LITMIR.BIZ

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a mouthful of pasta there. Sometimes we will order a takeaway of a few deliciously buttery curries, popadoms, bhajis and chapattis, and when the children have had their fill I will put away anything that is left on the table.

      But it is not just the food. For as long as I can remember I have drunk a lot of wine. Not every night but most evenings I will get through a bottle, perhaps a bit more. Although this is way above the recommended daily intake I do not seem to suffer ill-effects, apart from being too fat. There is no diabetes, few bad hangovers, no greater loss of concentration, in fact nothing that would serve as a warning that I am drinking too much and I rarely wake full of remorse, cursing the night before.

      My exercise consists of walking to the newsagent for a newspaper and, if I am smoking, a packet of fags. Rose also takes up and gives up smoking intermittently, but regularly runs round our local park. The fitter she has become the more frequently she asks when I will try to do something about my weight, or take a break from drinking so much. I have always had a good line ready when under attack: ‘I am putting a date in the diary,’ I will say. ‘After the wedding/birth-day/dinner/Christmas party’ – delete as appropriate. Exercise, if it is taken at all, has been both irregular and painful: the odd swim and game of tennis if the weather is nice. But both leave me feeling knackered and unable to move properly for days after. There was a game of football once with some friends in Battersea Park. We played against a group of young kids and after an hour we were so exhausted that we spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub and vowed never to play again.

      My dad was forty-two when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As a young man he had been a smoker and drinker, but shortly after he became a father he gave up the fags, cut down on the booze, got fit and was enjoying life. When he was diagnosed he was in better shape than he had been as a teenager, but it was all too brief. When he was first diagnosed he spiralled into depression and retreated to bed to die. For six weeks he hardly moved, and in the end only got up when we stopped taking him food. He died nineteen years later.

      Part of the reason why I have not stopped smoking or drinking is that neither of these things killed my dad. I have always possessed a nonsensical fear that if I follow his route to fitness and redemption the same fate might strike me. There was little logic to the reasoning, but it is a fact that the fitter you get the more you worry about your health. As a consequence, ever since I turned forty-two I have been waiting for some kind of diagnosis like the one given to my father. In the dark hours of my midlife crisis these are the thoughts that regularly haunt me.

      While my brother was like my mum, I was always very much my father’s child. We had the same mop of hair and were of a similar temperament, and perhaps it is because of this that, daily, I convince myself that I have some life-threatening illness. Sometimes it’s knee cancer, sometimes throat, other times lung. I still remember when, aged eleven, I read in a Sunday supplement about a young girl who got cancer on the ball of her foot. I was convinced that was going to happen to me.

      I was thirteen when my father was diagnosed, the same age my own son, Jack, is now, and it was around this time that the horse bug really took hold of me. It grabbed me by the throat: there’s nothing like the horse when you’re feeling down. I’d had the experience before when I was much younger, when we lived in Muswell Hill and not grotty Ealing, where we subsequently moved to. While my father was being eaten by his horrible disease I sought solace with the horse. I would tiptoe out of the house and take the train to the stables in Harefield where we kept a series of ponies, first Bracken and then Gambol. The journey from our suburban house in Ealing, which I hated, took over an hour, and the closer I got to the stables the more I felt I had got away from the suffering at home. I used to get the train to Ruislip and then walk the three miles to the stables. Sometimes Mum would drive me but, as I know now, ferrying children around to something you are uninterested in can be particularly soul-destroying. I would stay there long after dark, until the stable owner was closing up and only then, reluctantly, walk back to the station and wait for the last train home. Mum would occasionally feign an interest in riding. Once or twice she even had a couple of lessons, but they were really only taken to placate me.

      During those first years I would do anything to be surrounded by horses. There is something untouchable and unknowable about them, and they were as magical to me as characters in my favourite children’s stories. When I was around them I was able to forget for a moment what was happening to my father. I loved stroking them, but I was just as happy watching them in the field, or observing them eat and drink.

      It is now more than twenty years since I last rode a horse. We have two children. There are other distractions along with the duty of putting food on the table. But I have regrets, and the one I feel most keenly as I observe others who have been successful in one horse business or another is that, through a combination of fate and error, I never pursued that promised career in the equine world. More than that is the nagging reminder that I have never done the one thing I have always wanted to do – competed on a horse in a race, on a racecourse.

      Since I was a teenager I have been drawn to horses, riding and the world of horse racing, but I have never ridden in any type of race. In those early years of hanging around ponies, drowning in their aroma, I never had the bottle, the skill or the bravery to put them, or myself, to the physical limits of both our capabilities. I competed in hunter trials and gymkhanas, and have a very old sackful of rosettes to prove it. I have a grand photo, too, of me and my dad in an equine fancy-dress competition. Dad is leading me on a white pony called, funnily enough, Prince. A tiny thing and perched on top of him is me in a fantastic outfit; I mean a really brilliant, clever outfit. I was dressed as a bottle of whisky and my dad held a banner aloft proclaiming ‘You can take a White Horse anywhere’, a play on the in vogue advert of the time for White Horse Scotch whisky. My mum had spent days designing and making the outfit. We won the show. Later on there was a bit of jumping, too, the higher the better, and even though my pony at the time, Bracken, was tiny, he would jump any obstacle put in his way. But as much fun as those riding days were, it was not quite the same as actually racing a horse. And this is what I have really always wanted to do.

      There is one certainty about riding in a race and that is that you have to be a particular weight. A 16-stone man has never ridden in a horse race, let alone won one, even though I once suggested in the racing column I write for The Tablet that there should be horse races for fatties in which the jockeys have to have a minimum weight of 15 stone. In my daily, very urban life in London this is the closest I now get to living out my dream, and yet almost every day I am haunted by the lure of the horse. The pull remains infectious and the desire to ride returns time and again.

      It was not just my weight and general listlessness that sparked the fire to get reunited with the animal I love most in the world. I have enjoyed a good living combining the worlds of journalism and television to follow what I love, but I am at a time in my life where I am feeling disappointed, somewhat unfulfilled. Middle age is upon me, and with it has come the crisis. I will not have many years left in which to fulfil a childhood dream. Time, therefore, to do something extraordinary – just once.

      One evening after Christmas, Rose and I were finishing a bottle of wine and having a ‘big conversation’ about our lives. The usual discussion about how we both drink too much (we do) and how we should cut down (which we also do from time to time) was interspersed with the reality of my weight and general lack of fitness. I weigh four stone more than I should and I am only five foot ten. ‘If you won’t lose weight for me what would you do it for?’ she asked. And then the words came out of my mouth. I don’t know why and I can only guess that I had been meaning to say them for a very long time. ‘I’d lose weight to ride again.’ Rose thought I meant hacking through woodlands or having a steady canter along verdant green turf or practising the forgotten art of the rising trot. I could see she was entirely unimpressed. And then I said: ‘I’ll do it to ride in a race, on a proper racehorse on one of Britain’s racetracks.’ That stopped her in her stride. She thought it was a great idea and from that moment onwards for the next ten months I put every effort into pulling it off.

      Chapter One

      The basic arithmetic was simple. To become a jockey I needed to lose five stone, to get under the minimum allowance of 12 stone. Having never been on a diet of any sort in my life before, I had no idea how long

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