The World I Fell Out Of: The Inspiring Sunday Times Bestseller

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She is working on a follow-up to Let Us Spray. Journalism, though, may turn out to be not enough. Next stop: court.

When Melanie Reid spent a year recovering on the spinal ward in Glasgow after falling off a horse, her world collided with an unlikely collection of ordinary people with incredible stories. Despite their only common ground being a newly broken body, Mel grew close to her ward mates. She sets out to discover what became of them. It's beautiful - full of love and light - and an exploration into not only how, but why we survive, despite everything.' - Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness In 2012 Reid was named Journalist of the Year and shared Investigation of the Year, for an ACC story featuring Bronwyn Pullar, who had received private information on 7000 ACC claimants.

In print, Reid is able to mask some of her pain. Her public persona is steely, but in real life she is a discomfiting blend of resilience and fragility; defiance and (unjustified) guilt. There are many points in our conversation where tears are running down her face. But when I ask her if she wants to stop, she plays it down."Oh, I cry easily and a lot," she says. As well as the physical loss, there was a kind of psychological belittling, a shrinking of status and voice and power. When you are in a wheelchair, you can't get cross or argue, or hold your own in an argument especially if the other person is standing because you are like a child talking up.” Last year, she and David put in a new kitchen, but it's designed to fit in with the style of the farmhouse rather than her wheelchair. This, says TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, is not what the BSA was set up to do. She believes the BSA should simply be judging whether Reid did everything she could to bring a story to light and gave the other side a reasonable opportunity to put its perspective. Instead, says Bradley, "the BSA has a tendency to become the investigator of fact, which I think is a wrong use of their mandate. They don't cross-examine to determine credibility in the way a judge does". Incidentally, I never realised sex in old age consists of chatting about how attractive he finds Amber Rudd.

Unflinchingly honest and beautifully observed, this is a memoir about the joy – and the risks – of riding horses, the complicated nature of heroism, the bonds of family and the comfort of strangers. Above all, The World I Fell Out Of is a reminder that at any moment the life we know can be turned upside down – and a plea to start appreciating what we have while we have it. Only after she came home to Stirlingshire, did she begin to accept her limitations (although, as we shall see, such things are relative). Returning to the countryside was both good and bad for her morale. She says it would have been a spiritual death to leave the house and might have killed her marriage. At the same time, gazing at hills she could no longer climb was a kind of torture. And I’d say, ‘In your dreams,’ in a fond sort of way and we carried on being fit and healthy and middle-aged. But a documentary that scrupulously balanced every claim with a matching counterclaim would soon disappear into a morass of contradictory detail. And though the ESR is incensed it was not given a chance to defend its research, TV3 argues, with some merit, that the ministry commissioned that research and has long been fronting the dioxin issue. And then I see her, sitting on a terrace high above this wildness. Oh, gosh – I’m going to be fanciful now but I’m only saying what I feel. Firstly, her calm stillness seems somehow to quieten that wildness around her; I don’t know – maybe like a lion tamer with a beast underfoot. And secondly, she seems strangely familiar, as if I’m popping by as I do each week.And it is humour that gets Melanie and Dave through the bleakest days. Humour based around Dave forgetfully leaving her all-important wheelchair cushion on the pavement outside the hospital; or forgetting to fit stabilisers to the chair. AS THE squabble over the value of the ESR report drags on, it is worth noting the rather depressing fact that even if flawless, the report would be far from the final word on whether or not the people of Paritutu were poisoned by the IWD plant. And, yes, it was a very different sort of life: the other Melanie Reid was an award-winning writer at the Herald in Glasgow; a journalist at the Times in Scotland; busy mother of teenage son Douglas; passionate horse-rider. Then, one Good Friday four years ago, her big chestnut horse refused to go over a jump at a cross-country training practice. Melanie fell, face first, body contorted. Conscious throughout, she realised almost immediately something terrible had happened; “Everything went bright red and my whole body was suffused by this intense feeling of warmth and I knew I’d done something catastrophic.” Yet almost from that first moment – ever a documenter of life - she was writing about it in her head. I would be immensely flattered if even that was half the case,” she says. “But there are compensations: I have enjoyed so many things since my accident that I never thought I could enjoy. The sound of silence; the stillness; the minutiae of life; watching the birds. Watching insect life. I never had a bird table before my accident; I was too busy.”