Flocculence

Gusty rain here. Gutsy rain? Lots of it, and wind, the stuff that makes your cheeks sting. I'm still enjoying it as if it were a novelty, smiling all over my pink face, watching the dogs run and and wriggle and run again. It's quiet in the cottage kitchen this morning. My kitchen table has is covered in the parts of the hoover, which I took apart, washed and can't put back together again, displayed on a linen glass cloth, a plastic bag containing a girth that doesn't fit, and a heavyweight horse blanket that's far too big. Yesterday my father would have been 103, and, fittingly, a little horse I'd looked at 5 weeks ago and couldn't get out of my mind, arrived in a horsebox from Wiltshire. She's tiny, a former racehorse, 11 years old and although she's 15.2, built like a pony, with little square hooves, fine bones. Audrey Hepburn, or a ballet dancer. Delicate, aqualine, refined. Enormously sweet, and still settling in. She is a little worried to be in a new place, but displays incredibly good manners, and apparently superior breeding, and in a very English way, feels it would be untoward to complain. The bridle I bought her is huge. Her browband sticks out two inches from her face, and the bit is two sizes too big. The saddle slips off of her high withers and skinny belly, and so I've found a breastplate. She is tiny, and delicate, and very, very sweet. Like a child, I can't sleep, dream about her, can't wait to whiz over there to see her, as I did this morning, clutching a bag of chopped up apples. As she doesn't know anyone else, she whinnies when she sees me. Note to other horses: this scores you a lot of points. Good plan.

There are people coming for lunch, which is perfect, because the raining is pouring down.  Charlie arrives from London soon. We shall light fires and make it cozy. There is lemon posset and roast chicken and sweet potatoes with sage. And we'll listen to this crazy version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, recomposed by Max Richter. It's on Spotify, find it. Extraordinary stuff. It makes me cry.

The world is blowing open. It's as if there were weeks and weeks of cloud cover, and you'd never know unless you were above it that there is a whole, endless, hopeful blue sky. And do you know the way the world looks after the rain, shimmering with a thousand prisms? Every day the world changes. Here I am in the middle of all this ridiculous natural beauty and every single day, it changes. Tiny things: green shoots that will be bluebells, tiny buds forming on branches, daffodils about to explode in hedgerows. And for me too, everything is beginning to feel right, as if I'm exactly where I'm meant to be.

I hope you have a lovely Sunday.