Horses

In 1995, Her Majesty was heard to remark that the worst aspect of the Parker Bowles divorce was that she had got Danny back. Danny was a corgi given to Camilla and me by the Queen in the early 1990s. She had previously given us a corgi called Windsor Flame who was wonderful, intelligent and brave. Danny had none of these qualities. He was short in looks, legs and temper. After the divorce he returned to Windsor, where he spent the rest of his life, very happy, in the care of Mrs Nancy Fenwick, who was unofficially the keeper of the Queen’s dogs. I came to realise how much the

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd

As he grouted the last tile, five years after the bathroom was finished, I knew the game was up. ‘I guess this is it,’ I said, as the builder boyfriend used a filler gun to bring about closure. This single ungrouted tile where the bath meets the wall has been something of a symbolic fight between the two of us. It baffled and infuriated me until I simply gave up wondering and made my peace with it. I plastered it with Hippo tape, thinking that would shame him, but it didn’t. Why he stopped short of an otherwise perfect job two seconds short of completion, he never did explain. I

After the landowner told us to be out in three weeks, then admitted we had three months to move our horses under the terms of our lease, the search began. We set about putting my house on the market and looking for a place with a few acres, but it was soon clear we were not going to find anything in budget. With the clock ticking on our notice period at the farm we’ve been renting, we had to look for livery for the horses. The timing could hardly be worse. Vacancies don’t tend to come up as winter approaches. But I always find the Good Lord provides when your

The letter arrived in a hand-addressed envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note. After everything we have been through, we were expecting something typed, from a solicitor. It began by politely thanking us for looking after the land so well. But in the next paragraph, the landowner attempted to serve us three weeks’ notice to move our horses, claiming that was all she needed to give. We texted her immediately to say our lease states three months. She replied later to say three weeks had been a mistake, she meant three months. She tried to make light of it. But we already know we are losing our smallholding because

Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts. Baron de Coubertin, who dreamt up the modern Olympic Games, took a different view. He admired the spirit of games on the playing fields of Eton and thought that they might provide a model for games of the sort he imagined the ancient Greeks enjoyed at Olympia: competitive but amateur, fair, wholesome, played for the sake of it and also, he hoped, acting as a stimulus to world peace. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Olympic Games, founded in 776 bc, celebrated Zeus, god of Mount Olympus,

What has happened to forgiveness? That question hangs heavy over the Gordon Elliott controversy. He’s the racehorse trainer currently in the eye of a media storm after a photo emerged showing him sitting on top of a dead horse. There has been virtually no discussion about forgiving Elliott for this error. Instead the knives of cancellation have been drawn. He must be destroyed. It’s the only way, apparently. The fury has been relentless. The photo, taken in 2019, shows Elliott atop one of the racehorses that he trains. The horse had just died from a heart attack. It’s an unpleasant image, for sure. The horse’s eyes are glazed over, its

Not long after he took on a smallholding for his cobs, the builder boyfriend found a couple walking through his fields with their dog. They had appeared out of nowhere, apparently by squeezing through a small hole in the hedge with a neighbouring property. As there is no footpath through his land, the BB was perplexed. ‘Can I help you?’ he called. But the smartly dressed couple waved him away. ‘No, thank you!’ the man called back politely enough, as he and his wife walked on with their spaniel, which darted this way and that, soon entangling itself with Jimmy and Duey, the builder b’s black and white cobs. The

Always the National Trust sticker. It feels like every time a car parks across the gateway to my horses’ field there is a National Trust sticker in the windscreen. Sometimes there are several stickers in varied colours, the permits of different years, one above the other, like a star rating system for lefties. A few weeks ago, a shiny black car with five National Trust stickers parked sideways on, blocking not only the gateway but the stile beside it so people couldn’t access the footpath. When I caught up with the two men who got out of the car, asking them to please go back and move, they were, in

The whole of Surrey and south-west London seem to have gone abroad on holiday so I’ve got my sanity back. All the people who were working from home because they couldn’t risk Covid-19 but who had to go out walking and cycling in the countryside all day long have simply vanished. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the Covid-phobics have got on planes and enthusiastically breathed as much re–circulated air as it takes to get them to a villa by the sea. The cyclists and the runners and the ramblers with backpacks with cooking pots sticking out of the top have all evidently decided they didn’t need to bother me

‘Can my dog meet your horse?’ asked the woman, as her German shepherd lunged at me, making my thoroughbred jump up and down in panic. We had been riding through the woods, a friend and I, when we came across one of those dog-walking clubs. Up to a dozen of what looked like former guard dogs and their owners came round a bend on the track towards us. ‘He just wants to say hello!’ the woman persisted. How many times have we all heard that from a dog-owner in the park before said beast pounces and humps us half to death? So I told her very firmly: ‘Absolutely not. Do