Summary:
From early childhood family outings reflected my parents’ passions: Badminton, Farnborough air show, The Derby and a succession of hunter trials and point-to-point meetings. An MFH taught my sister and me to ride. A close uncle rode to hounds. My mother couldn’t even ride a bicycle though she had been pretty handy driving war-time ambulances. My father, an old salt who had sailed the seven seas, serving in every naval theatre of World War 2 except the Arctic convoys to Murmansk, hacked until he was quite ancient. One day I caught a first whiff of 110-octane petrol up my nose, and I was off into another magical world defined by Formula 1 and motor rallying, particularly in my case the Paris-Dakar, 12,000 km across the Sahara. The Range Rovers I drove then were much noisier and nimbler than those one sees today, waddling silently across fields and turned through gateways with evident difficulty. Despite my rackety career in Fleet Street, in hot pursuit of the public’s right to know, my wife Claire and I managed to get mud on our wellingtons pretty frequently. Once Claire had died after her long brave battle with a remorseless illness, I wanted to return to eventing, not as a solo spectator but with a role in organisation of some sort. With a couple of introductions from a kind friend, I found my self flung in at the deep end, kept my cool and my breath and came up for air without drowning. The fact that I keep coming back for more and organisers continue inviting me poses a multitude of questions…