I had a filthy cold last week and missed two rides, so it was in a snotty and enfeebled state that I gathered Lenny on Monday morning. He reported that there were large predators afoot. By “he reported” I mean that he was snorty and on tiptoes, his eyes on stalks.

His usual demeanour being more of a cocky strut, Pam the trainer allowed as to how there are mountain lions in the area and that he was probably correct in his surmise. We decided to lunge him. He’s extremely left-handed so we’ve been working on his right lead canter. With only minor plunging and leaping for dramatic effect, he gave us beautiful transitions into a steady right lead.

I wish you could have seen him like that, jazzed by the excitement, fit and shiny in his metallic summer coat, arching his neck and flexing his horse abs. His surfer-blond mane standing like flames along his crest. When he’d settled a bit I got on. A hundred or more red-winged blackbirds flew low over us. Lenny stretched down into the bridle, carrying me as if I weighed no more than a feather.

Our children always grow to live in a foreign country

Four children of the same parents do not receive the same parenting.

Often we do not grasp what has happened to us until we tell someone else about it.

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’.

Dull people found him amusing. Interesting people thought him desperately dull.

The descendants of those who inhabited the region during that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare sometimes refer to it as “the time when the stars fell.”

Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind. The list of such men is short

Without the stars it felt like someone had unplugged the world

One wing of the British Museum, in a crowd in a heatwave while jetlagged, but I did get to see Lindow Man (an ancestor), the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the Lewis chessmen. One wing of the V&A on a cooler day and lunch with a friend in the spectacular cafe, the first museum cafe ever, what a good innovation. A bookshop in Notting Hill; no, not that one, the other one. Bike rides to Westminster and Chelsea. The Chelsea Physic Garden with a glass of Pimm’s and another friend: you are my medicine.

Our rental car: an electric blue Mini Cooper. Avebury henge, even more beautiful than I imagined it, with a gratuitous game of cricket off to one side. The warm surface of the stones, so large, so lichen-y: more ancestors. Oak trees in golden grasslands like it’s freakin’ West Sonoma county out here. Cheshire at golden hour, with hares grazing among the sheep and cattle in the hayfields. Reading Elizabeth Gaskell, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor (not that one, the other one), Virginia Woolf. A Hendricks and tonic under a tree at the Cholmondeley Arms. A walk around the Roman walls of Chester. Jodrell Bank, peering out at the cosmic microwave radiation: another ancestor.

Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.

The Major had told him one day that in five years’ time no one would read any more. Later, archaeologists would ponder on, argue about, what books had been for. ‘It’ll all be telly; visual aids.’ ‘Then why are more books published every year?’

Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who don’t read Shakespeare

Did people then only go for the light and warmth, the coffee after the Sunday morning service and a friendly word from the vicar?

In 1970 the American Indian Student Association at the University of Minnesota satirized the archaeological establishment by submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation that called for the exhumation and scientific analysis of human remains in a pioneer cemetery.

They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves.

If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever.

“You can feel it on that one, like a tingle. You ever feel something like that? Like you can just feel the ghosts of the raped around a certain kind of man?” “I know what you mean,” Trace says. She does. She has felt this, often.

I don’t want to divide the world up into categories anymore, I want to understand.