IN SEARCH OF GOOD NEIGH-BOURS!
SHE HAS THREE HORSES, FIVE DOGS AND THREE CATS AND NOW THIS WRITER WANTS TO MOVE THEM FROM CYPRUS, WHERE SHE LIVES, TO IRELAND, WHERE SHE HAS NEVER BEEN BUT KNOWS IT’S THE RIGHT HOME FOR THEM ALL
People talk about rescuing racehorses that have retired from the track, but with Lucky Star it was very much a case of him rescuing me. The week before Lucky won his retirement race, my beloved horse Achilles died of colic. Achilles was seven years old, the first horse I’d owned, and the pain of his passing
was as raw and as brutal as anything I’d ever known. Perhaps it was the force of my grief, I’ll never know, but at the exact time of his death, my watch stopped ticking and never started again. I haven’t worn a watch since.
Needless to say, in the days that followed Achilles’s death, I struggled to cope. At one point, my parents were so worried they suggested I see a doctor. But I wasn’t depressed, I was just very, very sad – until fate
brought me Lucky. A first-class racer born in Cyprus, where I live, this incredible horse had run 63 races in his career, winning 12 of them. He was a money maker with an owner rich enough to retire him at the age of eight. Of course, in Cyprus there’s no guarantee of a second chance for many off-the-track thoroughbreds and it was both his, and my, good fortune that we found each other at the right time.
As one might expect, there was an intense period of adjustment and for the first year Lucky mainly scared the life out of me, even as he healed me. Hot with occasional explosions of temperl, he was not a horse to be lunged – or taken near donkeys, as it turned out – but it soon became apparent that he was a supreme athlete blessed with a remarkable character who was very much capable of being, if not a dancing horse, a very fine riding horse. So, that is what he became. He also