EVENTING NATION

The first thing I have discovered is that Arthur has a patience threshold of 40 minutes. What this means is that you have precisely 40 minutes before he becomes completely unreasonable about anything. Unfortunately his last shoeing took slightly longer than this and he decided, being 17.2hh and having long legs, that he can cause a lot of issues for the farrier without much effort. I was particularly embarrassed and apologised to the farrier for his awkwardness--every time the farrier picked up the hind leg he would just shake him off. We did eventually manage to get the full set on through bribery. He has not been that naughty for ages so next time he will be ridden first and we will have the fat cob stay with him to see if that helps because the cob was with him the time before when he behaved himself.

The second experience of needing to race against the tolerance threshold was clipping. Arthur was pretty reasonable about his first experience clipping and stood for all the awkward bits. Gradually as the clock was ticking he became more and more agitated so some lines are not perfect in his hunter clip. But most of it came off which is the aim! I hoping the tolerance threshold will grow but you try telling this to my mother's hunter who will not tolerate the clippers at all despite being 20 years old and being clipped twice a year every year.

I managed to get a lesson with my trainer before this miserable cold weather set in. We worked on jumping and trying to get the steering into place as well as going forward. Arthur was pretty good but did not make much effort over the small fences. Unfortunately for him, he needs to stay with small fences until all the other foundations are in place. After the lesson the hunt was running close by so I hacked and met them. I had about an hour out with the hunt before Arthur became really tired mentally. It was ideal going out with the hunt after my lesson because then it was not so exciting for Arthur. I love hunting for young horses because I think it teaches them so much, but unfortunately we jump something called main rhynes (pronounced reens) which are massive water filled ditches like what they jump in Ireland. These are not conducive to young event horses as they learn to jump these open stretches of water and then become very suspicious about water jumps so I am very choosy about which meets I take my horses hunting.

Lessons have been placed on the backburner recently because I have been doing my trailer training. In the UK you are not allowed to drive on the roads with a trailer with horses unless you have passed a trailer test if you passed your driving test after 1997. Up to now I have relied on my wonderful other half to drive me around but he loathes winter show jumping so if I want to go out and do some competitions I needed to man up and pass this test, which I have been avoiding for a long time. I can honestly say that this was more painful than doing my driver training at age 17. I completely lost the ability to traverse junctions and roundabouts, reversing a trailer became impossible and the instructor told me that he doubted at some points that I really could drive! Luckily I was on an intensive course so the reversing became better and I could also drive forwards in a way that would pass the test. Sadly my test was cancelled due to the icy weather which was very annoying because I had just got my head around all the intricacies.

At the moment the weather is a hot topic of conversation in the UK. As with everything slightly abnormal from rain, we seem to be unable to cope and everything grinds to a standstill. With horses this means everything gets canceled because we have minimal indoor arenas. One place you can guarantee the going is always good though is the beach so I had a very pleasant ride with my friend on the beach with a good canter. I am absolutely anal about riding on the beach though because I had one of my first eventers break down in both tendons after fast work so since then I will not go any faster than a gentle canter. I popped Arthur over some driftwood and he went straight away. He was a little more hesitant about the water but stopped being such a wimp after he was left with no choice.

Finally the other day I achieved a first. I fell off Arthur. Unfortunately this was whilst hacking by myself. I was cantering along some of our fields by the motorway when Arthur stumbled. Unfortunately I was in my dressage saddle with long stirrups which lurched me forwards onto his neck. Arthur took great exception to this and shoved in two bucks which sent me flying. As soon as I hit the ground he was off for home. It was a bit embarrassing having to run along the field by the fence next to the motorway whilst clearly without my horse. Luckily I had my mobile phone so called my father to collect the horse, who managed to gallop most of the way home. I took two positives out of the experience. One that my warmblood could clearly gallop and I should have no worries about cross country and two that all my hard work in the gym had paid off as I normally fall off to the left as this is my weaker side and this time I fell off to the right!