Melissa Kite: Warning. I gallop

What is the point of living in a free country if you cannot do dangerous things every now and again? I enjoy galloping. There, I’ve said it. Luckily, the girlfriends I ride with enjoy galloping too. As we are all safely in the bracket known as ‘middle aged’ this scandalises the world but we don’t care.

Our proudest moment was when a farmer ran from his house shouting: ‘There’s a load of old women galloping around my field!’

This behaviour has its risks, of course. The other day, for example, my friend Sarah fell off her horse. It furthered our reputation for geriatric silliness considerably because we had taken out with us two young girls from the stable yard who evidently thought that because we were, relatively speaking, old fogeys it would be a safe, sensible ride.

I did try to warn them. Before we approached the sand track where we do our first gallop, I looked behind and said, ‘Any minute now, girls, Ingrid will take off and you won’t see her for dust. If your horses are likely to bolt after her, and if you don’t want to gallop flat out, you need to get ready to hang on to them.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about us,’ they both chimed. ‘We’re very experienced riders.’

‘Well, I’ve warned you,’ I said, before turning back round. A second later we hit the sand track and a great cloud of sand went up as Ingrid’s Arab shot off like you-know-what from the proverbial shovel. My friend Sarah’s horse scrambled after her and my mare Gracie shot a few feet into the air with her usual mixture of excitement and fury at being last and galloped off on their tail.