more emphasis now on good character and teamwork.

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Now it seems I have turned into the most monomaniac of one-trick ponies. But the British and their equines really have done something remarkable. On Monday, a fifty-something gentleman with a replacement shoulder, an artificial hip, a broken neck, and goodness knows what else, jumped clear round after clear round over enormous oxers and terrifying uprights. It was not just Nick Skelton who excelled, although I do love seeing the old fellas have their day in the sun; it was not just his three bold team-mates. It was the horses as well.

It’s easy to forget the pressure on the horses, who are, after all, flight animals. They come into a strange arena, filled with ecstatic cheering crowds, waving flags, taking pictures. All the while, announcers are calling through microphones and helicopters suddenly circle overhead. It’s almost a perfect storm of everything the horse is bred not to like. It does not necessarily think: all those lovely Britons are cheering for me. (Although some horses are born performers and rise to a crowd.) It is more likely to think: damn, mountain lions at three o’clock.

My mare doing her own little dressage test, in honour of her compadres

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The sun shines gently in Scotland as I collapse in a heap after four days of watching the Olympic three-day-event. I rush up to the field and gaze at my own dear mare, who, despite her stellar breeding, would laugh in my face if I asked her to do a flying change. The discipline of three day eventing never fails to amaze me. The horses are trained to a peak of fitness, so that they can last four miles across country, but are then expected to dance into the ring and perform the delicate, controlled movements of dressage. After the hurly burly, the exhaustion and the mad dash of the event course, they must then take flimsy show jumps seriously. Even the best riders sent poles crashing at this stage, so much had been demanded of their concentration and stamina.

Dear old Team GB could not quite get past the mighty Germans, who were in danger of confirming all their national stereotypes with a performance of such efficiency and accuracy that it was hard to believe they were executing it on the unpredictable animal that is the horse. But the Brits were magnificent, and Olympic silver is a stunning achievement.

I got especially excited about Mary King, who is fifty-one years old, competing in the only Olympic event where men and women go up against each other on equal terms, and for whom age is no obstacle. Fifty-one is not old in life, but in any athletic sport it is positively geriatric. Yet there she was, glittering and shining for her country, showing the young ones how it is done. I found something inexpressibly moving and inspiring about that, especially when all the media tells the older ladies is that they have too many wrinkles and must rush at once to the Botox needle.

Mary King patently does not give a stuff about Botox. She is absolutely brilliant at what she does, and has more important things to think about than the lines on her face.  My suspicion is that her only vanity may come in the perfection of her extended canter. She should be driven round the country as a role model for young girls, a perfect example of why it is better to be a brilliant athlete, fulfilled in your chosen field, than to get your face stretched by a surgeon’s knife.

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I’ve decided that I shall officially get excited about the Olympics. There is, of course, a huge amount to grumble about. The car lanes stuffed with sponsors and bogus VIPs, the ghastly creaking corporate bandwagon, the idiocy of having a great sporting event sponsored by crappy hamburgers and sugary drinks, the security fiasco: all make one’s heart sink into one’s boots. But it would be sad to allow all that to obscure the human side.

This morning, Alice Plunkett, whom I watch all winter as she presents Channel Four Racing, tweeted that the lovely Lionheart had set off for Greenwich. He is the horse of her husband, the great eventer William Fox-Pitt. As all the noise is of the famous sprinters, the swimming hopes and the cycling heroes, the horse side of the British contingent is often overlooked. Eventing is the most minority of sports, after all. I always love the Olympic three day event, but now that I have a horse of my own, I feel it even more keenly.

It is one of the most challenging disciplines of any sport. It is, essentially, a triathlon with horses. First, they must do the delicate, controlled, precise test that is dressage. Then, they must go flat out across country, over terrifying fixed obstacles, with huge drops, shining water features, and any other kinds of novelty that the course builders may dream up. This requires strength, stamina, courage and accuracy. It’s about as far away from dressage as you can imagine. Then, they must go into the show-jumping ring, and tackle a completely different kind of fence, with fragile poles that can fall at the flick of a hoof.

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One of the things I crave most in life is authenticity. I loathe phoniness almost as much as I hate cruelty. There must be some fascinating psychological reason for this, but I cannot quite work out what. It does seem slightly extreme. After all, most humans are a little bit fake sometimes. Most of us put on a good front, lie politely when asked how we are (default British answer is always I’m fine, even if your life is falling apart), pretend to be more confident or capable or informed than we are. The little white lie is one of the cornerstones of civilised life.

For whatever reason, the authentic is my lodestar. It comes with all sorts of peculiar associations. For instance, one of the things I love most about going back to horses after thirty years away is that I come back from the field with my hands dirty. There is so much horse on my hands each morning that it takes two washes and a scrub with strong soap to get it off. (My nails are now a write-off.) This is the most bizarre source of pride to me.

I am so proud of the dirty hands that often I take them out in public. I was brought up by my mother to be clean and polite at all times, so this goes against muscle memory. Today, I rushed back from riding, and had to run into the shop for vital supplies before I could get to a sink. I handed over my card for olive oil and Bonios with hands black from the mare. I should have felt slightly embarrassed. It’s not what nice girls would do, after all. Instead, a strange dialogue took place in my head. See, said some inexplicable voice, the shop lady now knows that you are a real person, who does manual labour, who gets dirty, instead of just sitting at a clinical computer screen poncing about with words all day long. In fact, the shop lady was almost certainly thinking: could do with a wash.

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As the weather continues dire, my heart is wrung by the plight of the farmer. He was out with his one permanent worker and half his family last night, desperately trying to get in the hay for silage, before the rains came again. The mare and I stood and watched as four huge machines zoomed up and down the fields, cutters clanking, lights flashing, engines revving, like some great monstrous creatures bent on eating the fields.

They work incredibly fast and with pinpoint accuracy. The lines of cut hay lie on the ground with the precision of cricket pitch stripes. I had wondered if the mare might wig out. She has seen farm machinery before, but four huge tractors running at full speed in her home fields might be enough to put the wind up her. If I were a horse, I would not fancy it much. But after an initial snort of alarm, and the high head predator alert pose, she seemed to see that they were not coming for her, and decided the whole thing was rather fascinating.

We observed for many minutes. It was absolutely riveting. I love watching someone do a job they know really well, especially when it is something to do with the land. When I left, at eight o’clock, they were still at it. I heard this morning that they did not finish until eleven.

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The rain continues to fall. In the village, people gather in the shop to buy strong liquor, clearly planning to drink their way through it. The farmers look harried and fretful; the cows are downright grumpy. There is a flinty north-eastern pride in getting through the tough winters. The lower the mercury falls, the happier we seem to be. A long snow in January is greeted with a sanguine blitz spirit. The thing is, we are braced for hard weather in the dark months. This is the north of Scotland, it is what we expect. Also, there is something clean and honest about minus 16, and it often comes with a dazzling blue sky and beautiful glittering hoar frosts. This weather, on the other hand, is just sullen and soul-sapping. The sky is the colour of old socks and the land looks sodden and defeated. The blue hills are lost in filthy cloud.

People are now heard seriously discussing the jet stream, which apparently is stuck. Meteorological experts spring up everywhere. Escape plans are hatched. One of my relations said today: ‘I think we are going to drive south.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps at the tip of Cornwall you might find a ray of sun.’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘The South of France. The cloud goes all the way to Bordeaux.’

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For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. This time last week I was roaring home perhaps the greatest racehorse I ever saw, giddy with euphoria, only slightly cross that mere words on a page could not express what I saw. (There is a visceral, elemental nature to horses which means that often they defy prose.) Now I gaze out onto a drowned landscape, everything brown and sodden under a low, grumpy sky.

There are particles of sadness floating in the air. I’m really sad about Nora Ephron dying. Seventy-one is no age; she was so clever and funny and witty and true. She gave an awful lot of pleasure to an awful lot of people, and that’s not a bad thing to be able to say about your life. Someone else who gave pleasure was the young jockey, Campbell Gillies, who won me money and brought me great joy at Cheltenham this year, when Scotland triumphed in the Albert Bartlett, with the lovely Brindisi Breeze. Gillies also died yesterday, in one of those freak accidents that make no sense. (I suppose no dying makes an awful lot of sense, but some makes less than others.)

Crash, crash, back to earth I come.  The sensible great-aunt in me says: spit, spot, this is life. It’s not a carnival ride. The rain rains, and work must be done, and people depart, and that’s how it goes. The not sensible part says: bugger this for a game of soldiers.

I stomp up crossly to the mare. It’s so nasty out that I was not going to do any work with her, but I have some bizarre puritan streak that pushes me on. As if sensing that I need some good news, she is immaculate, at her sweetest and funniest and dearest. She actually rather loves this weather. Too much sunshine is far too vulgar for her grand sensibilities. A low, soft day is her absolute favourite. She is willing and responsive and I get the sudden thrill of achievement.



Just as the horse is doing something particularly impressive, my step-niece comes out to feed the chickens. The hens are nearly as grand as the mare, and get the remains of the great-nieces’ porridge for their breakfast. ‘Oh,’ says the step-niece in delight, ‘look what she is doing.’ I feel idiotically proud. I have a witness. See what I can do, with my horse whispery skills. See how clever and brilliant my lovely girl is.

The lovely girl, obviously overcome by her own cleverness, sticks her nose into the silver saucepan and eats all the hens’ porridge. For some reason I find this inexpressibly funny. I never heard of a horse eating porridge before. ‘So Scottish and good for her,’ I say, laughing. The mare nods her head, very pleased with herself. I scratch the velvety spot behind her ears and think this really is much, much cheaper than therapy.

Determined to counter the dreich, I come home and make yellow split pea soup with saffron and drink a pot of coffee so strong that I can feel it jump-starting my brain. On I bash. At least the rain means I don’t have to water the garden. It keeps the flies away from the horses. It means we live in a green and pleasant land, instead of an arid desert. It’s just a little bit of precipitation. Out in the east, beyond the beeches and the Wellingtonias and the venerable oaks, a faint gleam of light appears in the sky.

A plaintive and very polite note comes from the editor, wondering gently if there is to be a blog this week. I had, in fact, entirely forgotten which day of the week it was. I had practically forgotten my own name. This is because, after twenty years, I have returned to the Royal Meeting at Ascot. I abandoned it because of the crowd and the hats and all the fashion silliness. But this year it lured me with the two best horses in the world.

One of them, the Australian supermare, Black Caviar, had flown thirty-three hours to be here, dressed in a special lycra suit, so that she looked like one of the Olympic swimmers. (It keeps the horse's blood pressure steady, apparently.)

Black Caviar runs on Saturday, but yesterday the meeting opened with the highest rated horse in training, the majestic Frankel. High expectations are the enemy of happiness, and expectations were running red hot. He has never been beaten, he is clearly head and shoulders above the rest, he has developed into an even greater and stronger horse at four than he was at three. I said, for a joke, 'he'll win by ten lengths.' Horses don't win at Ascot by ten lengths, over a mile; especially when up against the most talented of their cohort. Last year, Frankel won by three-quarters of a length. The greatest horse is the greatest horse, but it is racing; anything can happen.

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There was no blog last week because I was running up to deadline for my book and all ability to do any other thing was temporarily lost. So now I emerge, blinking into the light, like a faintly deranged woodland creature. (Not one of the adorable fawn-like ones, but one of the lowly, scuttly, muddy ones.)

Sometimes people ask me about writing, as if I should know. I damn well should know. I’ve only been doing it for twenty years. And here is the strange thing: I know exactly how to do it, and I don’t know how to do it at all.

I sometimes say that, after all this time, I can just about carry a tune. What I mean by this is that I have a certain confidence in sentences. I can string them together. I enjoy stringing them together. Occasionally, one of them might contain a little bit of drollery. (It really annoys me that I can’t do that wild, properly funny writing that people like our own Esther Walker can; and I’m not just saying that to suck up to The Lady. In life, I can make people laugh a bit, but on paper there is some reticence, I have no idea what it is, which mitigates against laughing out loud. So I have to settle for the occasional mild drollness.) Sometimes, one of my sentences might even make a point.

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