Sometimes, from my place inside this merry dressage ring, my dainty hoof trit-trots over a hidden hornet’s nest, and for a short while the email goes a bit crazy. Messages pour in; some of them (there’s no kind way to put it) quite frothing with viciousness and madness. “Crikey!” said Philbrick in Decline and Fall. “Loonies! This is where I shoot.”
But we mustn’t shoot, must we? Not nowadays. No matter how loony the letters, we must feel sorry for their authors. And I do. Bloody nearly. That is to say, I’m working on it.
Sometimes, if the children are passing, I use the letters as a teaching tool. “Crikey! Loonies!” I cry out. “Listen to this maniac!” and then we workshop the letters together. We parse them, where we can; and afterwards, with serious faces, we discuss what it is about the human race that drives some people to be so full of such ungainly personalised vitriol. And we all agree, smugly, that it is most bewildering. Jolly good show. Trot on.
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Spite is something we’re meant to grow out of in the playground. And I thought I had. Pretty much. That is to say, with apologies to Richard Branson, about whose excellent beard I was needlessly unpleasant a few weeks back...So, maybe it was the heat. But there was this man in my bikram yoga class the other day. Though I might not even recognise him if I saw him again, for a period of about 120 seconds he irritated me so much it took every ounce of my willpower not to trot across that hot studio, with a little buck and pretty neigh, and bloody well push him over.
There must have been 30 or so students in the same room, drenched in sweat, delirious with discomfort. Suddenly we heard a gasp, and a loud clunk: one of the students had collapsed onto the floor. Out for the count, she was: eyes open and glazed. Her companion rushed to her side, quickly followed by the instructor, while the rest of us sort of stopped what we were doing. And looked on, helplessly.
Spite is something we’re meant to grow out of in the playground. And I thought I had. Pretty much
There was a man — a local parent, everyone round here knows about him — who was doing one of those “boot camp” fitness weekends recently. He had a heart attack in the middle of it, and phut! That was the end of him. The same question was running through all our minds: Was the clunk woman a goner, too? And it seems to me, if somebody’s potentially died in front of you, the least you can do is pause and find out one way or the other. The man I wanted to push over didn’t miss a beat; didn’t move his eyes from his reflection. While Miss Clunk lay comatose at his feet (she was fine later), he slipped seamlessly into a perfect dandayamana dhanurasana. A posture, by the way, that is incredibly hard to pull off: takes near pathological levels of focus, self-possession, serenity and concentration.
I can’t do it. And maybe that was the problem. In fact, now I think about it, damn.
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Bang goes the moral high-ground. Never mind. Here’s the thing. I wanted to push that man over more than anything I’ve wanted to do in years. But I didn’t. Because spite is never clever, as I say to the children. And spite without finesse (I hardly need to tell them) is seriously embarrassing.
Jolly good show. Trot on.