I NEVER remember a time I didn’t love horses. I got this from Nigel, my father, who has a real natural gift for horses. His grandfather promised to take him to Banbridge Horse Fair to buy a pony for his 14th birthday, but the day before, he sadly died, and so Dad never got the pony. When he left school and started work, he bought two thoroughbred foals with his first pay packet.

My parents have seven children. I’m number three and the only one interested in horses. As a young child, we kept Bonnie, a Shetland, in the back garden before my parents built a house with a couple of stables. I remember coming home from school, immediately tacking up my dun Connemara gelding Samson and heading off round the roads with Mum or Dad usually following behind in the car.