My Passion With Cheryl Green

IT started with a pony called Sam. He belonged to my best friend at school and I would go with her as much as I could to visit Sam, everyday sometimes, whatever the weather.

I pestered my mum for a horse of my own, although we couldn’t afford it back then.

But I was happy to share Sam with my mate. We would ride him over to a nearby farm to get him a bale of hay and bring it back – thinking back on it now, he was basically going to pick up his own dinner!

Fast forward more than 30 years and I’m a mum myself with two daughters, Molly and Jazmine, who have inherited my love of horses.

We are lucky enough to have two of our own – Sadie and Quinn – and my partner Chris loves riding, too.

We’re all members of Penistone Riding Club, compete in trials and attend pony camp but also just love riding them purely for pleasure as well.

I love to watch my children getting so much enjoyment out of it.

I remember very fondly a day when my daughters and I were riding all three of us together along the Trans Pennine Trail and I looked at them and realised that something I had loved since I was a child had been passed on to them. It’s a lovely memory that I’ll treasure always. I remain very passionate about horse riding – it means absolutely everything to me. I go riding every weekend and I can’t imagine a hobby that could be more fulfilling or rewarding.

I also think that all the effort and energy I put into looking after Sam the pony as a child was character building – I’m sure that commitment has translated into a strong work ethic and a fire in me that wants to go out and achieve. Thanks to my love of horse riding, I learned early on that you get out of things what you put into them. It also taught me that the best things in life usually require dedication.

I tell my youngest daughter how lucky she is to ride horses today – she may complain that it’s cold on our way to the stables but I will always remind her my friend and I used to visit and look after Sam when it was freezing cold as well as in the warm summer months. Snow, sleet, rain – nothing would stop me.

Molly is a very lucky ten-year-old indeed, actually as we got her a pony of her own for Christmas but wanted it to be a surprise.

It was so difficult to keep it a secret in the weeks leading up to it – she kept pestering me to buy Sadie when she found she was for sale but we told her she was already sold to someone else.

Then we decorated around the stable and told her on the day that we had to go up to the stables to check on all of the horses and make sure they were all okay.

The look on her face when she realised that Sadie was actually hers was absolute joy!