Musings on my side saddle season

Like many bold ventures, this one started around a kitchen table and involved a bottle of wine and late night conversation. During which my Impossibly Stylish Side Saddle Friend kindly offered me the loan of her horse, Bud, to take hunting while she was away skiing. "Oh and by the way, you might as well borrow my habit and go sideways, as you've been having lessons". This was back at the start of the season, and January 25 felt like a comfortable way away, a reassuringly long stretch of time during which I would no doubt improve on my fledgling side saddle attempts and become fully proficient. Ha!

It seemed like a great idea at the time. Well, now that I and, more importantly, the horse, vintage saddle and habit, are all back in one piece, I can confirm it was a truly brilliant idea. But if you'd asked me the night before, while I was brushing the beautiful navy cutaway coat with shaking hands, I might have said otherwise. A bad case of the jitters and "why the hell did I agree to this", compounded by finding that said borrowed coat had hunt buttons on, to which I am not entitled. The friend I was staying with had a moment of Blue Peter brilliance and saved the day with invisible sellotape and black felt-tip pen.

Hacking to the meet, I dismissed a sense of impending doom with my usual big grin and banter, and decided to focus on keeping straight and balanced. My escort for the day, an assertive but friendly and no-nonsense pony club lady, just the sort you need by your side in a crisis, proved invaluable - finding clever short-cuts that kept us on decent ground and avoided unnecessary bursts of speed, while allowing us always to keep up.

My confidence was soaring, until someone pulled up alongside me and asked: "So, how long have you been doing side-saddle for?" It was only then I realised I'd had a grand total of four lessons, one disastrous but brief bucking episode in the school and one hack, making this only my seventh time sidewise, ever. Gulp. But people were overwhelmingly positive about it, we had a constant stream of visitors dropping to the back of the field to stare at this rarity, some of them doing a double-take before realising it was an impostor and not my Impossibly Stylish Side Saddle Friend, rightful owner of both horse and accoutrements. And I would explain that I'd come as her and taken over her life for a day, and very nice it was too. Someone started a rumour that I was even wearing her underwear, which I hasten to add is not true.  And more to the point I stayed on, with a reasonable level of dignity and poise, I'd like to think.

I have since had three more outings of this sort. I got a little bit braver each time until it felt almost completely natural - I lost that awkward sense of being a cherry precariously perched atop a moving cake, and felt instead like the familiar action of riding. And I got to wear a variety of (borrowed) outfits: in addition to the heavyweight navy blue hunting habit below, there was a sage green tweed with matching waistcoat and, during the hot spell in late March, a lightweight grey cotton twill, made in 1929 for a lady emigrating to the colonies.

So, I shall remember the past season as my Lady-Mary-from-Downton moment (minus the unfortunate incident with the Turk).