However long you’ve been involved with horses, there are some inevitable firsts that you can only experience as a horse owner or rider…
1. The first time your horse smacks you in the face as you’re hanging his haynet.
2. The first time you wear your beautiful and very expensive Italian breeches and find the smear of green slobber down the back them.
3. The first time you realise that your horse has been a little too quiet for an hour or so and walk into his box to find him standing beside a chewed/stomped-on/poo-smeared rug.
4. The first time your horse decides to help you with mucking out/poo-picking and tips over your full to the brim wheelbarrow.
5. The first time you find yourself sitting alone in a freezing cold barn at 2am, praying to every God you’ve ever heard of that you’ll still have a horse in the morning.
6. The first time you walk two miles across field and dale in full hunting kit, trying to muster as much dignity as you can and retrieve the delightful creature that dumped you at the last hedge before careering off into the distance.
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7. The first time your ridiculously gangly baby horse, who has spent six months struggling to coordinate all four legs, picks up the correct canter lead twice in a row.
8. The first time you discover your horse lying down having a snooze in his box or in the field and go and join him for some chill time.
9. The first time the sun comes out, the rugs come off, the mud disappears, your horse is sleek and shiny and you think, ‘Oh yes – THIS is why I do it!’
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A graduate from Durham University, Madeleine joined H&H in 2011 and became Features Editor — producing content across the magazine and website, including the popular inside back cover article ‘The horse that made me’ and the weekly ‘The best of my fun…’ interview. She has written on topics as diverse as hay making and headcams, to hot totty in the horse world and circus horses. Madeleine now works as a freelance feature writer for Country Life, The Telegraph, Horse & Hound, cntraveller.com, The Spectator and The Field, as well as writing obituaries for The Times.
