The Horsey Life by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes [Barnes, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595356
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2010-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

I’m serene, you bastards

I had an awful day the other week. I was researching a piece for The Times to a tight deadline, and every two minutes the internet connection dropped. I didn’t deal with this at all well. I shouted, screamed, swore. I was impossible to live with. I finally got the job done, and spent the rest of the day with a tension headache that felt like a tourniquet on my skull. I’m a bit like that. Things get on top of me. My life has contained a million instances of impotent rage at mechanical objects. I am quick, volatile and have a nought-to-sixty temper, one that’s generally gone as soon as it starts, but leaves me wrecked. Others, too. There are no small disasters in my life.

Right at the start, when I started riding thoroughbreds in Hong Kong, I made the most extraordinary discovery. When I was around horses, I didn’t scream and shout when things went wrong. On one of my earliest rides with Gill, a horse I was riding – it was the laddish Ben Wyvis – got upset with the traffic. He did an instantaneous spin through 180 degrees and galloped back along the main road to the stable in a crazed panic. I stayed with him; I had him steady within 50 yards and stopped not much further. I then turned him back into the traffic and walked back to where Gill was waiting with a big grin of both relief and, impossibly, admiration. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t think this was a big deal at all. It seemed to me a very straightforward and simple thing to do. I was completely without stress. And when I thought about things, I realised something wonderful: that my lack of stress had miraculously communicated itself to the horse. I had told him, just by sitting quietly, that the traffic that had upset him so much was in fact no big deal.

When I came to ride Dolores, this sort of thing no longer came as a surprise. I found the same bizarre calm in the midst of her excitement and nonsense. Now please be assured here that I am not boasting. It is not a matter of courage or excellent riding skills. Rather, it is a quirk of temperament. When I am with horses, I find an unexpected and underused side of my nature. Cind will give a hollow laugh if you talk about my serenity: but Dolores will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s just the way I am with horses. Perhaps that is at least one of the explanations for the addictive quality of the horsey life: that I need the calm, that I relish the calm and that I can’t find it by normal means. That makes it the opposite of being an adrenaline junkie: though at least a part of me is that as well. But the strange combination of adrenaline-fuelled excitement and rather melodramatic serenity are each a part of the horsey life, so far as I am concerned.

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