Born again

Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a timely guest, as he says, because she has recently written in her Sunday Times column about being ‘surprised by a small epiphany of happiness’, of experiencing a ‘rebirth’, if ‘rather cruel’.

‘You find joy in little things …I see all the things that I never saw in my busy life,’ she says, which coming from her sounds far more than a cliché because she has also written about the awful business of catheters and rectal tubes, of the tedium, the frustration of her life now, of the way that her memories of the accident (she was conscious throughout and remembers everything) are ‘always there, gnawing away at you’.