Last week my arduous afternoons consisted of sitting reading a book under the shade of a tree, on the mounting block in a riding school yard while ‘my’ kids, the best in the whole school, had their three-hour riding lesson. It was a tough job, but hey, somebody had to do it.<\/p>\n

I don’t ride. Last time I did I ended up in Charing Cross Hospital with concussion, whiplash and third-degree burns, which sounds like a busy day at the circus but was a more mundane reaction to riding while drunk in the sun and not turning left when the horse did. But I was made to ride when I was a kid. I didn’t want to. It was that or elocution lessons. You think I’m joking.<\/p>\n

Apparently, I was supposed to be grateful I had riding lessons. Most kids didn’t. And if I didn’t like them, if I didn’t like the feel of soaking wet jeans chafing my legs against a borrowed saddle, if I didn’t like bored horses stepping on me, if I didn’t like getting asthma so that eventually I was allowed to stop when an hour on a horse meant a day in bed, then I was just ungrateful<\/p>\n

Every single word of this is true. But last week I discovered that while I still don’t really have any great desire to go riding as opposed to looking good on a horse, I also don’t have asthma, or any allergic reaction to horses, dung, straw, hay or stables. Which came as some considerable and pleasant surprise. Maybe I grew out of it. And maybe it was nothing to do with the horses at all, but no matter. It’s gone. What hadn’t gone was my occasional not hearing people properly, assuming I have and over-reacting in a way that makes Clive Dun’s Corporal Jones look like a study in under-acting.<\/p>\n

Teaching English, I’d tried showing them You Tube clips of Jones screaming ‘Don’t Panic!” to reassure them about the exams. I’d tried showing them ‘Allo Allo’s Officer Crabtree, to show the importance of proper pronunciation, but that didn’t work at all.<\/p>\n