Free You Only Live Once by Katie Price Page A

where it didn’t seem worth the stress and aggro it caused to go out. But I think that did eventually bring me down. I was in a rut. I loved Pete and the kids, loved being part of a family – it’s all I’ve ever wanted – but I needed something else in my life. I needed to do something just for me. I felt I needed a hobby, something separate from work.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    GROWING APART
    Back in 2008 I felt as if all I ever did was work and then come home and there was never any down time, never any way I could switch off. I’d started up my KP Equestrian range and that was going well so I decided that I wanted to ride more and challenge myself by learning dressage. It seemed the obvious choice. I have always loved riding. Horses are my escape and my passion. I’d been riding since I was seven so it wasn’t as if it was this new thing that just came out of the blue. I already owned several horses, two of which were on loan to friends, but I was hardly riding at all, apart from the odd hack. And I did want to push myself. I wanted a fresh challenge. Learning jumping didn’t appeal to me as I thought it looked too dangerous, but I liked the look of dressage. It’s a highly specialised sport where the rider has to make the horse perform a number of precision moves by using their hands, legs, and the position of their body. It is occasionally called horse ballet. It looks beautiful and elegant but it is really hard!
    Once I’ve decided what I want to do, I don’t hang about. So next I had to get a dressage horse. The horses I already had were not trained in dressage. So I flicked through Horse and Hound and saw what looked like the ideal one for me advertised. Not only did it sound impressive but it also happened to be black and that is my all-time favourite colour in a horse. The only problem was that it was in Glasgow and my hectic schedule meant that I didn’t have time to fly up and see it. So I called the owner and said, ‘You’re going to think I’m mad but I want your horse and I can’t come and see it, so can I send a vet round to give him his five-stage vetting? [That’s like a horse MOT.] And then I can decide whether to buy it or not.’ The horse passed its inspection and I called the owner again and asked if she would drive it down to me. I transferred the money into her account and was now the proud owner of a horse I’d never seen. Yes, I admit that was impulsive. It was a fifteen-grand impulse buy! People think you need to spend a lot more than that on a dressage horse, but I think that’s crap, because this one, who I called Jordan’s Glamour Girl, went on to teach me a lot.
    So the horse arrived, and as soon as I got on her she began rearing. This was not a promising start. The owner said that she didn’t usually do that. Typical, I thought. I’ve gone and bought a dud horse. Why didn’t I see her before I spent the money? But then the owner got on and I saw that the problem was with me, not the horse, because she had her trotting and cantering round the ring and the horse looked stunning. So I tried again but I couldn’t even get her to walk, let alone trot! And when I gave her the signal to walk on she began doing all this fancy footwork. Because the horse was so finely tuned to dressage instructions, I couldn’t ride her as I would usually; I had to learn the dressage moves first.
    But instead of learning dressage then, I was so busy with work that I ended up loaning Jordan’s Glamour Girl to one of my best friends, as she then was, Michelle Baker, another keen rider. And I paid for the horse’s upkeep. I knew Michelle from my glamour modelling days when she was still Michelle Clack. I couldn’t keep Jordan’s Glamour Girl at my house as my stables weren’t yet ready and such a highly trained horse needed to be exercised regularly otherwise her fitness would suffer.
    Several months later I realised I was back to square one with my riding ambitions. I was the owner of yet another