Along Came Freddie

Josephine and her flying machine! *SIGH* I'm not entirely sure how to start this post.... Let's go with the positives first - so having jumped a lovely 90cm round on 11 March to qualify for BOTH Cricklands and Hartpury, I started to build up the jumping at home. Making the jumps higher and wider. When our car brake caught fire on the M5 as we were on our way for Ewen's birthday celebrations at Exeter Race son 17 March, that sort of put the kibosh on Cricklands (10-12 April) b

A win yesterday for Freddie on 69.31% in the Elementary 1, finishing almost 5% up on the next competitor - go Fred! We also scored 66.72% in Elementary 2 — although as the only combination in the class, I’m not sure that really counts as a “win”!?! After Freddie decided to go completely feral at the start of the dressage season in January (including an Elementary test that will absolutely NEVER be seeing the light of day), yesterday he chose to show up… mostly. The warm up wa

After such a sparkly but confidence-boosting start to the show jumping season, Wednesday felt like the next little test for Fred and me. The plan was simple: go out, jump the 80cm , keep things calm and positive, and see where we landed. Fred warmed up in the warm-up arena like a total professional. Granted, we were in there on our own for quite a bit of the time, but riders were coming and going and horses were appearing and disappearing around us – and Fred took it all in h

it's taken me a bit of time this year to get underway due to the weird reactive hypoglycaemia issue discovery. November and December were a wipe out and as the iron kicked in through January and the discovery about sugar/insulin thing, it's taken a while to get my energy levels back up. I jumped in January just at home in the arena not competing and it was SOOOO exciting Fred bucked after every fence and tanked off around the arena. Which meant a few lessons and a few jumps t

Just two days left to go in 2025. What a fantastically successful year for Freddie and I.... We've come so far - qualifying for 3 championships in both dressage and show jumping. We've learnt to jump quickly and turn fast, move like dressage divas And perhaps amongst all my proudest moments this year, have been those where: We got the double win to qualify for arena uk - both team and individual We were 2nd out of 20 riders (beaten only by a ludicrously fast nimble pony lol),