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‘Smile!’ she insisted.
‘Bugger off!’ I said. We get away with taunting each other like this because it is seen as yard banter. It is not banter, of course; it is a deadly-serious feud in which one of us will have to be crushed at some stage.
Naturally, the rain came down before I could get Gracie on to the lorry and her legs started to foam where I had failed to get all the soap suds out. I feared my nemesis would make a smart comment prompting us to fight each other to the death with lead ropes and stirrup irons but thankfully she had gone inside the tearoom for a swearing match with someone else.
An hour later and our contingent of 11 women of a certain age was safely checked in at the secretary’s tent in Windsor Great Park. Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous. That’s the horse world for you. One minute you are blaspheming for dear life, the next minute you are dealing with the scrupulously polite members of the Lions Club.
‘Have a super time,’ said the terribly nice lady who handed me my number. I nearly told her to get stuffed before I remembered I was no longer required to josh for survival. ‘Thank you so much, and thank you once again for organising such a wonderful event,’ I said somewhat awkwardly, as I made the transition into polite society mode.
At the starting gate we lined up for our tack check. I love this bit. A man with a loudspeaker in a hut announced in a Mr Cholmondley-Warner voice that we were to approach the line in single file. As we did so, a small army of volunteers in fluorescent vests came from nowhere to stick fingers in our girths. This is England at its best.
‘I think yours could go up a hole or two,’ said the cheerful pensioner checking my straps. Then he looked deep into my eyes. ‘You don’t look very happy. Give us a smile!’ This was unfortunate, but you cannot argue with a member of the Lions Club, and so I simply explained as politely as I could that my face was, for the moment at least, stuck like this. They fired us off and after some restrained trotting to the first set of obstacles we set about the serious business of hurtling in a haphazard fashion over fences.
There was much desperate hailing from loudspeakers as our little group of desperate horsewives threw itself at the four-foot hedges and gates that the good people of the Lions Club had spent weeks lovingly assembling. At one point I somehow managed to dismantle completely a solid tiger trap. ‘Terribly sorry!’ I called back over my shoulder as officials ran across the field to attempt repairs.
A few miles later there was a further breach of etiquette. My friend, who had been struggling to keep control of her Arab mare, decided to let her off the leash to run off a bit of steam. This resulted in a man with a red flag chasing after us shouting, ‘No bolting!’ Fearing she might be issued with a Crown Estate horse-speeding ticket, my friend affected an air of insouciance. ‘I got lost,’ she said improbably, when he caught up with her panting.
In the end, we made the finishing line ahead of schedule, our horses’ legs suspiciously spattered in red dust from the tracks we were not supposed to be galloping along. And I had a huge smile on my face.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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