Diary

20 June 2009

Barry Humphries opens his diary

Los Angeles

I have just spent a hippocentric few days on a horse ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. I was the guest of my friend Monty Roberts, the inventor of horse whispering. Monty first developed ‘Join-Up’ to stop the cycle of violence typically accepted in traditional horse-breaking. His methods still infuriate traditionalists who believe that cruelty is the only way to domesticate horses.

I have never been in the least horsey, having taken a flyer as a boy when a nag that was supposed to be almost comatose took off and launched me over a fence. I was so grateful to find myself intact after this misadventure that I decided, then and there, never to risk my skeleton again in hazardous athletic practices. I always thought that equestrianism was rather unnatural anyway, and it was not until I was married to a keen horsewoman that I grudgingly, and expensively, came around to it. At one stage, my parents hoped I might ride and I even had a horse at our country shack in Victoria, which I occasionally sat on in my Gene Autry cowboy suit for the purposes of photography. There was a cupboard at our house full of sporting equipment in pristine condition. There were cricket bats, boxing gloves, tennis racquets, golf clubs and, most poignant of all, one ping pong bat and a box of white celluloid balls. They all represented my father’s desperate desire to turn me into a sportsman.

Happily, I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries, who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion, but I really admire Monty and so does the Queen, I discovered. Last year the Monarch bestowed on me a small but colourful token of the Nation’s esteem, and after the ceremony at Buckingham Palace I was due to go to Guildford to attend one of Monty’s spectacular and moving demonstrations. In the brief moment I had with the Queen, I mentioned I was going to see Monty and she lit up, almost ecstatically. ‘What on earth did you say to the Queen?’ my friends asked later. ‘I just dropped the name of a cowboy,’ I replied.

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