Clare Balding was a nervous wreck when she received an OBE from Britain's Princess Anne.
The 42-year-old TV presenter admits she was taken aback when she came face-to-face with the Princess Royal at Windsor Castle in Berkshire yesterday (03.10.13) as she received the award for a dazzling career in broadcasting.
Clare - who was joined by her partner Alice Arnold - said after the event: "I got terribly nervous about this, I've been pretty busy then suddenly yesterday I thought 'gosh I'd better make sure everything's in order for tomorrow.
"I'm still a bit shaky now, I talked absolute gibberish, absolute gibberish - I was just hopeless. Mucked my curtsey up, nearly fell over as I turned and walked away, messed up properly, but luckily not too many people had seen that."
However, seeing Anne brought back some unnerving memories of a horse racing incident in 1989, which Clare wrote about in her autobiography 'My Animals and Other Family'.
She said: "I've known the Princess Royal a long time, we rode against each other as amateur jockeys - we had an incident at Beverley racecourse many years ago so this feels like the story coming full circle in a nice way.
"I bumped her very badly in a race - it was all my fault. I think it's quite a funny incident and I wrote about it in my book."
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