‘Put your left foot here, into this stirrup’ — I glanced down at a decorated steel half-shoe hanging on a leather strap — ‘and grip this stubby thing with your left hand….’ — I looked up at a sort of leather knob about the size of an orange set into the prow of the saddle — ‘and now lift your weight on to your left foot in the stirrup, swinging your right leg over the back of the horse.’ A bit of an effort, this, but it was how I was taught to get on to a boy’s bicycle and I found I still could. ‘Put your right foot into the stirrup on the other side, and settle into the saddle.’
I write this from Colombia where I am travelling this month and about which I shall hope to write for the Times. Picture me in the yard of a little farmstead, gaily painted, with high ceilings and old-fashioned verandas: the Finca San Jose, in a nature reserve on the lower slopes of the valley of the Corcora river which rushes down from the snows of a range of volcanoes between Bogota and the Pacific, themselves an immense national park, the Parc los Nevados. Above, the valley ascends into cloud and sunlight, and deep, steep forest. Here around me, wax palms 200 feet high pencil their way into the breeze.
I last rode a horse 45 years ago in Southern Rhodesia at the age of ten, and fell off. I vowed never to tangle again with these ridiculous animals. The allure of horses escapes me. Horsemanship interests me not at all. Horsiness in humans is an abomination to me. I regard the horse, as I regard sailing boats, as at best a useful means of getting where human legs cannot take us.
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