People who exhibited an excessive attachment to animals once struck me as slightly suspect. Until I became one of them.
Dogs and cats I could take or leave. Then my wife and I embraced equestrianism. We did so to answer our own question: is it possible to bring up five daughters without them becoming addicted to fashion and Facebook?
Our stratagem has worked, so far. The girls, aged eight to 17, are rough and tumble without being precocious. Ponies have arrested their development. By which I mean they have yet to discover an unhealthy interest in make-up, boys or American teen soaps.
And like many dads, a child’s hobby has become mine too. Tired with watching from the sidelines with only a manure bucket for company, I decided to get a horse of my own. This was a potential act of folly. My experience on horseback – a handful of lessons in my 20s – was negligible.
“A novice like you wants a cob, a plodder, something steady.” There was no shortage of wise counsel from horsey friends. Naturally, I ignored it all the moment I saw Manny, a 16.2 hands-high steeplechaser with an exemplary pedigree. His maternal grandfather was the former Derby winner Nijinsky.
This is less impressive than it sounds. Nijinsky’s offspring are many. Few of them made his grade and Manny’s mediocrity saw him sold on and on, each berth less exalted than the last, until finally he came to me to see out his days as a happy hacker.
I paid £2,000 for him, in the teeth of a gale of scepticism from fellow Pony Club parents. Avoid a thoroughbred, they said. Prone to injuries, dangerous and doolally, probably.
But there is something odd, preternatural almost, about the way a horse can fix you with his eye. Manny was totally unsuitable. I was completely smitten.
What was I thinking? My wage sustains a non-working spouse and our six school-aged children. Manny was way past his prime, but was still half a ton of unpredictable flesh and bone capable of accelerating from 0 to 20 in not very long at all.
Over the next year and a half there were falls. Yet, thanks to a sturdy body protector and soft ground, I was a stranger to A&E. Like all horses, he began by testing me. He would “nap” – ignoring my instructions while shaping to throw me off. But one by one, we passed incremental milestones. A first trot. An inaugural canter. And then the rest: hacking with daughters, hacking alone, jumping and trail-hunting.
A friend from the Daily Mail expressed an interest. It withered on the vine when the features editor stressed such ramblings were commonplace.
The story of my equestrian mid-life crisis would only be published if I dressed up “as Poldark”.
There were moments of wild exhilaration but, more prosaically, a quotidian dose of satisfaction. After each ride, no matter how lousy a day at work lay behind me, no matter what fresh disappointments parenting had dished out, there was a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
Of course, one of the reasons we introduce our children to animals is so that they might learn to love and lose, preparing them for graver separations in years to come. But I was not prepared for Manny’s swift decline. His liver was packing up and, a little earlier this year, he had to be destroyed.
What is a suitable period of mourning for a much-loved horse? Some horsey-types, inured to sentiment by decades of watching these wonderful beasts come and go, will scoff at such lily-livered hesitation. Get straight back in the saddle, man!
But it has taken me a few months to think and feel my way to a resolution, to decide there has to be another Manny. He was not a mid-life crisis, for all I joked to friends that he was. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Manny was, in fact, a new sensibility, another way of looking at the world for someone who, as a journalist and parent, had hitherto only seen it through the prism of people.
Horses do not care for blandishments. They judge us entirely by our actions, which is why they sense anxiety. In return they choose to keep us safe, or not. Our love for them springs partly from a sense of gratitude, the relief that comes from knowing you deserved to be thrown off, even as he contrives to keep you on.
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