My family has never had a happy relationship with horses, ever since my dad killed one with a hot-air balloon.

Well, it wasn’t really his fault. We’d chipped in to buy him a hot-air balloon ride for his 50th birthday, and as the balloon drifted down to land in a field after the flight across the dawn-reddened Lancashire landscape, a horse took fright, bolted into a wall and broke its neck.

I’ve been on a horse maybe once in my life. It didn’t do anything particularly horrible to me, but I don’t recall it being anything other than a slightly fraught experience. I don’t really like being on the back of something that has the capability to run at 30 miles an hour without a brake reassuringly close to my right foot.

Despite our family’s evident lack of horsey empathy, my mum managed to get close enough to one to get bitten by it recently. In the middle of London, as well, where you wouldn’t normally expect to be bitten by a horse.

She’d gone down to the capital to watch Wigan Athletic’s semi-final FA Cup success against Millwall and with some other members of my family decided to take in a few of the London sights.

This involved a trip to Horse Guards Parade, which involved the usual and obligatory activity of pulling faces at the Horse Guards themselves to make them crack a smile. While she was having her photo taken in front of one of the Guards, his horse leaned over and bit the hand she was no doubt flapping about in front of its face.

Strangely, there was no representative from HorseClaims4U on hand to take her details and claim compensation from the Queen or someone, because this is exactly the sort of thing that these type of ambulance chasers live for.

It wasn’t a very nasty bite, more of a nip, really, but there was some blood, so the Barnett delegation trudged over to Downing Street to take some advice from the policemen standing guard there.

It’s probably a good job that Al Qaeda weren’t planning to stage a raid on the Prime Minister’s home that day, because before long practically every copper in a 100-yard radius was over to the gates to look at this Northerner in a Wigan shirt who’d managed to get herself bitten by a horse in the middle of London.

“Do you think I’ll need a hospital?” said my mum to one copper.

“You might need to get a tetanus jab,” he said as a crowd of tourists gathered. “But you can probably wait until you get home.”

His mate chipped in: “Just make sure you go to the hospital straight away if you start neighing in the middle of the night.”

General hilarity – and, it has to be said, a distinct drop in the quality of the security around Downing Street – ensued. In the event, my mum was all right, so I think we can call this result Horses 1 Barnetts 1, and draw a line under it.