I made myself do it. After days of avoiding the internet, I made myself look at the pictures of the fallen horses of the Grand National. As suspected, it broke me. I know there are pictures of wider-scale suffering doing the rounds every day, but, for me, as examples of pain that could have been prevented by people being better humans, they are just as harrowing as the scenes of war.

But I’ll tell you what is worse than looking at the pictures. It’s reading the statistics of the fatalities. 35 horses have died in the last 50 years. A year with no deaths is considered an uncommon bonus.
And that’s just the Grand National.
There were 27 fatalities on other races held at Aintree between 2000 and 2014.
And that’s just Aintree.
145 horses died on British National Hunt racecourses – in 2013 alone. One year. 145 deaths.

And it’s not getting better in this ‘enlightened’ age.

Since 1999 the average number of horses ‘participating’ in the Grand National has gone up over 25% – from 29 to 40 – worsening the crowded conditions and increasing the likelihood of deaths. So in the interests of greater ‘participation’, and the resultant greater injection of cash for already rich people, we are becoming less humane than at any other point in the race’s inglorious history. Less decent than we were years ago when animal welfare featured low on our social conscience. Less morally invested in the important notion that these horses do not get to choose how casually their lives are risked.
The horses do not get to choose. The horses get whipped.

And it’s not just the death count, though that is deplorable enough.
The deaths just serve to hide the quota of horses who suffer injuries from major to minor, and those who don’t sustain any visible damage but who ‘merely’ suffer from anxiety and exhaustion. Would we deploy our children to a day of ‘fun risks’ with such nonchalance?

And complicity in pathetic excuses is inexcusable; it makes you ugly.

It’s not enough that it’s a ‘national institution’. It’s not enough that the newspapers like big colour spreads of ludicrous women wearing ludicrous hats. It’s not enough that millions of pounds of sponsorship and gambling pots are involved.
It’s not enough that the horses are groomed daily and have a far better diet than most low income families in this country. It is not enough to suggest these horses enjoy their rigorous training because they love to run. Breeding is one thing; pushing a horse to the death then shrugging and buying another horse is another.
It is not enough to say only a few die and the rest “finish comfortably” (what the fuck is finishing comfortably anyway – getting to the end without their necks bending double as their faces plough into the ground?). It’s not enough that organisers work with animal welfare organisations to reduce the severity of the deliberately difficult fences and to improve veterinary facilities. Having more medical provision on hand is just another way of saying you know the chances are high that the creatures will be damaged but you want to see what happens anyway. Prevention is better than cure. Don’t put their lives in danger.
It’s not enough.

The Grand National is not one of the things that makes this country great or interesting. The Grand National is just another jewel in the crown of privilege still worn by this country of rich men doing whatever they like; the consequences of their questionable actions still being swept under a carpet, which still seethes with centuries’ worth of bodies of the poor, uneducated, innocent, and shackled. People, and horses. Lives. It should be a relic but that carpet still exists. It is not a jolly; it is a blight on our national soul.

Now don’t be alarmed, but I’ll probably be dead when you read this. By the time this baby goes to print, I will be up an Austrian mountain with no fricking clue what I’m doing. I don’t know how it slipped my mind for two months that I was going on a free press trip to sample the delights of Tyrolean snow fun, but it did, and now here I am, hullo me, sitting in a pile of puffy clothing borrowed from an athletic friend two sizes smaller than me, wondering if I’ll get assigned my own rescue dog. If I get my own dog, and it’s a big dog with brandy round its neck, I reckon I might just make it through this. Dogs are pretty dependable. Unless they see a rabbit. Are there rabbits in Austria? This is what I’m thinking right now, as I sit here wearing goggles indoors, practising my ‘I’m skiing’ face.

The only time I’ve ever skiied was in the midlands in the 90s. My Dad took us to one of those bristly dry slope affairs off the motorway and told us that living an active life was just as important as reading. I scoffed. What was this lunatic on about. Everyone knows your body is just a trash can for the multipack of Monster Munch you’ve just eaten. We only went once. Maybe Dad feared for our hymens on the ski lift, which was, even in its kinder moments, inappropriate.

Thanks to the dirty smears of time, my only residual memory of the skills needed to ski are thus: if in doubt put your hands over your eyes, clamp your legs together, and hope for the best. It’s pretty much how the British used to procreate before we were liberated by hurried creative sex with Yanks in exchange for black market items during the war. That’s my entire model for staying alive. It’s all I’ve got. A bad metaphor made from dubiously cobbled history. I’m screwed.

Here are some things I’d like to get off my chest before I die:

1) Sorry, little sister, for locking you in the cupboard under the stairs when we were kids. As you said recently, Harry Potter didn’t exist back then so it really wasn’t cool. Sorry.

2) Sorry Anonymous, for rubbing out your GCSE artwork without your knowledge and redoing it. Even if you did get a B.

3) Mum. Thank you for never letting me get the perm and straight fringe combo. I thought I would die if I didn’t get to scrunch mousse into corkscrew curls like they did in Just Seventeen. Turns out I’m going to die skiing. So there we go. Life is mysterious.

4) Cous cous. I’ve never really got it. What is it?

5) There’s other stuff I’m sure but I’m a bit distracted. These goggles are very tight.

What do I feel on the eve of my almost certain death, you ask? I feel nervous. But also excited. Because if you’re going to die, it might as well be on a free trip, right? I wonder if the minibar is complimentary. I wonder if I eat the expensive macadamia nuts whether they’ll charge it to my family. That would be poor form I think. “Dear The Haslers, Sorry for your loss. Miss Hasler enjoyed some macadamia nuts shortly before her spectacular demise, but as she ate only three we are just billing you for the proportional sum of £5.11. Kind regards, Austria.” I don’t even like macadamia nuts. I think I’ll have the Pringles instead. It’s what my family would want for me.

I wonder what the mountain air will smell like. I wonder what all that white will look like. I wonder what I’ll be thinking as I’m soaring like an eagle, into a tree. I wonder if as I’m dying in the snow I’ll lie back and think of England, or just “Damn, I missed the free lunch”.

The question “when are you going to have a baby, Sadie?” is like coleslaw. I get it about twice a week. People who barely know me feel fine asking it irrespective of whether they know I can or want to. They come straight in with the “when?” It seems it’s open fodder for anyone who can see you’re carrying a vagina somewhere about your person. It’s more permissible than enquiring about people’s finances or true feelings on love. It’s almost clinical. But the ‘when’ is important. Because time is of the essence.

I’ve always fobbed off the questions, light and smiling, as though having a baby is like going on a hiking trip around Guatamala; possible, but not likely. I’ve been paddling at the luxurious deep end of biological grace; the right side of the right time.

I’m writing a play about the choice that women have to make, about two women – one who has always known that she does not want kids, and one who is quietly (and occasionally painfully) unsure. It’s been an interesting way of making myself think about it all.

I’m 34, and split down the middle. On one hand I am brazenly happy being child-free knowing I am beholden to no one but myself, may choose what I do with my time, and have no overt pangs driving me to stock up on ovulation tests. On the other, I love kids. My niece and nephew are sunshine, and lots of my mates’ kids are great human beings. I can’t imagine never having a son or daughter phoning me in snot and tears on their first night of university – but I also can’t imagine the bits before that. The near-present is harder to picture than the distant future.

Writing the play has made me a bit emotional. Last week at a dinner party, at the tail end of margaritas, paella, and wine, I scooched up to the end of the table to chat intimately with an amazing woman. The men had taken their leave and were singing sea shanties in another room and spilling wine on their trousers. Andrea and I talked about children, about her gorgeous boys Joe and Jack who had charmed me into swooning before they went to bed. We got quite deep – discussing the time you ‘just know’, what happens if you don’t know, about there never truly being a right time, about the leap you just have to make, and the faith you must have that you will love the little person you make more than anything else you’ve encountered in the world for it is biology to do so – and I ended up having a little cry, and through my crying I was half-laughing and apologising for being a total idiot. Then I went to the toilet, sorted my face out, and we carried on. Now, before you all write in to beg me to come to dinner because I am the jolliest gal ever, you should know I don’t often behave in this way. I rarely cry anymore. I haven’t got time, and am happy.

I was crying because I don’t know. It is one of the most important decisions you can ever make in your life, and I am turning 35 in June, and I am no closer to knowing than ten or twenty years ago. And I now have less time.

In your early twenties you can scoff at the question; time is a hefty bugger and it’s on your side. In your early thirties time is of average build somewhere in the same room. In your late thirties it’s just down the hall and might come when called (if it likes you). In your forties time could be anywhere and you have to keep shouting and hoping it comes. Eventually time is standing in the doorway, waving, time is the footsteps fading, time is the silence, the non-reply, the echo of your call. Time is no time at all. That is a woman’s reproductive biology. All very different, but still governed ultimately by an end that is like a mini unmarked death inside you.

I have no end to this. How do you decide the right thing before it’s too late to decide anymore?
Anyone? Answers on a postcard. And make it fairly quick. I’ll be waiting with a margarita at the end of the table.

“Monday 11th December 1995

Didn’t go to school today. I felt awful. Really bad period pains. Read To Kill A Mockingbird. It is so brilliant! And so sad! I want to give Boo Radley a big cuddle! What a lovely book!”

And that’s all I wrote.

It pains me now, far more than my girl bits pained me on that day of self-piteous bunking, to read what an ineloquent wang I was after I had just devoured what quickly became, and has stayed, my favourite book. How brief and moronic and exclamation-mark-y I was about the book that has stayed with me the longest, so vividly – the book I clasp tightly to my chest if a friend plucks it from my shelves, the book I have recommended hundreds of time with a deep sigh and an imploring hand on a customer’s arm throughout my years as a bookseller. Would it become my favourite if I had only just read it now as a thirty-four year old woman? Possibly not. But the time that we choose and read our books is sometimes just as important as the books themselves, and when are our sensibilities more porous than when we are teenagers; dawdling in the brink-land; becoming the people we will be?

How funny that as I wrote my diary that night, after chomping up all those lovely words in a single day with a luxurious voracity that makes me envious of my fifteen year old self, I simply had no words. Harper Lee had already said all the ones I wanted to. I just wrote the basics for my own posterity and went to sleep. But the book was now inside me.

1995 was also the year the Boo Radleys had their hit song Wake Up Boo, which was one of the most iconic songs of my teens. I still bellow along to it when I hear it playing, even now.
Was that song the reason I bought the book? That I let it sit on the pile of books I kept by the side of my bed to be plucked out and read by soft peach light until Mum knocked on the door and reminded me I had school in the morning? I don’t remember that being the link, but perhaps it was how I found it. Maybe that’s how thousands of us found it.

I’ve been fascinated with Harper Lee ever since. How could someone who had written such a book – that had never been out of print, that elicits such a strong emotional reaction in so many people – not have written another book? It seemed like lunacy, as bizarre to me then with nascent dreams of writing as now, with a very real ambition for writing to be my life. It seemed so mysterious; as shadowlike as Boo, as silence-full as the Radley house. Why were there no more words, Harper?

As I grew older, and I found myself reading Harper Lee’s childhood friend and inspiration for her character Dill – Truman Capote – I became even more intrigued. Here were these two writers, friends from childhood summers in Alabama, casually hanging out being brilliant together. What are the chances? Harper Lee never spoke out, agreed to no interviews post 1964, and there were scant attempts to biographise her. She hid. Like Boo. There were even delicious whispers that she hadn’t written To Kill A Mockingbird at all – that the preening literary giant Capote had written it and in an uncharacteristic sashay away from his own ego, credited her; that it was all a massive literary hoax.

Now to hear that Harper Lee’s original novel – Go Set A Watchman – has been found in a ‘safe location’, that Harper Lee has given her elusive consent to it being published, and that we could be holding one in our hands by the end of July, is an amazing firecracker in my heart. But they are mixed feelings. How uncanny is it that only three months after her sister and staunch protector’s death an old manuscript is found and readily sanctioned for publication by a publicity-shy (and seemingly writing-shy) Lee? How is she being ‘handled’ now at the feebler end of her wits? How on earth will the world be satisfied by a sequel to a book more popular than the bible? What is Harper Lee – now 88, blind, deaf and wheelchair-bound – setting herself up for?
I hope, because I love her, that at this stage in her life it won’t be like making her – making Boo – dance out in a light she is not conditioned for.

Is it just me or is everything a bit ‘womanny’ at the mo? Apart from all the uncovering of paedophiles, weird racists gaining electoral ground and other world stuff, it seems like there’s a lot of wotnot about us birds going on in the mix. I wrote my cute little rant about Page 3 last week, didn’t I (bless me), and read a lot of stuff about women and Page 3 and FGM and inequality in pay and famous women being patronised and pitied for not getting married and sprogged up. I thought about all that, and I thought about all this female energy like an electrical charge in the air, and I swelled with love for all my male friends who are as outspoken on these issues as women, and I swelled with love for my former female students who I see out in the world, being brilliant.

Then I did something I would have once thought unconscionable. I cut a person from my life on a gut-instinctive whim. A chap I know had posted a picture of Yasmine Bleeth the Baywatch actress, who had been seen out in public for the first time in years, “back on the beach, but this time in baggy sweats” (the audacity of it), supporting her husband who had just done something fitness-based in the ocean. The chap was aghast at how she now looked, and said that men everywhere had had their fantasies ruined. Then another droll little chum of his chimed in saying that Yasmine and her partner in swimsuited life-saving Pamela Anderson were now ghoulish shadows of their former selves and that he was really annoyed about it. They then swapped smutty inferences about how they reckoned they could make Yasmine lose the weight and get her back to her former glory. Presumably they thought they could fling her about like a kama sutric ragdoll leaving her cardio-vascularly astounded by their artful manfulness until she emerged once more like a sexy butterfly from a chrysalis of podge and woe. Perhaps, less creatively, they thought they could piston-fuck her with their big man sticks of joy and virility til all her fat literally fell off from the force of it or something. I don’t know what these dicksplats thought they could do to a woman who’s probably had more satisfying coitus than they’ve had cups of tea, but I know what I saw in her pictures. SHE’S 46, MARRIED TO SOMEONE SHE LOVES, DOESN’T WANT TO GET HER WHAMMERS OUT, AND HAS FINALLY LOST THE COCAINE ADDICTION THAT WAS THREATENING TO MAKE HER NOSE GO A BIT DANIELLA WESTBROOK. SHE IS HAPPY, YOU FETID RECTUM SWAMPS.

And I got riled and I blocked him. I think the only person I’ve blocked before was a paedophile. I even felt mean doing that. But sometimes you have just got to strap one on and do the do, don’t you?

After I’d huffed about being cross for a bit, I got to wondering about what is fad and what is not. Humans don’t seem able to keep things up for very long. Pop culture enthusiasm, diets, political issues, peace. We seldom sustain. We can’t keep all our balls up in the air, all of the time. Women themselves are fads. One minute hot in red bikinis, the next – O V E R.

Then I worried that this sort of new feminist spirit we are enjoying at the moment might also be a fad. That us gals will turn around in a few months time and realise that our ‘little efforts’ are now the sociological version of the tamagotchi or the budweiser frog. So Ova. Perhaps that is what will happen with this wave of popular feminism that is whirling around like a gust of crisp packets. We’ll have this burst, then it will die down a bit, and there’ll be something else that whips up our fancy, and there will be a select hardcore of people who remain, who keep doing what they always do, but people will listen slightly less and it will all just have that strange suspended hush around it; that non-sound you get after snow. Maybe not. Maybe actual change is happening and what we have afterwards will be the clarified disbelief at an old way that is now as criminally inexplicable as stealing entire nations into slavery, sending nine year olds down mines, or not letting people with vaginas have a say in who is Prime Minister. Perhaps these things do come in waves. Some lap quietly at the shore, others rolling in like giants; the small waves just as crucial as the big ones to keep the oceans moving.

I hope what we are left with will be an inbuilt strength in our individual responses. Like finding you are no longer the kind of woman who worries herself into insomnia about being ‘mean’ when telling a douchebag to fuck himself off out of her awareness, who can wipe the stain and move on.
Maybe that’s the real result of this new feminism, or maybe it’s just me growing up.