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.