Scanning through the local equestrian magazines, we came across an advertisement regarding a medium-sized yard in a village called Hanslope, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. ‘Long Street’ seemed ideal. Having just been taken over by new managers, it only had a couple of liveries in as yet, and the chances were we would be able to take on as many extra boxes as we liked, at least in the early days, on an ‘as and when’ basis. It had an outdoor school, which, although it was built on quite a significant slope, and had a less than perfect surface, seemed like luxury after so long doing without a school at all. Best of all, it was large enough to accommodate a round pen and still have room to ride around, so Leslie and Karen, the couple managing it, were happy for us to install one there when we eventually got one. The yard was also located just about a mile away from the Milton Keynes Eventing Centre, which meant we would be able to hire their indoor school and other facilities if the need arose. With the optimistic view that Nicole would be spending all day every day training horses, it made sense for our lot – Sensi, Misty, Finn and Cobweb, and our friend Jenny’s ex-Police horse, Major, to be on site. Jane, our friend who knew Lucy Rees, and who kept her horse, Jasper, near ours, decided to come too. What really clinched the deal was that there was a large barn available for our horses to stay in, so they wouldn’t have to be stabled.

When we worked out the sums, it turned out not to be much more expensive than the cost of the paddocks we were already renting. I still had one more term to finish at the Japanese school, so at least we had a steady income for a few months. Even so, it was a worrying commitment, particularly as Nicole had just given up her job with the police at Christmas. Knowing that she needed to concentrate fully on the business and not spread her energies too thinly, the decision felt right, but January is a notoriously bad time of year for many businesses, and perhaps particularly so for horse trainers. Everyone feels the pinch after an extravagant Christmas, but with months of mud and rain ahead, the average horse owner tends to shrink into survival mode. ‘Doing’ the horses every evening becomes some sort of endurance, assault trial. Head down, battling against the elements, knee-deep in mud, hands red and raw and deeply lined with dirt, feet frozen and numb, they search a rain-sodden field for their mud-drenched equine by the light of a torch, carefully checking that the horse is warm enough under its state-of-the-art, arctic, breathable, self-righting, lightweight rug. Risking life and limb, they lead their four-legged friend through the wellie-snatching, slithering mire, extricating it from the gnashing teeth and flying hooves of the hungry mob at the gate, to a stable knee-deep in straw, haynets and feed waiting, water buckets filled to the brim, all having been prepared at some bone-chillingly cold, dark hour of the morning, before the owner rushed home to change for work in order to be able to pay for all this pleasure. Occasionally, inspiration will strike, and the wise will pack off their horse, and its numerous rugs, lotions and potions and feed supplements, with careful instructions for hay soaking, feet scrubbing, and feed mixing, to someone like us, while booking themselves a fortnight’s holiday in the sun, re-mortgaging the house if necessary.

Misty’s former owner put us in touch with a new client called Marianne. I’m not sure if her decision to send us her beautiful chestnut Trakehner stallion had anything to do with the mud. More likely it was about getting him up and running for the summer season. In any case, we were encouraged by the prospect that she had other horses she would want starting, and also by the fact that we had a couple of small ponies arriving for training too. Emboldened, we decided to invest some money that Nicole’s dad had recently given her in a round pen. He had suggested that she might like to put this down as a deposit on our right-to-buy council flat, but she had somehow managed to argue that a round pen would be more useful than a roof over our heads, and he had resigned himself to this fate for his hard-earned money.

So one fine Saturday in mid-January, Jane, Jenny, Julia, Nicole and I moved our five horses the twelve miles to Long Street, taking it in turns to ride Sensi, Major and Cobweb, and to lead Misty and Finn. A bridleway led right from our field to Hanslope, with only the last mile or so on roads. Misty was slightly worried by this part, being anxious about vehicles approaching from her off-side, but sandwiched in the middle of the string, she coped admirably. Julia and Nicole had spent the day before bedding down the barn with forty bales of straw, and our horses viewed the sight with approval, seemingly particularly impressed by the huge wooden hay racks stuffed to overflowing with good quality hay. They appeared unperturbed by the move, and settled in immediately. Jane rode Jasper over a few days later. He had a stable in the main yard, and seemed happy. I suppose alarm bells should have rung, however, when we discovered we couldn’t turn our horses into a field as a group, as had been discussed when we’d looked round the place with Leslie. ‘That ought to be all right’ had suddenly become ‘out of the question’. Our horses would have to go in with the others, mares in one field and geldings in another, whether we liked it or not.

The reaction to the round pen was less than favourable, too. An imposing metal structure, it looked enormous in the outdoor school. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Leslie was having a lot of difficulty breaking in an Arab he’d bought, I think he might have asked us to take it down, and only assemble it when we used it. As it was, he discovered just how useful a small enclosed space can be when riding a difficult horse, although it didn’t help him much when his horse threw himself to the ground with Leslie on board!

So Marianne’s chestnut stallion duly arrived at the end of January, accompanied on his journey by two Dartmoor fillies from the same part of Oxfordshire. Being two-year-olds, they were coming for some general handling. In fact, one of them, Kim, had been with us the summer before. Nicole had put on her first headcollar and taught her to lead for her owner, who had rescued her from being exported to France for meat. A dockers’ strike had delayed her departure for two weeks, and she had spent all that time locked in a crate. Let loose in a field, she had understandably decided it was probably best to avoid humans, and her new owner had been unable to get anywhere near her. She had been lured into a trailer to visit us the first time by following a handsome Shetland gelding. She was doing really well back at home, and her owner just wanted her to be exposed to traffic and brought on a little. Her companion, Kit, would accept having a headcollar put on, but was otherwise fairly wild, not leadable, and very averse to having her feet handled.

It was quite a sight watching the three of them come off the horsebox. The ponies stomped down the ramp, looked around them, gave a shrill neigh, and then tried to go in search of grass. Leslie, who had fetched the horses in his lorry, was holding Kit, and looked astonished when he gave a little pull on the rope and she responded by locking her neck against him and carting him across the yard. We managed to get her into her stable by having her follow Kim. The ponies moved in that straight-legged, economical way so typical of Exmoors and Dartmoors. The stallion, by contrast, bounced down the ramp, as if powered by enormous springs, and trumpeted his greeting to the yard in a most proprietorial way, immediately earning him the nickname ‘The Chief’, although Tigger would have been just as appropriate. Installed next to Jasper in the barn, he settled down immediately, completely unfazed by the fact that the horse on the other side of him was a mare.

The Chief was all horse. At 16.2 hands high and growing, he could be quite a handful. When he went into Tigger mode, he seemed to grow a hand, and Nicole often looked rather small beside him, or on top of him. We put him out in the round pen with Finn, and they would tussle endlessly, with Finn giving at least as good as he got. The stallion would chase Finn and mount him, taking chunks out of his mane and coat, and you’d be just on the point of going to rescue Finn when the Chief would get distracted by a mare in the field and then the cheeky bugger would turn around and nip him hard on the knees (which were more or less at Finn’s nose height). Another round of chasing and rearing would ensue. Allowed this free expression for his natural exuberance, the Chief was better able to contain himself and concentrate when asked to. We were so fortunate that Marianne was happy with this arrangement, and not worried by the odd bite mark. On the thankfully rare occasions that Leslie decided no horses were allowed out (on account of the weather), the Chief would be climbing the walls. On other occasions, when he was out on his own, he would try to play with us. He was inevitably always disappointed that we wouldn’t rough-house with him.

The Chief’s training went smoothly enough, and Nicole was delighted to have such a quality horse to work with. Being a stallion, he muscled up extremely easily. The second time he cantered under saddle, even coping with the slope of the school, he was already far better balanced than Sensi was after five years of riding.

Then Pinky, another of Marianne’s Trakehners, arrived. She was 17 hands high, and seven years old, and had never been started. She’d bred a couple of foals, and had been saddled and long-lined, but Marianne had never had a rider for her at the right time. Becoming a mother can often make a mare have more of a mind of her own, with different priorities. Also, with a couple of what we saw as ‘false starts’, where she’d been prepared for backing, but had never gone through with it, she could have been quite difficult, but, in fact, she was surprisingly easy. She was also fully mature, strong and straight, so she could easily handle the weight of a rider. I was surprised when I heard people talking about starting them young, before they got too big and strong. It was so much easier to work with her than an immature three-year-old, and the fact is, if we’d been trying to start her using brute strength, she would have already been too strong by the time she was one.

It was around this time that we worked out a fantastic arrangement with the Japanese school. They wanted to extend the curriculum and offer interesting alternative activities, and decided that horse riding would be a good option. The arrangement was good for us in that it meant steady money, and although we were only charging the going rate, the number of students involved meant that it was, to us, very lucrative. Even better, it didn’t involve weekends, and so didn’t interfere with the normal riding teaching that Nicole was doing. By now, Sensi’s School was no longer the smallest riding school in the world, but we still only had a few horses we could teach on, so we suggested to the school that they might like us to include horse care and management in the curriculum. This was very popular with them as it made the activity seem much less frivolous. We already had the licence, the insurance, and now that we’d moved to Long Street, the facilities. We were set to go.

So it was that I took the first group of students up to the yard to introduce them to the horses one day in April 1998. Nicole was away on tour with Monty at the time, so I faced the prospect of dealing with the first days without her. It was raining very hard when I drove down to the school, which was not the plan, as I knew well the fortitude of this generation of Japanese. Rather than ‘Samurai’, the first word of Japanese I picked up was ‘Samui’, ‘I’m cold’. It was pointless to even consider working a horse outside in rain like this, but I had in my rucksack a box of doughnuts. Putting on a headcollar or picking up a foot would be about the limit of what we could do, but there would at least be something to fall back on, to make the first horse activity special. The six students – five girls and an extremely brave boy, all sixteen years old and fresh from Japan just two days before – met me in the lobby. They were accompanied by a Japanese teacher called Nori, a jovial and friendly man of about thirty-five, with very good English. As he also taught history, we had worked together for several years on a unique Second World War reconciliation project. Now, as the school was falling apart around his ears, he was being promoted into the void left by the best members of staff, and put in charge of redesigning the school curriculum to make it more attractive for parents. One of his main proposals had been to introduce several non-academic activities, of which horse riding was a star attraction, being a very exclusive activity in Japan due to the incredibly high cost of land. I knew a lot of his credibility was riding on this.

So I was not overjoyed when I discovered that the kids hanging around in the lobby in school uniform were actually my riding club. Several of them did not have any kind of coat, and none had outdoor footwear. I sent them off to get better equipped, knowing this would take ages, and went off to find some umbrellas. When the kids finally reappeared, they were still woefully ill protected, for the rain was still bucketing down outside. We clambered into the school minibus, which rapidly filled with steam as we drove the 10 miles or so to the yard. The students started out with a lively chatter, until one of them asked, ‘Does it always rain like this?’

I made light of it, but it wasn’t until we started to get out of Milton Keynes that I realised there was actually something pretty serious going on with the weather. The roads in MK were all so new and well made that you hardly noticed the volume of water on them. Once we got off the main road into the countryside, it was clear this was going to be a flood. Roadside ditches were already overflowing, and torrents of water were gushing out of gaps in the hedges and from gateways on the side of the road. The only time I had ever seen rain like this was in Africa. It was thumping down on the roof in great blobs, and the windscreen wipers, working at full throttle, could not cope. We descended into a wide valley, and found ourselves going along a narrow raised causeway between fields usually full of sheep, already completely flooded. By the next day the road itself would be submerged in more than 2 feet of water, and impassable for over a week.

We made it to the yard, however, and Jane met us in the car park. She had kindly volunteered for the job of assistant tutor, and as soon as the kids saw her smile, I knew they would get on well. But she couldn’t hide the anxiety in her voice as she told me, ‘You’d better drive down to the barn. You couldn’t walk it. The track’s under water.’

So, rather than stop in the car park, I drove down the flooded track to the barn where I knew the horses would be. As we drew round the corner, however, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The area outside their barn had turned into a fast-flowing stream about a metre wide. The students would have to leap across this to get into the barn, unless I carried them. Wails of protests and exclamations of ‘Samui!’ greeted me when I explained what they would have to do. They hardly noticed Sensi and Major, standing behind the waterfall pitching off the roof between us. Putting up my hood, I stepped out into the rain.

I found the horses warm and dry. With a deep bed of straw throughout the barn, and mangers all round stuffed with hay, they had little to complain about. But they seemed to have an air of dejection about them, which I could not put a finger on. Surely for once, they must be grateful not to have been out in the rain. I beckoned to the students. ‘Look, all you have to do is jump over this,’ I said, pointing at the torrent of water that ran between me and the barn, on a normally dry path. ‘As soon as you get inside, there’s dry straw.’ It was a big jump but I leaped forward confidently towards a big hummock of straw just inside the entrance.

As I landed on it, it was all I could do not to fall unceremoniously onto my backside, for the hummock turned out to be an island floating on a bed of water about 4 inches deep. No wonder the horses were looking so miserable. The entire barn was flooded. The students, complaining every inch of the way, shrieked and exclaimed as they negotiated the short distance between the van and the barn, while Misty cowered in the corner, terrified of the noise they were making. But as soon as they were inside, trying to find a lump of straw big enough on which to stand without being immersed in the water, the magic of horses took over, and their shouts and cries gave way to hushed tones and expressions of wonder. ‘Cho kakoee! Misty wa ee desho! I love Misty!’ I looked at Nori, who was smiling for the first time all day.

It wasn’t long, however, before the thrill of standing in a dark, flooded barn began to wear off, and it was clear my bag of doughnuts was going to prove invaluable. Leslie had assured us he had plans to build a proper tack room, but for the moment there was only an old shipping container, a long, windowless steel box with a naked light bulb suspended in it, and more importantly, a kettle. This was not exactly a quality venue for a school excursion, but it would have to do, and the mention of coffee and hot chocolate perked the children up immediately. We said sayonara to the horses and jumped back across the stream as best we could, and I drove back to the top of the yard.

There wasn’t a great deal of room, or a sufficient number of mugs, and all the kids were cold and wet, but as I had anticipated, the sight of a fresh doughnut made it all much better. I began an impromptu vocab lesson, in my most enthusiastic manner, trying to explain to them the difference between hay and straw, when Leslie suddenly appeared around the doorway. Interrupting me, with a face transparent with rage, he asked if he could have a word with me, and it was clear he meant to do so without delay. I stepped outside, leaving Jane and Nori to fill the silence as best they could.

We stepped around the corner, under cover of an old carport whose foundations were peppered with large rat-holes. It was obvious that Leslie was furious, for his face was a seething purple. He turned around and raised his fist, and I really thought he was going to hit me. Barely able to stop himself from screaming, he managed, ‘Who the f* * * are these Japs and what the f* * * are they doing here on my yard?’

I was for once glad that the tack room was a large steel box, because I hoped the noise of the rain hammering on the roof would be loud enough to drown out our conversation so that the kids would not realise what was going on. Feeling the anger rise in me, I began to explain my position, but there was no telling Leslie he had made an agreement that we would be able to teach our clients at the yard.

‘It’s not that I’m racist,’ he began with that time-honoured lie, ‘but nobody told me anything about loads of kids,’ he said. ‘Get them off my yard right now. You’ll have to find somewhere else for them.’

I found myself shaking with rage, which I was barely able to suppress. After the first few days of our being at Long Street, during which Leslie was reasonably polite, his demeanour had begun to degenerate until none of the liveries liked or respected him, and he had become a constant source of irritation. A number of incidents around the yard, as well as a constant stream of childish notes stuck up around the place to remind people to do this and not do that, had alienated everyone. But this was beyond the limit. We were paying for the use of his facilities, we had agreed the terms, and now, all of a sudden, he was banning my clients from using them, on the basis of their race. With a supreme effort, I managed not to tell him what I thought of him, his horsemanship and his yard, as I just couldn’t risk the hassle of finding my five horses wandering outside in the road that evening, up to their knees in flood water. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

Taking a moment to compose myself, I pretended everything was all right as I breezed back into the tack room. Trying not to seem in too much of a hurry, I got the kids back into the minibus, and waved goodbye to Jane, promising to come and pick her up as soon as I had dropped the kids off, and collected my own car, as she needed a lift back home. She set about the arduous job of trying to sort out a dry area for the horses in the barn, by spreading about twenty bales of straw out at the back, which was a bit higher than the rest, until eventually they had a patch they could stand on. Still close to exploding every time I thought of Leslie, I hardly noticed that the rain was still coming down as hard as ever, and it was now nearing rush-hour.

Having deposited the kids and their minibus, and arranged to meet them the next day, I got in my car and headed straight back to the yard. I got almost to the edge of Milton Keynes, before finding myself in a traffic jam. It wasn’t long before I realised that this was not an ordinary traffic jam, but there was nothing I could do. The car did not move at all for about an hour. The Ml had been closed and all the traffic had been diverted onto the A5, which had now become blocked. I only needed to get about a mile further before I could turn off towards Long Street, but it took me more than an hour and a half to get that far.

By the time I finally did get back to Long Street, Jane had long reached the point where her sense of humour had failed. She exploded into a tirade until I managed to get a word in about the traffic. But as her anger receded, she was suddenly gripped by a panic. ‘We’ve got to get back to my place as soon as possible. Last time it rained like this, the river broke its banks and the house was under a foot of water!’ I remembered her boyfriend Patrick, whose recording studio was on the ground floor, as she lamented the fact that, after the last flood, they had been unable to get any insurance.

Knowing that to go back the way I had come would mean waiting for hours to get past the A5 roundabout, we opted for a cross-country route. This was not easy, for in several places there were lines of cars stranded where they had flooded their engines through bad luck, bad judgement or through staying on the left-hand side of the road instead of driving through the shallowest part of the river that once had been the road. The emergency services and AA were overwhelmed, as this was the worst flood we had seen for many decades. We came to a place where the road curved around the edge of a hill, leaving a wide dip that would normally have coped with any runoff, but was now a lake overflowing with muddy water that filled the road. A queue of cars had built up on the other side, and several were lying broken down in between. I took off my shoes and socks, and waded through it, to find it came above my knees. It was obvious that if we tried to go through we would break down. There was nothing else for it. On one side was the lake; on the other, a large wall gave notice of a fancy country house, its gateway bracketed by stone pillars topped with ornamental carvings. Sensibly, the wall had been well set back from the road, to allow a clear view to either side when emerging from the driveway. The space between this and the road was filled with a fine lawn, edged with a small white chain-link fence. Reaching down, I found that the posts were easily pulled out. Without pausing to consult my conscience, I removed them, rolled up the fence and put it neatly to one side, before getting in the car and driving over the lawn.

So we managed to get back to Jane’s, where we found to our amazement that the river had not burst its banks. Nevertheless, Nicole being on tour, I took up Jane’s offer to stay for the night, in case they needed to make a sudden evacuation of the contents of their ground floor. I spent most of the evening on the phone vainly trying to contact Nicole, to see if she could talk to Leslie and negotiate a stay of execution for a few days so that we would have time to make an arrangement with Milton Keynes Eventing Centre, to hire their facilities for the Japanese students. This would cost extra, and would require riding and leading the horses along the road every day, but at least we would be able to fulfil our contract. In the event, the road in the valley on the way was so badly flooded that it was impossible to get near Long Street for almost a week, without a boat or a tractor.

And all the water in that valley had to go past Jane’s house, or else right through it, which, in the end, it did. We went to bed that night with a sense of distinct unease, leaving wellies at the top of the stairs, rather than the bottom as they had done the last time, only to find they had floated away in the morning. Patrick got up every hour to check the state of the river. Suddenly, at about 6.30, he woke us up with a shout. ‘This is it, it’s coming in the yard!’

We stumbled outside to find water advancing at a rate of several feet a minute into the cobbled yard outside the house. Frantically we set about rescuing Patrick’s artwork, motorbikes and assorted equipment from an outhouse, before racing into the house to stuff the contents of the ground floor up the stairs. Computers, keyboards, guitars and amps underarm, we ran up and down while Jane desperately battled to delay the water with a rampart of sand-bags. The last item was impossible to move, a full-size Hammond organ weighing about as much as a small car. Setting two stools at either end, we lifted it up as best we could and placed it on the stools and turned off the electricity supply just in time, as the first water broke over the sandbags, inundating the house to a depth of one foot.

Around this time Jane’s mobile phone rang. It was Nicole, who had finally got the messages I had left. ‘How are things?’ she enquired routinely. I hardly knew where to start. ‘Yeah, I suppose it has been raining a bit,’ she said absently. ‘We’re up in Lancashire at the moment, fantastic demo last night . . .’

It was sad to go because I felt I was making a real contribution to the lives of many young people. I particularly enjoyed teaching them about the war (which remains almost a taboo subject in Japan and has been deliberately misrepresented for years in official Japanese textbooks). It brought a sense of the reality and presence of history in our lives, to be teaching the granddaughters of Hiroshima victims. With Nori, I initiated visits by Second World War veterans, from both sides, involved in reconciliation efforts. These are truly remarkable men who have somehow managed to find it in their hearts to forgive, while making great efforts to ensure we do not forget. It was very moving to see the positive response of the students and several members of the Japanese staff. But there was no hope of survival for the school, which had been chronically mismanaged for years. Soon afterwards, many equally frustrated teachers also decided to leave. The school closed in 2002.

It was also becoming increasingly clear that we needed our own place. I was about to go on the Monty course at West Oxfordshire College, and just before the latest tour had begun, Nicole had been offered the assistant tutor’s job on the course. The hour-long drive each way, to do just two and a half hours’ teaching every afternoon, didn’t seem sensible. It was time to move on. We succeeded in renting facilities from MK Eventing Centre for the Japanese students, and I managed not to come to blows with Leslie, but it was far from convenient. As soon as Nicole got back from the tour, she had a meeting with Leslie and Karen. They were amicable enough, but the message was clear: We won’t turn you out on your ear tomorrow, but the sooner you can find another place, the better.

If life hadn’t been so hectic, we might have had time to dwell on the problem and feel really desperate. As it was, our lives were so complicated and fast, we were struggling to keep up almost every second of the day. Nicole’s job on the course came as a complete surprise, the departure of the previous assistant tutor being rather unexpected. Additionally, the course was scheduled to begin just two days after the end of a tour and started early every morning except Monday, when I would entertain the Japanese, but as Nicole was only teaching in the afternoons, we couldn’t even drive in together. So I had to buy another car and spent a few nights a week with some friends who live close to Witney, to cut down on travelling.

Back in MK, there were several horses in for training, and the usual endless mucking out, and with Julia also on the course, no one to help out. Jane had taken over the role as main tutor to the Japanese students, so she had her hands full. At the same time, Nicole and I were doing an evening course at Bedford College, working towards a qualification in teaching adults in further education. This was a condition of Nicole’s job on the course, but I decided to go for it as well, as the skills were bound to come in useful, and this way at least we got to spend one evening a week together! With all this going on, it was not exactly easy to find time to search for a new yard nearer to Witney.

Yards to rent are in short supply. In particular, small yards are very hard to come by. We had asked a few people and their responses had been very uninspiring. It seemed everywhere was taken and that prices were high. Buying somewhere was out of the question. We had looked in the classified adverts of a few horse magazines, but there weren’t any yards to rent.

The decision to leave Long Street was made on a Thursday evening, and on the Friday, Nicole thought she had better buy a copy of Horse and Hound to see what was on offer.

‘Not much in this one,’ she said, flicking through the classified section. ‘But this one might be a possibility, if it’s not too far. “Small yard to rent in idyllic Cotswold countryside, ten minutes from Cirencester.”’ She looked at the map on the wall. Cirencester looked almost as far away as Milton Keynes, but other than this yard there was nothing. ‘Shall I ring up and at least find out which side of Cirencester it is?’

A few moments later, Nicole put down the phone, a hint of guarded optimism in her voice. ‘Well, it’s the Witney side of Cirencester, so it might be close enough. I’ve arranged for us to go and have a look on Sunday afternoon. There’s also some self-contained accommodation available, although it sounds very small.’

The yard was called Moor Wood Stables, in the small village of Woodmancote.

It was mid-afternoon on Saturday, and we’d just come home from the morning’s chores at the stables, turning out the horses, mucking out, watering, preparing haynets, training the couple of horses that we had in (almost an incidental task after the repetitive, tiring, but to Nicole, ‘great fun’ daily jobs), and we had a couple of hours’ respite before we had to go back and do the afternoon tasks of bringing the horses in for the night, sorting out evening feeds, et cetera.

Nicole looked up from her steaming tankard of tea, munching thoughtfully on a chocolate biscuit. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘these yards don’t come up very often. If it’s suitable, we should put down a deposit straight away. I think we should bring a cheque book.’ This is possibly one of the most sensible things Nicole has ever said.

For the last couple of years that I’d been working at the Japanese school, and Nicole had been doing two or three jobs at once, we had seen so little of each other that we hardly had time together at all. The transition from job-free idleness to workaholism had happened so imperceptibly that somehow we had both come to regard working non-stop as quite normal. We’d never been exactly house-proud, but the busier we got, the more our flat slid into chaos. It wasn’t just that we were lazy, but we genuinely didn’t have the time to tidy up, or wash the dishes, certainly not with the sort of regularity that most people consider hygienic. Every now and then, a visit from someone who might feel ‘uncomfortable’ with (or revolted by) the level of mess would force us into action, and we’d blitz the place, even if it meant staying up even later than usual to do so. Within a day or so, however, recently cleared surfaces would become lightly mulched with dirty dishes, unanswered letters, bills, documents requiring immediate attention (which they never received), unfinished marking, slowly rotting vegetables harvested from the allotment, cats and bits of fur, and discarded items of clothing. Luckily we were both more or less blind to this unsavoury view, unless there was absolutely nowhere to sit when we came home. A burglar coming in to ransack the place might have left disappointed, thinking that someone else had got there before him. A Feng Shui adviser would probably have dropped down dead on the spot.

All through this, however, we at least got to spend the nights together, to fall asleep or wake up in each other’s arms. Now I was away for days at a time. My absence was hard for us, although I suspected that Nicole secretly enjoyed the space. The fact that she acclimatised so quickly to occupying the entire bed by herself, stretching out diagonally with the cats, confirmed my concerns.

That Sunday, as we set off to check out this prospective yard, we felt a sense of release, almost like we were going on holiday. Having seen to the horses in the morning, we arranged for Jane to do the evening chores. We had what amounted to an afternoon off! It was a bright spring day and as we passed Witney and set off into new territory, the countryside seemed to become even more beautiful, with low, weed-infested hedges giving way to thick belts of mature trees, lined with long stone walls and sheltering an under storey of yew and holly. Meandering rivers emerged from the rolling hills, their cosy valleys dotted with picture-postcard settlements. Even the sign saying ‘Welcome to Gloucestershire’ seemed reassuring. Catching up on all our news, we made an unusual mistake. Engrossed in discussion, we found ourselves at a pub at the bottom of a hill, as described in the directions, and turned right, several miles before the turning we were supposed to take.

Being lost, however, was a pleasure. As we left the Fosse Way, the Roman road built to allow the legions to move around their conquered land in the days when Cirencester, now a small market town, was the capital of England, the scenery became even more spectacular.

‘Ooh look, a cross-country course,’ cooed Nicole.

‘Ooh look, lovely big trees,’ I answered.

We finally worked out where we were and rejoined our intended route to Woodmancote. The directions were very specific, but as we turned through unmarked stone gates and drove slowly down the long driveway to Moor Wood Stables, we were sure there must be some mistake. It seemed too beautiful to be real. Descending through a cluster of huge trees, we seemed to leave the world behind, and come out into a land like a dream.

Back in Milton Keynes we had become very fond of an oak tree next to one of Sensi’s many fields, whose gnarled, twisting branches seemed almost to claw at the orange night sky, reflecting the millions of street lights in the city. I once climbed up it, as the branches were perfectly placed.

What we found ourselves facing now was quite impossible to contemplate climbing. In front of a grand house was an enormous Cedar of Lebanon, in almost perfect condition, looking out over a beautiful valley, in which nestled a number of old cottages.

‘I don’t think it’s going to be difficult to choose our favourite tree,’ I blurted out before our view opened out across the estate to reveal a large wood down the side of the valley. At the time I could only identify about five types of tree, but it was obvious at a glance that this was a collection that would rival many arboreta. The great spread of mature oaks and chestnuts, their branches edged with a tinge of light green, leaves just peeking out of their buds, was broken by the sharp spires of black pines. Towering at the foot of the wood were two huge Wellingtonias, the taller of which had a broken tip, having been struck by lightning, but it was still about twice the height of the large native hardwoods around it. Later, as I learned to recognise more of them, I would realise that standing in the yard you can see about thirty-five different species, almost every one a near perfect example of a type of exotic or native tree.

We drove down beyond the cedar, past old stone walls encrusted with moss and bizarrely colourful patches of lichen, from which dangled an array of climbing roses (which turned out to be the National Collection of rambler roses), until we came between two L-shaped yards and a house. We drew up in front of a huge old granary barn and got out. As our ears accustomed themselves to the calm, which closed around us as I switched off the car engine, we realised there was another sound, not merely the wind in the trees or the birds.

‘A stream?’ We looked at each other. Sure enough, there at the back of the car park was a perfect little babbling brook, its clear water looking clean enough to drink.

A couple greeted us with a friendly smile, introducing themselves as Sarah and Peter. Recently married, they were not in fact the owners, as everything in sight belonged to one Henry Robinson. He lived with his family in the big house, which in spite of the conspicuous lack of piles of old tyres, rusting machinery and dilapidated buildings, was called Moor Wood Farm. They showed us around the fields, which they explained were four hundred years old pasture, designated ESA (an Environmentally Sensitive Area) under an EEC directive to preserve them. However, many years of continuous grazing by horses had left the land in a pretty sorry state, poached by hooves and dotted with patches of weeds. It was quite steep, too, and exposed to the west wind, which roared across a huge open field on the other side of the valley and seemed to blow right through our clothing. But as soon as we stepped through the gate into the squelching mud, I noticed a flat area, just big enough for the round pen. Nicole’s eyes met mine, and I knew she was thinking the same.

The fields they were offering amounted to about 8 acres, together with one of the yards, containing six stables made from Cotswold stone. One of the stables was huge, at least twice the size of the others. Sensi wouldn’t mind this, I thought, especially with the view out onto the woods.

It was perfect, and although even one month’s rent would seem like a fortune, we knew the chances of finding somewhere cheaper were minimal. But the accommodation was not ideal. Used as we were to living in a one-bedroom flat, the annexe was much smaller, and had no internal doors except into the tiny bathroom, which would have been impossible to step inside if it had actually contained a bath instead of a shower. If we were going to live here, we would have to make sure we never had an argument, as there would be nowhere to storm off to. We would also have to throw away a large number of our books and other possessions, as there would be nowhere to keep them.

Fortunately, Sarah and Peter had a suggestion. For an extra ‘peppercorn’, they could rent us a room in the granary across the car park. The moment I stepped inside, I knew it was the perfect place for my musical equipment – a barn with walls two feet thick. There was, however, a major drawback. Half of the roof was full of holes big enough to let in shards of light, and there were already several swallows making their nests among the beams. I hoped we would not disturb each other too much, because my mind was already made up. A bit of tarpaulin nailed to the ceiling, and this would be the music studio I had always craved.

We looked at each other without needing to say a word.

‘We’d like to take it. Can we leave you a deposit?’

Sarah and Peter looked slightly taken aback, and said, ‘There’s just one problem.’ Seeing our faces fall, they added, ‘Nothing terrible. It’s just that there are some holiday bookings for the annexe. It won’t be available until the end of May at the soonest, even if we cancel some of the later ones.’

This was less than a fortnight away, and as we had yet to pack, arrange transport for the horses, and sort out our stuff, the wait wasn’t too much of a problem.

In fact, during the next fortnight, there were two weekend courses at Witney, which Nicole was teaching on, as well as the course from Tuesdays to Fridays, so we only had two days, two Mondays, to arrange everything. Nicole had ambitions of sorting through the flat, recycling or throwing out things that we didn’t need, and only packing and bringing useful items. In the event, we didn’t even have time to gather together sufficient boxes, and ended up just throwing the chaos of our flat, rubbish and all, into, appropriately enough, bin bags. Even then, we ran out of bags.

We hired a 7.5-tonne curtain-sided van to transport all of our stuff, but we weren’t too confident about driving it. Nicole called her Australian friend and karate instructor, Rohan, and dropped hints until he offered to drive the van for us. A typical Aussie, prone to bad-taste humour, extravagant tales and with more than a hint of arrogance, he is nevertheless a real gentleman, the sort that would always help a friend in need, give generously of his time, and gladly give up his bed and sleep on the sofa if you needed to stay the night. Tall and strong, he was also bound to be helpful with the heavy items.

The first of the heavy items we had to deal with was the round pen, which we went to collect from Long Street. Twenty panels of eight by six galvanised steel mesh, and a gate, which Nicole and I were already very familiar with loading and unloading on tours. Usually, however, there are hordes of helpers. With only three of us, it was a back-breaking task.

It’s possible that when Rohan asked whether the stuff from the flat was all packed up and ready to go, and Nicole said ‘more or less’, he may have had rather different expectations of the situation than the scene that greeted his eyes when we got back to the flat.

‘Ah,’ he said testily, surveying the wreckage, ‘a definition of packing that I hadn’t previously come across.’ He added, ‘It helps if you put the stuff in boxes.’

‘We have!’ Nicole exclaimed indignantly. ‘Look!’ And she pointed to the half dozen or so boxes crammed full with the sort of stuff that even we didn’t consider suitable for plastic bags – crockery, glasses, knives. ‘It won’t take long,’ she said, with the sort of misguided optimism that would be endearing if it didn’t so often mean me getting roped into impossibly big tasks with ridiculously little time to do them. To prove her point, she picked up two large bin bags and an armful of books, and set off down the stairs to the lorry. Sighing, Rohan effortlessly hoisted up a couple of the largest boxes and set off after her.

Innumerable trips later, and we were beginning to make an impression. Surfaces were becoming visible, the piles of bags were diminishing, the boxes and most of the big items were already in the van, and although we were getting hot and fed up with the job, we could see an end in sight. I was just about to follow Rohan and Nicole out of the flat yet another time, when the phone rang. Glad of the excuse to sit down for a moment, I picked it up.