Back to basics...

I realise I haven’t posted anything for the shocking time of four months... The Wayward Child had the foolishness to damage his back over the summer, so unfortunately it’s a case of starting over again with him a bit. In fact, he still isn’t ready to be brought into work, so there’s also a waiting game to played.

Actually, I have been a bit of a foreigner to the truly dedicated horsey world because I’ve been at uni for the past three months or so. I’m going back in two weeks, I doubt my horses will have a clue who I am. But being as stupid as I am, I couldn’t bear to deprive myself from horses for that long, and I joined the Equestrian Club. ‘Equestrian Club’ may sound fairly prestigious, however after a few meetings I found out that it’s just a grown-up version of the Pony Club. There are a few changes of course – this can be seen in the Inefficient Wannabe, for example.

This Inefficient Wannabe is in a class of her own, in fact, Whiny-Deluded-Spoilt-and-Brattish Inefficient Wannabe is probably more accurate. That’s WDSPIW for short. WDSPIW made her debut during the team trials when after yanking some poor nag round the arena for an hour demanded that she should be offered a place on the team. She had a variety of reasons – she had, she claimed, won national competitions at home, she adored riding as it was her only true skill, and she was so gutted from being refused a place on the netball team that she may become suicidal if the Equestrian Club were to not want her either. No matter that she can’t ride, then.

There is also a Superstar Rider. In this case she is a hundred times more irritating than the Pony Club’s version, as she can actually ride very well – it’s a combination of that and her supreme confidence and belief that she is therefore above everyone else that makes her so unbearable. She certainly didn’t help herself by introducing herself as ‘the one who rode for the French international showjumping team for five years’ before even telling anyone her name. No-one has yet to establish whether indeed this is true or not, but there is definately a general dislike for her, as her snobbish manners make her nigh on impossible to talk to.

The rest of the group is a fairly balanced mix of Snobs and Nice People. The Snobs are annoying but just about bearable, whereas the Nice People (mostly the commitee and a few select others) are, well, nice. As far as there are awful people in the club, I do like my team. I also enjoy the lessons – as strange as it is going from the horses you’ve been schooling all summer to stubborn riding school ponies, it’s also quite fun. We have a competition coming up – by pure co-incidence it happens to be in Suffolk, so I can look forward to going home.

Once the Wayward Child’s back is back to back perfection, we can take him back to back basics... And in the meantime, at least my riding hasn’t gone down the drain completely.

Pony Club Camp-ing it up.

My brother has been at Pony Club camp this week. Quite how a fifteen year old lad plans to entertain himself in a camp dominated by hysterical eleven year old girls is questionable, but that was his problem. Or at least that was his problem until it dawned on me that he would be taking the Irish Cob with him.

The Wayward Child demonstrated his disgust by breaking out of his stable only hours after the Irish Cob left and performing Wild West bronco bucking up and down the track. He then made a rush for the poor dog who was just minding her own business, wandering around in the yard. She was suddenly confronted by a very large pair of brown gnashing teeth, and has been traumatised ever since. When we finally managed to round up the Wayward Child, he paced up and down in the stable sweating and screaming for his friend, which led us in desperation to do a mad, mad thing - we borrowed a pony.

Borrowing a pony is always far more risky than you can imagine when you breezily accept the offer from a concerned friend. For a start, however well the field may be proofed against a large-ish cob and a 16.2hh TB, a cheeky 11hh Welshie can escape within minutes. We found this out the hard way, when the Welshie appeared outside the sitting room window, having totally demolished the garden first, of course. And then there is the problem of Who Is Boss. Who Is Boss can turn even the meekest, mildest mannered horse into a devil creature, and the Wayward Child, at first concerned only with turning the Welshie into a firm friend, soon had his teeth out again. The biggest problem, however, of borrowing a pony is not what the pony itself does, but rather what you, as the borrower, do. The pressure is immense - you convince yourself as you lie in bed each night that the pony has escaped and is running free down the busy main road, or that some horrific poisonous plant has suddenly grown overnight, or that the pony has gorged itself on your lush, barely eaten grass and will refuse to come in the next morning with a horrible Laminitis case. In our case, all this pressure was pretty pointless, partly because there was nothing to worry about - none of these things happened - but also because we needn't have borrowed the pony in the first place, for all the good it did. The Wayward Child remained a nightmare all week, and as much as I schooled, lunged and flat-out-galloped him, he refused to stop pacing and yelling.

However, the stress was worth it to see the reunion between the Wayward Child and the Irish Cob. It was like a Hollywood Movie scene - they dragged us along on the end of our leadropes to touch noses, and the moment we let them loose in the field they did circuits at top speed. Despite the fact that the Wayward Child refused to tire when he ought to have done, he can barely move now.

Rally around, lads...

I am taking the Wayward Child to a Pony Club rally tomorrow. His behaviour at rallies can span from mild irritation and over-jumping to full on bronco bucking, so naturally I am slightly apprehensive.

I enjoy rallies, as a rule. If you are in a group of friends and have a fun instructor then the time follows you as you fly over the showjumping poles. However, there will always be the odd 'it's not your day' rally, and I can recall several interesting sessions.

The first Cross Country rally that I took the Wayward Child to was certainly one of note. In fact, it was nigh-on disastrous. For a start, it was raining. And this wasn't just normal rain, this was torrential, been-doing-it-all-day-and-will-soak-you-to-the-bones rain, this was the type of rain that even when sitting in the car you could swear you could feel drops on your head, the type of rain that runs from your hat down your neck even though you're wearing several layers of clothing and one of those hideous plastic macs. In short, it was the type of rain you definately do not want to do a Pony Club rally in. But we Pony-Clubbers, we're troopers, and we battled out there. The Wayward Child did not appreciate this, and the whole of the session was decorated with fox-leaps over the tiniest of obstacles, punctuated on occasion with huge, arch-in-the-middle Wild West impressions. I could tell that even the Seasoned Instructor was more than a little panicked, especially when the Wayward Child in one of his finest moments galloped straight at her, bucking as though he had a hedgehog stuffed under his saddle, with me, stirrup-less, clinging desperately to the martingale. He polished off this delightful performance by refusing to load at the end.



There was another rally in which the whole of the conversation focussed around the Inefficient Wannbe's new horse. I consider myself to be a fairly patient person, but by the end of the rally, or should I say the monologue occasionally interrupted by a bit of work vaguely resembling a rally, I was so bored I considered seriously the prospect of drowning myself in the Wayward Child's water bucket. I have honestly never heard one person talk about themselves as much as the Inefficiant Wannabe did on that day. The boredom was interspersed with genuine irritation every time she felt the need to play the part of instructor when it was someone else's turn to ride the jumping course - "oh no, she's doing that all wrong, she should take in far more rein and take a better contact, she'll totally ruin that horse, oh look, she's let it stop, you should never let a young horse stop...etc" I will point out at this point that everything the Seasoned Instructor told the girl in question what to do was completely opposite to the Inefficient Wannabe's ideas.



There are always those rallies when you end up in the same group as the Superstar Rider with her £30,000 FEI eventer. The Superstar Rider herself is a fairly average rider, by no means terrible but certainly not the next big thing, as she truly believes herself to be. She is even worse than the Inefficient Wannabe, as annoyingly, and thanks mainly to her expensive pony, she does actually win things which leads her to look down her nose at the others in her rally group, and make it quite plain that it is preposterous that she should be in a group with these no-hopers.



My most disastrous rally though, by far, was the day I fell off the Irish Cob. It started off fairly successfully, typically flat work in the morning followed by showjumping in the afternoon. It was my fault I fell off the Cob - he's normally so easy over jumps, and I stopped concentrating as we approached a treble fence... Unfortunately, probably sensing that his passenger had drifted off, he ducked out the side of the second part, and I fell off past his shoulder. I was uninjured, which was pleasant, but as hard as I had tried, I hadn't been able to keep a hold of his reins. Now, the Irish Cob takes particular pleasure in refusing to be caught in the conventional way - normally when I bring him in from the field I just let him follow the Wayward Child and make his own way in. Obviously I wasn't going to just be able to walk up to him at this rally and remount straight away. After many attempts to catch the Cob, which mostly involved walking towards him whilst pretending not to, and then cursing at him as he galloped away for the thirty-second time, it was decided that the best approach (as he was now sprinting round the field with his tail in the air) was to halt all the other groups and form a line of the fifty-odd ponies to try and stop him in his tracks. It took a good (humiliating) half hour, but eventually this worked, after he realised that the more he barged through the line (almost knocking small children off their ponies) the closer together it got. He gave up. The Cob was loose for at least forty-five minutes, during which the whole rally came to a stand-still - I was all too aware of the younger riders staring, and the older ones sniggering into their stocks and was incredibly embarrassed by the whole incident.



Even so, by my calculations, there are at least two good rallies for every horrific one, and sometimes, just sometimes, there will be the Perfect Rally. The Perfect Rally is the type of rally when you end up riding on better form than the rest of your group, and therefore the Seasoned Instructer actually seems to approve of you, when you are in a group with your best friends, and when your mount, for once, decides to toe the line.



I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Stable mates

I am confronted today with the age-old dilemma that is letting a close friend ride your beloved horse. I have several good friends, all of who are fairly novice as riders. The problem is that it is certainly good fun riding with others, and it makes sense to call over a companion to hack out with, until it becomes clearly obvious that even though with an able rider on board the Irish Cob is a thorough gentleman, with the Nervous Novice it is a completely different story.

The Nervous Novice comes in several different forms. First of all there is the Giggler. The Giggler laughs nervously almost constantly. She fiddles with the reins and jiggles her heels about, sending the Irish Cob into a fury. She also fidgets with the edge of the numnah with one hand, whilst twiddling with her hair, or her hat strap, or scratching her nose with the other. The Giggler rides in a floppy manner with flapping reins and over-long stirrups. Yet somehow, what ever desperate plan the Irish Cob cooks up in an attempt to unseat her, she seems to be able to centre her balance so that she never falls. In fact, despite all her faults, the only serious harm the Giggler can do is irritate the Cob to the point where he actually gives up, and behaves like a lamb for the rest of the ride.

Far, far worse than the Giggler is the Squeaker. The Squeaker does not, in fact, seem to enjoy riding at all, yet insists she does, and so the pantomime starts. The Squeaker is afraid of everything. She yelps out in fear when the Cob so much as rests a hind legs whilst we wait for her to actually gather up the confidence to ask him to walk on. She quakes in her solid, iron capped and cushion heeled jodhpur boots when he flinches as a fly lands on him, and she gets the shakes if he jogs a couple of steps to catch up with the leggy Wayward Child of a horse that I try to keep in pace beside her with the plan that I may be able to catch her before she hits the ground when the fear gets too much. The actual squeaking starts when she insists that she is capable of jumping the Cob in the school. Over every fence, the peace of the countryside is shattered with an ear-piercing shriek as the Irish Cob steps over the four inch cross-pole I have worriedly put down for her. Interestingly though, the Squeaker's real danger is her riding (and the possibility of being sued by the whole of Suffolk for perforated ear drums) She can do no harm to the horse as he just plods along in his merry way, and in fact, when it comes to handling the Cob on the ground, she is the most efficient out of all the Nervous Novices. I have decided in the case of the Squeaker, more fun can be had by bathing and plaiting the horses than actually riding them.

However, worst of all Nervous Novices is the Deluded Gung-Ho. The Deluded Gung-Ho is under the impression that he can ride any horse that comes his way. He can handle the stroppy stallions, he knows how to deal with the snappy Shetland Pony, and he is under no doubt that he is actually doing me a favour by riding the Irish Cob from time to time. This confidence is made all the more unbearable by the fact that he is the worst rider out of all three of the Nervous Novices. In fact, he can hardly even be described as a Nervous Novice as his confidence puts him in a league of his own. The Cob has no idea of how to deal with him. I can see the perplexion in his eyes when the Deluded Gung-Ho remounts him yet again, after being unseated for the sixty-second time in an hour. Whatever trick he tries, nothing the Cob can do unnerves the Deluded Gung-Ho, and as a result, he gets more and more worked up as the ride goes on. The main problem with the Deluded Gung-Ho is not just the stress he is putting on my horse, but the injuries he does to himself. The Deluded Gung-Ho has broken countless fingers, two ribs and a leg as a result of his many falls, and even fractured his skull when he came to close behind the Wayward Child, despite my many warnings. For some reason I feel responsible for this.

However, having considered all of my Nervous Novices, I have come to the conclusion that at least they all have some potential. In fact, if you took the amazing balancing feats of the Giggler, the natural horsemanship on the ground of the Squeaker, and Deluded Gung-Ho's unshakeable confidence, then you would have the ingredients for a Horseman, or at the very least, an Able Rider.

I won't give up on my stable mates. The Giggler does at least genuinely enjoy riding, and whilst the Squeaker is too nervous to accurately describe in words, she tries ever so hard, and wouldn't give up horses for the world. Deluded Gung-Ho will always be up for a ride, and hopefully under the influence of the other two, he will tone down his ego. I hope everyone else is lucky enough to have some great mates to ride with, whether they are, like mine, Nervous Novices, or whether they fit more under the category of Experienced Horse People. Have fun riding in company this summer!

On trial

I have to admit, I have never done this before. Or, to be honest, anything remotely like this.
But let me introduce myself - I offer you me, with nothing to hide, on a full two week's trial, vetting included.

As you may have already guessed, I rather pride myself on being a 'horsey person'. What I am less proud of is my never-ending plunge towards failure in such horsey matters. For example, I took the Wayward Child (who, incidentally, is not in fact a child, but a horse) schooling today after feeling mightily inspired by the standard of the dressage at the Pony Club area competition, only to come away with that sense of doom that accompanies the fact that my seven year old is never going to grow up enough even to get past the pot plants that the organisers placed around 'A' in each arena.

Normally I would cheer myself up by taking the Irish Cob for a gallop, but I was needed elsewhere, and so the downwards spiral continues...

The Wayward Child is a beautiful horse. No-one can dispute his talent, his paces, his build... Unfortunately, he puts his natural advantages to the sole use of trying to unseat his clinging rider, or at least to scare anyone else who might offer to help me school him away.

But let's put such depressing matters aside - it's summertime, and, as Gerswin so cheerily said 'the livin' is easy'. The sun is out, the rain might just hide behind the clouds for a couple of days, and what's more, the summer show has come out of hibernation. Showjumps are in the air (in a completely non-literal sense, or at least until that madly out-of-control ex racehorse that the Inefficient Wannabe rides enters the ring), the dressage boards have been whitewashed (and perhaps even polished, judging by that spook-inducing shine that reflects with the sun) and the ponies are plaited and ready to go.

However, it is my duty to inform you that even the silver lining that is summertime brings with it a big, fat raincloud. Because, you see, with the showjumps comes the misery that is being eliminated at the first fence because your horse is suddenly terrified of the coloured fillers that he barely looks at at home, with the dressage comes the wonky centre line that can ruin the whole test, and with the plaited ponies comes the Ultra Competitive 'Super' Mum and the inevitable spoiled child, plus the disagreements when the judge prefers the 'Super' Mum's archrival's daughter's Welsh Section A to her own. Yes, as demoralising as it all sounds, summer is not all good.

The main bug I have with summer is the sheer volume of flies that suddenly come out of nowhere. My horses are a like a gourmet restaurant - whether I have doused them in so much fly spray that they actually need resusicating afterwards or not, the nasty little nightmares seems to find a convieniently uncovered corner to feast on. There is a purpose to this rant in the form of advice to all you horse people - please take a moment just to spray.

Despite all the problems with summer, I suppose one must remember that it is still summer. I wish you all the best of luck with your competitions these holidays, and for the lucky ones who have found a way to escape from the show-ring, make the most of your happy hacking before some sad soul drags you into the world of woe that is the summer show.