The Village

The village market hall clock dangs the half hour at 6.30 am and it is time to get up and walk three miles to muck out the horses.

If you had told me in 1979 — standing in a squat in W9 with a calendar full of atrocities under my arm — that this is how it would end up, I would have been insulted, and I would have been wrong.

The clock is wonderfully workaday. A blunt stab of sonic information for commoners who may need to know that it is TIME. The hall itself is a real institution: martial arts, horticultural shows, and our pal Stacy's fortieth birthday party, which was a thing to behold. Chopped pork pies at one end, a rockabilly band with an exceptional rhythm section at the other, and in between trestle tables of backwoodsmen, women and children of all shapes, and some pretty tough looking lads, all of whom you had to negotiate a place among, after which it was all smiles.

The route to the horses goes through three fields. Past the gypsy stockade, where there are seven or so trotting ponies and where the patriarch and I nod at one another and have never exchanged a word, which I consider a perfect arrangement. Through the graffiti tunnel under the London to Portsmouth railway line. Across an open fallow field to a set of centuries-old barns where nobody ever is, though people live in the cottages. And to one side, nearly hidden in creeper and silver birch saplings, a beautiful old bright blue and yellow steam engine, still with wheels and everything, which I first saw under the lightest covering of snow and which nobody has ever been able to explain to me.

Smartie is a retired racehorse. Blue is a big French horse with a sense of humour. I feed them, muck them out, turn them out, and do the walk four times a day. When I started in the winter you had to break a thin sheet of ice on the water before you could change it.

The standard version of my life has me down as a haunted Celtic bar-room prophet. The haunted Celtic bar-room prophet is presently pushing a barrow of horse manure up a Hampshire lane at half past six in the morning, at sixty, with a dog beside him that has just been bitten at, and has never in his life felt better than this.

The household: a bruiser of a cat called Mr Big who helps me work by headbutting me while purring very loudly; a white terrier called Basil who once played for an entire afternoon with a lime in poor condition (the Co-op had no lemons); later a brown one called Ronnie; and a very old cat who refuses to go outside in winter and then in spring insists on coming in only to use her tray.

Behind the house the orchard runs up to an ancient donkey stable with vines round it, damsons, apples, gooseberries. Down at the bottom of the village the creek comes in on the tide and I take the terriers to swim out after driftwood, and sit on the bench there, as I have sat for years, talking to Kevin the village alco-mystic about the Ford factory at Southampton. On a Sunday the old boys play jazz in the pub across the road, farmers in garage shirts with harvest-coloured eyes.

In the spring my brother Ed died.

He was my little brother. He came to stay with me in Poole when he was still in his late teens and we had some real good times in Dorset, one summer and one winter, long walks to country cider pubs. The first memory I have of him is throwing wooden bricks at his head to distract my sister, who had come off her tricycle and would not stop crying — my debut as a therapist, which did not really go that well.

Snowdrops will always make me think of Ed now. I was walking by the river Hamble when I understood that, ten minutes before I wrote it down.

For a long time I could not finish a chorus I had written years earlier in a monastic little hotel in Münster — the Kolpinghaus, where the rooms are like cells. Then Ed died and the song arrived, whole, and it is called Beware Soul Brother, and for a while I thought the album would be called that too.

I am feeling a bit less roughed up than previously, I wrote in the spring, and thanked people for the kind words at shows.

That is also the year I found a small television way of dealing with my own as yet unfinished grief about the loss of my parents, my brother, and loved ones — which is that I watch Air Crash Investigation, obsessively, skipping past the aeroplanes to get to the interviews with the bereaved. I sit there and I grieve along with strangers about something that has nothing to do with me, and then I can get up and do the day.

I have been a troubled soul most of my life, although I have learned to be at peace with much of the trouble. A sort of Belfast Of The Mind, in which the old conflicts remain raw in the imagination, but there is no real appetite for going back out on the streets.

Carl Jung said that the gods have become diseases. I would put it differently: honour the gods and goddesses where you find them, or wait, and they will come back in another form. They came back to me as two horses, a market hall clock, a steam engine in a hedge, and an old man with ponies who has never once said good morning and never once failed to nod.

A few nights ago I was writing in the garden at midnight by moonlight. The poet Anne Ridler has a line — the light of the moon is visible silence — and that is exactly it. Apple and cherry blossom all coming down at once, sticking to your shoes, walked into the house, so out comes the taped-up Dyson with its terrible GUUUURRRR. It is the downside of spring, but what a downside.