SARAH MCCARTHY
Sarah’s greatest passion in life has always been horses. As soon as she could speak, she bugged her parents enough that they finally bought her a pony for her fifth birthday, hoping that the fixation would pass. But, over the years, the ponies got exchanged for horses and Sarah ended up competing most weekends, gaining provincial colours as well as several broken bones.
Along with a male German Shepherd, the thoroughbred horses were always the only pedigree pets among the rest of the menagerie, which included a rescued cat, chickens, ducks, rabbits, budgies, hamsters and even a white rat that inhabited the two-acre property in Constantia, Cape Town.
Sarah’s mum stopped complaining about the hoof marks in the sprawling lawn when Sarah rescued a baby, hairless squirrel while out riding, and Jasper took to scaling the silk curtains in the lounge as a hobby. Along with two Cape white-eye baby birds that had fallen from the nest, Jasper was hand fed a nutritious horse-food grain through a syringe and successfully reintroduced back into the wild.
Despite spending many hours in the saddle, Sarah’s horse riding never took away from her academic career. And despite falling on her head several times, she still managed to achieve an ‘A’ aggregate for her final year at school and win a national award for the best English essay in South Africa. Sarah went on to get a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in financial accounting and economics, and a post-graduate diploma in advertising specialising in copywriting.
Sarah has spent twenty years in the UK where she’s had the privilege of working for some world-renowned companies (HSBC, Harrods, Unilever and Burberry) and top agencies (Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, Proximity London). Here, she mastered writing for different audiences and riding a single-speed bicycle through rush-hour London traffic while still wearing appropriate office attire and high heels.