Heels Down, Kick On

#4       It was acceptable in the 80s (and 90s): Part 1 Earlier this week, I wrote a post about pony profiles. Writing it was like being shoved from the top of a helterskelter of nostalgia, evoking a flood of other memories on a Noah and the Ark-like scale. Ever since, my head has been filled - two by two - with a number of other horsey reminiscences, which I’ll hedge my bets a few of you will recall too. So grab a glass of wine (it is a Bank Holiday, after all), get comfortable and allow me to bring you a handful of throwbacks to the equestrian 80s and 90s. This may take a few instalments… 11.        A complete and utter disregard for health and safety precautions. Hordes of kids all simultaneously trying to catch 20 different ponies in the same field. Armed with frayed headcollars and homemade lead ropes, we’d storm the field with our buckets of pony nuts yelling “Come oooooooooon!” at the top of our lungs, ...

#3         The power of a good pony profile If you were the kind of child who enjoyed a damn good list, who got excited about a fresh page in a notepad and new gel pens in a spectrum of colours, then you might also have enjoyed creating a few pony profiles in your time. For the lucky kids who had a real live pony, this activity would’ve been quite a useful exercise in ensuring you knew every last detail about your four-legged friend. For those of us who didn’t, it was just good fun: the beginning of a brand new game with a brand new air-horse, and an exercise in imagination. Here, you could have all the 16.2hh Thoroughbreds, KWPNs and sport horses you wanted; not just 12.2hh Bongo, who spent most of your weekly lessons trying to shake you off or refusing to move at all. The first pony profile I saw was in one of the hundreds of magazines I used to collect, which means it was probably in Horse and Pony, the home of gobby little ch...

#2         The joys and terrors of the riding school queue Not every pony owner was a riding school rider first. But those who were will surely remember the gut-churning anticipation that was The Queue. The unadulterated joy of being given your favourite pony… and the utter doom of the opposite. Back in the day when a full hour’s riding lesson was only £5.50 (what happened there?), I’d shuffle forwards with my £5 note folded into a square inside my glove, the 50 pence piece slotted inside, and don my most angelic 7 year old smile, hoping to have my name scribbled down next to my favourite pony for that week. The problem was, our riding school owner – like many before and after him - was a real advocate of giving children and adults alike genuine lessons in life: not just riding. The main one being, you don’t always get what you want. What I really, really did NOT want, was Tramp. Tramp was the stuff of a 7 year old’s nightmares. He wasn...

#1    It is a truth universally acknowledged that every little girl must be in want of a horse. I wanted a horse so badly when I was small, that I spent an unhealthy portion of my childhood pretending to ride around on one. Until the day a friend  –  who had recently been bought her very own  – peeped over  our fence while I was happily playing at ponies, and sai d, “You don’t still do THAT, do you?”  Well  I’m not  going to any more, am I, Jane? Notanyf*ckingmore. From that moment on, at the age of  eleven, pretend pony games ceased. To be fair, she probably saved me a few secondary school beatings, because thinking about it, eleven does sound a bit old to be brushing the garden shed with a dandy brush.  You see, Jane was a realist. She told me my horse wasn’t real, and she told me Santa wasn’ t real either. But while these pony games were still in full flow, t hey didn’t stop at shed -brus...