At 51, I have somehow found myself back on a horse.

At 51, I have somehow found myself back on a horse.

Which is either a lovely full-circle moment or a midlife crisis with jodhpurs. Too early to say.

I now ride once a week at a women-only English-style rescue stable in Texas, where the horses have been saved from kill pens and the admin appears to have been saved from absolutely no one.

It is dusty, chaotic, wildly disorganized, and for reasons I still don't understand, I am usually the only person who turns up for my lesson, often a full hour before the instructor. Which means I spend a lot of time trying to catch my horse, groom him, tack him up, and look like the sort of woman who knows what she's doing.

I do not.

I look like someone who once read a lot of pony books and is now being quietly judged by a gelding.

But I love it.

After doing Hoffman recently, I discovered my spirit animal is a horse.
Running wild and free. Obviously.
It's also the Year of the Horse, so if the universe is going to be this heavy-handed, who am I to argue?

What has surprised me most about riding again is not how good I think I am, but how much I am corrected by the instructor.
Does being English count for nothing in this sport?

Heels down. Lean back. Hands lower. Stop gripping with your knees.

Good God. I feel I should get at least some sort of Britishness credit. After all, I am basically equestrian adjacent by birth. Regal, even.

Sadly, the instructor remains unconvinced.

One canter was all it took to remember exactly why I loved horses in the first place.

And that all started with a horse called Topper.

Topper

My dad bought him for me when I was ten because I said I liked him.

That was the full extent of the due diligence.

Before you picture some idyllic English childhood involving a pony club, ancestral paddocks, and a mother in a waxed jacket and Barbour wellies shouting, "Kick on, darling," absolutely not. Topper cost about 300 quid, my father was impulsive, and he announced the horse was both my Christmas present and my brother's.

My brother had absolutely no interest in being the joint owner and silent partner of a 13.2-hand flea-bitten grey Arab. To this day, I suspect he is still slightly annoyed about it.

Topper turned out to be an absolute lunatic, far more horse than I was rider. In England, after the harvest, you get stubble fields. Horses go completely feral on them. The second he hit one, he was off.

I'll never forget the pure unadulterated joy of flying across those fields, half standing in the stirrups, arse in the air, breezing past my friend riding her horse Rupert. In that moment I was a jockey. Somewhat oversized, but a jockey nonetheless.
Nothing has ever quite matched that feeling.

The only problem was that fields, inconveniently, come to an end.

Topper was running the show, as always. I couldn't steer him, stop him, or reason with him. I was merely a passenger at the mercy of a young Arab with his own agenda.

If I wanted out, there was really only one option.

Launch myself off and hope for the best.

I did this twelve times before my parents declared that he had to go.

And I was heartbroken.

Looking back, they were probably right. Topper was fast, young, talented, and entirely wasted on me. We had somehow acquired a horse with Olympic aspirations and handed him to a child whose preferred stopping technique involved throwing herself off.

I loved that horse.

And for the next forty years, that was pretty much the end of my horse-riding career.

Full Gallop

And now here I am on the outskirts of Austin, riding a rescue horse called Jeffrey with a questionable gait.

Last week I managed a proper canter and even did a small jump. Since then, Instagram has become convinced I need to see videos of people racing horses across beaches and deserts, and naturally I have started researching riding holidays in Morocco.

This feels like a perfectly reasonable progression after three lessons.

My instructor would quite like me to perfect my posting trot. I would quite like to gallop through the Sahara.

We are clearly approaching this from different angles.

The thing is, if you've ever gone full speed across an open field, a polite trot around an arena feels a bit like being handed the keys to a Ferrari and then being told to drive it through a school zone.

And that's when I realized something. I was never really obsessed with horses. I was obsessed with the thrill. The speed. The freedom.
The simple fact that when you are flying along on something that powerful, there is no room left in your head for anything else. No emails. No to-do list. None of the low hum of everything you are supposed to be worrying about.

Just you and the ground disappearing beneath you.

It was never the horse. It was the feeling the horse gave me.

What's Not on the Listing

I see a version of this in real estate, because of course I do.

I spend a surprising amount of time talking people out of things they think they want. Not because they're wrong, but because sometimes they're chasing something the house was never going to give them in the first place.

I've shown beautiful houses that tick every box and left buyers completely cold. I've also shown houses with questionable decorating choices, bathrooms in need of a serious word, and enough deferred maintenance to keep a contractor entertained for months, only to watch someone walk in and immediately fall in love.

People think they're choosing a house. Most of the time, they're choosing a future. The calmer mornings. The kitchen island covered in homework. The summer dinners on the patio. The version of their life that starts playing in their head before they've even reached the second bedroom.

Usually that's perfectly fine. The feeling and the house line up, and my job is simply to help them get there.

But every so often someone is trying to buy back a version of themselves. The street they grew up on. The life they had before children. Who they were at twenty-five. The thing they're actually missing has very little to do with the property.

They're chasing a feeling.

And feelings, as it turns out, can be surprisingly difficult to find on a listing sheet.

The best purchases happen when the house and the feeling are the same thing.

The expensive mistakes happen when everyone is too polite to say they are not.

I spent forty years thinking I missed horses. Turns out I missed a feeling. Which is useful to know, because feelings have a habit of turning up in unexpected places.

Sometimes they are waiting in a house. Sometimes they are waiting in a city.

And sometimes they are waiting in a dusty paddock in Texas, attached to a horse called Jeffrey.

Until next month,

Gemma

P.S. If someone you know is thinking about buying or selling, I'd be grateful for the introduction. I'll take care of them.

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