I can trace all our problems back to Frankie Dettori

‘If you think about it, Frankie Dettori is to blame,’ said the builder boyfriend, because when things are really bad he deploys satire.

One thing leads to another with horses, the joke goes, so we may as well trace our problems back as follows.

If Dettori had not ridden a horse called Marienbard to victory in the 2002 Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe by bringing something magical out of a horse as slow as an elephant so that the Godolphin bay suddenly, like something out of a movie, exploded from the absolute back of the field to come from nowhere, overtaking horse after horse after horse in the final seconds of the race, flying over the finishing line so improbably that even the commentators were caught off guard and the first time they mentioned the horse as a contender was when they were announcing he had won… if Dettori had not managed to do that then Marienbard would not have been standing at stud.

And he would not have sired a filly out of a jumping mare called Up Thyne Girl. And this little bay filly would not have been born with one front foot slightly more boxy than the other, would not have had the producers shaking their heads and moving her on and would not have ended up in a sale, bought by a dealer, and sold on to an eccentric recluse with a stable yard in Sussex, the builder boyfriend’s mother. And when we visited his mother one afternoon I would not have seen this little filly and fallen in love with her.

Nearly ten years on, Maid By Marien (known as Darcy) still has one slightly boxy front foot but has become a fine jumping horse. We were doing well in a rented stable yard on a private estate with a sand school to train in, until we were told by the owner that the rich people in the big house next door, also owned by her, wanted us to let their children play with our horses. I wouldn’t hear of it.

The owner gave us our marching orders. The rich people were paying her £15,000 a month, and we £600, so it was a matter of economics. We had to move Darcy and our three other horses to two fields on the same estate. We had just put Darcy and the pony into one field, and the bb’s cobs into another when I noticed that the field opposite had broken fencing and a raggedy black and white pony was pushing at the wire.

As I watched, he pushed all the way through so I found out who the owners were and got a message to them. A woman turned up and told me the pony was uncut. But she didn’t make any effort with the broken fences. So I gave this woman one of my own battery packs to put power in her fence line to try to make mine safe.

The next morning at 7 a.m. I got a call from the woman saying her pony had broken in with ours in the night. ‘’Ow’s it got in?’ she wailed. ’Ow do you think, you idiot.

When I got there, the pony had gone through two lines of electric fencing to get to my mares. They had clearly gone through an ordeal. Darcy had a cut to her knee, and was holding one of her back feet off the ground.

The woman began walking away. I called to her: ‘I’m going to need your insurance details!’ The bb and I led Darcy and pony back to the stable yard where we had been packing up our stuff. I was so angry I thought, I’ll squat the place now if I have to.

The bb was then walking back to the field to get my car when I heard screaming. I went to the gate and saw two women squaring up to him. One of the women was shouting about the other one being her wife, on which basis, she was attempting to argue, they were immune from all responsibility.

‘If you give us a vet bill I’ll shove it up your arse!’ she screeched. Later, she made a complaint to the estate management that the builder boyfriend had threatened her. When I demanded to know how, she said he had ‘threatened her with a vet bill’.

‘Please tell these women to leave us alone. I want nothing more to do with them,’ I told the estate manager. ‘I will be emailing you my vet bill and you can forward it on.’

Joking aside, I blame the rich people in the big house. I blame the landowner who turfed us out. And I blame the ne’er-do-wells who put an uncut stallion in a field with broken fencing.