'My brother decided I had sufficient funds and badgered me into buying a horse'

Alan Weston of the High Altitude Partnership tells senior features writer Peter Thomas about the highs and lows of ownership

My dad was a supplier of agricultural products to the farming community around Devizes in Wiltshire, so when I was a 12-year-old I used to ride out a lot of ponies at different farms, and from that time onwards I've always loved horses. My father was a very small-time gambler and by the time I was in my late teens, my older brother Paul and I were going to the races, with a real passion for the jumps.

I'm a chartered surveyor and I have my own business, which has done very well, so when Paul came to work for me, he decided I had sufficient funds to buy a horse and finally managed to badger me into it in 2005, when I was 47. That's when the High Altitude Partnership was born – named for a film project the company was investing in about Everest mountaineer George Mallory – and although it's had different numbers and names through the years, it's always been the same name.