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We Can't Stop Thinking About the Saddle Club to Sex and the City Pipeline.

There are so many important things happening in the world, and that's why we can't make our one remaining brain cell stray from a series of ghostwritten paperback books from the '90s and Samantha Jones's entire back-catalogue of men.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that human beings need a tribe. Hence: the church! Netball teams! That one cult that’s somehow formed around Jared Leto, a man best known for mailing dead rats to his castmates and writing one (1) decent song across a six-album discography!

It’s this need for tribalism – this need to be validated and understood and seen for who we are, with all our faults and foibles – that leads people to do an awful lot of slightly weird things. Like spend several hundred pounds, for example, on a monochromatic head-to-toe wardrobe that’s coordinated with the monochromatic, head-to-toe wardrobe that their horse is wearing. Or, perhaps, assigning ourselves as characters in ensemble-cast series.

Let’s get this out of the way nice and early: I’m a Samantha. Or, perhaps, a recovering Samantha sun, a Carrie moon, and a… Lexi Featherstone rising. Sometime before she plummeted to her death with a Marlboro in hand. Maybe. 

And from the ages of approximately six until, I don’t know, sometime last week? I was – I am also a Stevie Lake. Of all the girls in the Saddle Club series, Stevie’s the fun one, the prank-pulling one, the inexplicably dressage-loving one, the definitely-harbouring-no-shortage-of-undiagnosed-ADHD one. And in the natural order of things, Stevie definitely grew up to be a Samantha Jones, because Stevie is all about following the good vibes. It’s as simple as that.

Lisa’s an easy one, too. Ever-so-well-brought-up Lisa Atwood definitely summers in the Hamptons (this may or may not be canon), can absolutely do things like seating plans for dinner parties, and learns to ride because it’s the sort of thing a well-rounded young lady should know something about. Lisa inevitably grows up to have an ill-fated society marriage, a King Charles Spaniel called Elizabeth Taylor, and a memorable breakdown about shagging amongst a bunch of Daughters of the American Republic. Lisa is, without any doubt at all, a Charlotte.

Military brat Carole Hanson is a touch harder to pin down, but actually, no she’s not, because she’s a Miranda. She’s terribly, terribly clever and very good at what she does (and what she does is ‘horse’, and she’s very good at horse). But she’s also a bit neurotic and would definitely eat cake out of a bin. Out of respect for Carole, these comparisons do not extend past the original Sex and the City universe. We practice And Just Like That… erasure around these parts. But Original Canon Miranda? Miranda who is so maligned for being a bit of a buzzkill but actually kind of made everything work for her, while everyone else was off being dumped by Russians and cheating on chiselled young actors? That Miranda poultices hooves, and she poultices them so good. 

So who’s Carrie in the broader scope of the Saddle Club universe? This, frankly, is a conundrum, and a very low stakes one, which means that it’s all I’ve thought about for approximately three weeks now. Carrie can’t be a Max Regnery (hot – we can all admit it now), say, nor a Mrs Reg, because she is simply too high-maintenance and also, frankly, she doesn’t really like animals. She could, potentially, be a Deborah Hale, the newspaper reporter who ends up marrying Max (again, hot), but Deborah Hale is far too much of a peripheral character to ever develop a personality, which doesn't feel in keeping with Main Character Carrie. Kate Devine, who's very salt-of-the-earth and lives on a dude ranch isn't right at all. Are there any other characters in The Saddle Club that aren't, like, horses? Is Carrie a Prancer? 

No. No, she's not. Because Carrie, unfortunately, might actually have to be Veronica. Both are indoor sort of gals; both know the importance of a really killer outfit. Both make impulsive, faintly selfish decisions (case in point: Veronica would definitely send her boyfriend to rescue Miranda from a bathroom floor rather than doing it herself), and both occasionally have a weirdly on-point moral compass, because even a stopped clock is right twice a day. (It's not implausible to imagine Carrie standing her ground if a nemesis was, say, judging a writing competition that two of said nemesis's best friends were competing in. The fact that we have to keep the bar so low for both these characters sort of proves my point, I think.) 

You know who would completely forget that their book debuted to rave reviews, purely because their boyfriend's ex gave them a dirty look in passing? Carrie, in season five, and also Veronica, probably, at any point in her adolescent or adult life. It's a shame to imagine that Carrie Bradshaw, queen of Manolo Blahniks and curiously overpaid dating columns and politicians that like a little bit of widdle could, in a parallel universe, also be a deeply mean 12-year-old girl who's so bad at seeing a stride that her horse actually dies, but unfortunately, we're all adults here and being an adult means dealing with hard truths, sometimes. 

Veronica would definitely also wear a signature nameplate necklace. I rest my case. Everything is ruined.