Try as I might to avoid it, the tricky issue of horse riding managed to ambush me when I was home last weekend. A girlfriend had spent hours bringing my clothes down from the upstairs bedroom and she and I were playing the now familiar game of Keep-or-Throw when, unexpectedly, the next item in the pile was a pair of riding breeches. She held them up and she and I stared at each other wordlessly for what seemed like a long time.
“I just don’t know,” I said eventually. Another long silence. “You could put them right down on the bottom shelf out of sight.” She nodded, carefully expressionless, and did as I suggested.
There are so many imponderables in my life right now. It’s bad enough dealing with ordinary clothes – they all seem at least three sizes too big, and after so long in T-shirts and trackies I haven’t a clue what fits my shrunken, sexless, uncooperative frame. What kind of trousers do I want? Realistically, will I wear a skirt again? Any chance I will ever need a standing-up outfit? And why, after so many years of wishing I could, does it hurt so much to chuck out the fat wardrobe and embrace the slim one?
It is a form of identity crisis. Bad enough the acute sense of bereavement for that bouncy, leggy woman in skinny jeans and smart pumps, lost for ever; but now this, the sight of breeches and jodhpurs and riding jackets: reminders of my former happy passion, which force me to address stuff I’m nowhere near strong enough for. Requiring me to explore my feelings for the thing I loved so much, but which ruined my life.
Several friends – and readers – have asked me, hesitantly, what my attitude is to horses now, trying to find out if it upsets me to talk about it and whether I’d like to ride again. Other people assume I ought to slam the door on the whole horsey world. My brother, seeing me reading Horse & Hound on a visit home, gave me the incredulous stare of he who visits the asylum and leaves in bewilderment and despair at the madness he finds. “I don’t like to say anything… but how can you enjoy that kind of stuff now?” he asked. And he had a very valid point. But then he’s not horsey. Untouched by the passion. I suspect my husband, too, probably loathes horses now, where before he tolerated, but is keeping a tactful silence.
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In truth, I don’t know what I feel or what I want. I equivocate. I’d like to be in a position to have a choice about whether or not to ride again. Part of me yearns to be close to a horse again, to bury my face in its neck and inhale its sweet smell. But the hurt and sense of powerlessness and loss that will come with that are terrifying. Apart from the fact I couldn’t reach the neck of anything but a Shetland pony, wouldn’t it be utterly selfish to put my family through the worry of seeing me mount a horse again?
In a way, riding clothes and magazines are just incidentals. When I go home, reminders of a horsey lifestyle are inescapable: the stables, the riding arena, the empty fields, the vanity pictures of me jumping on the kitchen wall. If I want to escape memories of horses, then the only thing to do would be to sell up and move. And we don’t want to do that.
It is actually quite a chewy debate, this: the relationship between a dangerous sport and its retribution. Horse riding, as Professor David Nutt, sacked head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, pointed out, is indeed more risky than taking ecstasy. But those who do it do so because it’s a passion, a thrill, a love affair. Because it brings that sense of being alive, properly alive, when you are pushing yourself and scaring yourself; because in a way there is an implicit contract with the devil – you know it’s dangerous but you are willing to accept and suffer the consequences. Because it’s better to be hurt doing something exciting rather than crossing a shopping centre car park or tripping over your own slippers. It’s the glorious arrogance of all risk sports: people who crash fast cars want to drive again; lone sailors who capsize yearn to return to sea; mountaineers can never resist the lure of high peaks. And they can be unlucky or really cavalier with fate.
I am reminded of a good friend, a climber, high on Mt McKinley in Alaska, who made the decision not to go for the summit because he knew if he did so he would lose his fingers to frostbite. And who watched, in horror, as others went on and duly froze. Later, back in the frontier town nearest the mountain, he had a distressing encounter with one of them, an elderly Czech, who held up his rotting hands, too far gone to save, and begged for solace. Some nights, I too hold up my crippled hands in supplication to the blank hospital walls, and offer to barter my frail ability to walk again for healthy fingers and thumbs. A mother who lost her teenage son, and founded the Sandpiper Trust in his memory, sent me a book of hugely comforting poetry which I turn to at times like this. “The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing and is nothing… only a person who risks is free.”
So I admit: sometimes, when I am feeling strong, I want to ride again. If I achieve enough torso strength, I would like to take up the kindly offer from Riding for the Disabled and be hoisted onto a horse to see how I feel. Apart from anything else, the walking action of a horse is said to stimulate the core muscles and hips of riders. And on days when my bravado is high enough to allow new daydreams – which it hasn’t been at all lately – I contemplate doing paradressage. One young paralysed horsewoman, Emma Douglas, who was treated in the spinal unit here in Glasgow two years ago, is now, magnificently, a member of the British Young Rider Dressage Scheme alongside the able-bodied.
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But it all depends, I suppose, on how strong your passion is. Another friend, paralysed by a jumping fall, says it is not for her. After the glory and the speed of whizzing cross-country, she says, how could she go back to plodding around an indoor arena on an old cob, held in the saddle by helpers. Is the view between a horse’s ears the best view in the world under any circumstances? It’s another of those imponderables.