Every Sunday we used to drive down to Turville in Buckinghamshire to ride at a stables there.My parents would sit in the Bull and Butcher, waiting for the hour's ride to finish - in the winter in front of a roaring fire, in summer in the garden.I, unfortunately, did not show a natural talent for the equestrian life.I was actually rather scared of the horses I was riding.Scared that they would bite me, scared that they would not do what I wanted.I wasn't so scared that I didn't want to ride...
I held in my heart an optimism that I would, one day, be a brilliant rider.I imagined, each birthday, that I would come down to find a pony of my own in one of our outbuildings.Of course it never happened - in the same way that my parents never wrapped the Osmonds in a huge gift box on our lounge carpet for me - they couldn't seem to read my heart's desire...
Shortly after I started riding, having had to wait until the grand old age of 8, my younger brother started too. Strangely he was allowed to ride from the age of 5... I adore my brother, now father to 8 week old triplets, but I was supremely jealous of his ability with horses. He was immediately like a kind of infant horse whisperer.Horses went dopey around him. They would do anything for him.The stables let him ride all the best horses, while I plodded around on the old placid ones trying to look good.
I remember one day the owner of the stables commenting to me on my brother's beautiful, soft hands... the way he was such a natural.... I could have stabbed her.
Still, despite my envy, my inadequacy, those stables and the times I spent there, form a huge and beautiful memory in my mind.The smell of saddle soap, the gleam of hoof oil... I remember spending summers on riding courses where we 'owned' our own horse for a week. In my memory the sun always shone. We played gymkhana games on our horses and I loved jumping, playing the higher and higher game. I remember having to hold my horse, Apache, with his head away from the jump because he loved jumping so much he would lunge on his haunches when it was his turn and we would fly over, somewhere between disaster and glory...
We would ride through the countryside together, eat lunch in the barn, brush our horses so they glistened.Everything was right with the world then.
I stopped riding when I went to university. The stables turned into an amazing, posh stud run by the owner's daughters and I sort of... grew out of it.Now I wonder if I will ever ride again... I always felt easy on a horse, comfortable, even though I was scared of them when on the ground, but now? Its a long way to fall isn't it? But I find myself googling stables in the area and wondering if I could still do it
