Real life | 1 September 2016

‘Oh no, I can’t bear it,’ said the builder boyfriend when I told him I wanted to look at one more house with land.

I have dragged him round too many one-bedroomed hovels with a few scrub acres out the back. We have had to be polite about too many dilapidated sheds which the owners are calling a stable block. We have had to think of too many ways to compliment a rotten pole barn, or a patch of bare earth and weeds a vendor claims is a sand school. We have smiled at too many bathroom taps in the shape of shells. We have said ‘Oo lovely!’ at too many pine kitchens. We have pretended to like too much cheap laminate. It crushes the soul.

But more to the point, these places never have horses. At all the euphemistically entitled ‘equestrian properties’ we have seen, the owners have tragically, or carelessly, depending on your view, lost all their equines to illness and injury.

The last one we viewed, a cramped cottage down an unmade track, featured a stable block full of old furniture. When we asked the lady where her horses were she said: ‘I did have a pony. But it died. Last week.’ Her eyes shot from side to side. Her husband shifted uncomfortably.

Before that, there was a Victorian semi with a huge stable block and seven acres of deserted paddocks. When I asked that owner why the place was empty, she flushed bright red, took on a constipated look, then claimed that in the space of a year three of her horses collicked, two did all their tendons and one died of cancer… of the eyes.

‘Gosh, that’s awful!’ I grimaced. ‘What are the chances?’