My Year With a Horse (eBook)

Feeling the fear but doing it anyway

Hazel Southam (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
240 Seiten
Lion Hudson (Verlag)
978-0-7459-6850-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Hazel had been scared of horses for all her life, and an earlier attempt to overcome her fear had ended in failure. She was still overcoming fear in other areas, travelling around the world with her job, reporting on areas recovering from war, famine, disease and catastrophe. And eventually she took up riding again - only to face bigger fears, when illness struck her. Even worse, her father's dementia grew so bad that her mother had a heart attack and Hazel had to put her father into a home. As illness threatened to derail her career, and family tragedy looked likely to break her heart, she was loaned a big old horse called Duke. He stood far taller than her at every point, and she was afraid. Yet somehow, as she rode him through the Hampshire countryside, she found solace and healing. Gradually her fears began to subside.

Textauszug

January

I open half an eye and groan. It is New Year’s Day. All over Britain there are probably many people like me, who can barely lift their heads off their pillows. People who are regretting having that last glass of something really unpalatable – and possibly green – from the back of the drinks cabinet at 2 a.m.; something brought back from a family holiday in the Mediterranean that had never been touched. Now it has been and everyone is repenting of it.

The difference is that I haven’t got a hangover. I simply can’t face the year that lies ahead.

It was a bleak Christmas. Now, I appreciate that Christmas can be difficult for lots of people. There are arguably too many preconceptions of what it should be like and generally there’s a great big gulf between those and reality. Magazines are full of decorative festive scenes in which, miraculously, time has been found to make beautiful displays for the table, the fireplace, the stairs, the hallway, and so on. In these pictures, the meal is never burned, the food all comes out of the oven at the same time, the Brussels sprouts actually look tasty and edible, and fresh-faced, smiling people in sparkling, fashionable clothes are having a jolly time. There are no rows, difficult relatives, or disappointing presents.

Helpful wall-planners give you a daily guide to things to do from about August onwards in order to be ready on time and have the opportunity and presence of mind to enjoy a relaxing glass of something bubbly with your family while the food magically cooks itself perfectly.

Of course, it’s not like that in real life, is it? Despite this, I’ve always loved Christmas: decorating the tree, bringing in holly and ivy to make the house look festive, cooking up a storm, writing cards, wrapping gifts, being with loved ones, going to Midnight Mass at the cathedral and celebrating Jesus’ birth.

It was all a joy. Then, six years before this story begins, my father – an intelligent, practical man – started to act strangely. He’d forget to do things. If he did them, he’d forget that he had done them. He got lost. He was unsure what he was saying.

He couldn’t remember how to do basic tasks such as getting dressed, and he was achingly tired all the time. He slept for much of the day as well as the night.

Then he started to forget people and places; whole chunks of his life vanished from his memory. My mother and I knew, long, long before the diagnosis came, that it was dementia. Part of the cruel irony of dementia, however, is that often the sufferer doesn’t understand what’s happening to them or recognize the diagnosis as being true.

That was the case for my father. It was nonsensical, he said, that he should be considered “demented”. He was perfectly fine, thank you. He’d always been intelligent, hadn’t he? Was anyone questioning that now? Were we saying he was stupid? But time wore on and he wasn’t fine.

By Christmas he was lost and scared, depressed by something he couldn’t fathom and angry at a diagnosis that he utterly refuted. It was all too much for my mother, who first suffered with a dreadful cough and then got the norovirus. We’ll gloss over the details. But I left her in bed and brought my father home with me. For three days I ran between the houses, cooking, cleaning, feeding, dressing, and washing both of them, administering medicine and sustenance. On Christmas Day, my father kept saying, “When do I give you my present?” I sat and wept, but that just annoyed him. “It’s not my fault,” he said, quite correctly.

“That doesn’t stop it being sad,” I replied. It didn’t look at all like the pictures in magazines. There was no peace or goodwill among men this particular Christmas.

So I find myself on New Year’s Day feeling that I have nothing to look forward to. Dementia is, after all, not something from which you miraculously recover. Whatever the road ahead holds, it can only be worse and more upsetting than what has gone before.

Yet, this year, I actually do have something to look forward to: a huge, middle-aged horse called Duke, who is to be my new best friend. The only snag is, as I have said, I am scared of horses. So just how have I got to this ridiculous point on a New Year’s morning when events are at such a pass that the only thing I am looking forward to is something of which I am terrified?

 

It had begun with a resolution I’d made about eight Januarys before, to take up horse riding. Most of us make New Year’s resolutions, but how many of us keep them? Plans to join the gym, lose weight, cut down on alcohol, quit smoking, all – it seems to me – go out of the window by mid-January. As I write this, I’m looking at a gym membership form and wondering how long I can put off filling it in.

Certainly I’d been uniformly rubbish at keeping New Year’s resolutions in the past. Generally, I simply forgot that I’d made them and only remembered weeks or months later when someone asked me how I was getting on. Consequently, for years I’d given up making resolutions at all. What was the point if I couldn’t even remember what I was meant to be quitting? It all seemed like such a negative start to the year ahead.

So I’d decided instead that I wanted a positive resolution that I might actually keep, something that I would do, rather than not do. Realistically, I wasn’t going to go to the gym. Clearly, that’s still the case. Is there anything more boring? Mercifully, I didn’t need to lose weight and I didn’t smoke. So that left The Big Challenge: face a fear and overcome it. I was going to learn to ride.

Though I’d grown up in the countryside at a time when villages were still villages and not commuter belts, I’d never ridden. My childhood had been bucolic, an off-screen version of the popular 1970s TV series The Good Life. We grew all our own fruit and vegetables. I spent my summers picking soft fruit down the garden whilst listening to Test Match Special on an old radio that my father had cobbled together out of spare parts. We kept two dozen hens and a fearsome cockerel named Jock, of whom I was very scared. I walked, ran, cycled, and skipped everywhere and was outdoors from dawn until dusk. Even after dusk it was hard to keep me indoors. My mother invariably found me, in my nightclothes, sitting with my legs hanging outside the bedroom window, gazing into the gloaming, watching bats flit over the lawn, and drinking in the scent of lilac, clematis, and apple blossom.

I didn’t set foot in a supermarket until I was sixteen years old and had never heard of McDonald’s. It is hard to be more rural. Yet horses didn’t come into the picture.

This was partly to do with class and money. Ordinary rural people like us didn’t ride. Horses were, the unspoken message went, the preserve of the rich. And we were not rich. So somehow, somewhere along the line, a lack of familiarity with horses made me scared of them. I figured that, with the honourable exception of miniature Shetland ponies, they were all faster, bigger, and possibly more intelligent than I was. And even the miniature Shetlands might be faster. And more intelligent. I wasn’t about to go anywhere near them. I didn’t even watch horse racing on TV on principle.

There were, of course, other children who did have ponies. At primary school there was a small coterie of girls who would trot and gallop round the playground rather than walk or run. I despised them. Had they any idea how foolish they looked? Later, my best friend at grammar school owned her own pony. She kept trying to introduce me to him, with what I understand now as natural enthusiasm and a desire to share her love of horses. To my shame, I couldn’t have been less interested. I’m still haunted by one afternoon spent at her house, when she asked me if I’d like to go and meet her pony, which was in a field nearby. “No thanks,” I said, without even having the politeness to lie, visit the horse, smile and nod, and pretend to be interested. All these girls had far better manners than I did. They also knew a secret: horses are wonderful.

Winston Churchill once said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.” But in those far-off growing-up days, the outside of a horse was not for me, or for most people I knew. In fact, the first time I saw someone riding around the village was when I returned, thirty years later, for a big family celebration. The sight of a woman riding a horse down the road that I’d grown up on took my breath away. I wanted to run up to her and say, “You do realize that no one rides here, don’t you? This is a fast road these days. Children don’t play in it any more. You’re not safe. The countryside isn’t what you think it is.”

And then I realized that the fact that she was riding down my old road showed just how much the village had changed. Money had come in. People were living there not because they’d done so for generations, working the land, as my family had done, but because it meant they could get their children into good schools and it was only an hour from London. The countryside wasn’t what I thought it was any more, either.

So how did the New Year’s resolution come about? The answer is that I have a dreadful habit of looking things that terrify me in...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.7.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Krankheiten / Heilverfahren
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Reiten / Pferde
• ISBN-10: 0-7459-6850-3 / 0745968503
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7459-6850-6 / 9780745968506