23 March
You know those posts that start - wow, I haven't taken my lovely pony out for 6 months and they came home with a win?... Yeah this isn't one of those What's that like by the way folks?
Fred was like "JUMPING!!!!" I need my tiara, I need the glitter, I need SPARKLE PEOPLE!!! Budge over Ru Paul, you got nothin' on this GINGA DIVA - 'COMING THRO-HOOOOH'
No breaks, no brain, no style... No rosettes! But I love him to the moon and back. He's a scopey little bugger when I can let the front end go and not worry that I'm gonna get decked if I do. My own fault for not getting out sooner, doing things differently.
To be fair - it wasn't entirely his fault. Just as I went out to warm up there was someone letting her horse let rip around the side pen. He caught sight of it and went into orbit. Unfortunately, she lunged for 30mins. The whole time I had for warming up. I managed to keep him calm sat on board inside and managed to have a very, very tense canter in the black arena each way before going in. People were doing the jump off in 43 seconds. I was sitting so heavy on him to stop him bucking me off, that we bounced on the spot canter and took 59 seconds to get around the jump off bit.
So I had to go in again HC, it was only marginally better and we still spooked at the gallery but at least we go around..... and then I entered the 90cm.
I hadn't planned on doing the 90cm class either, so I'm delighted that we did it, even if during the class Fred was pretty cross with himself for knocking the orange and black upright and I thought there was going to be a mid flow explosion but we settled for just getting our brain in a tizz and wrong to the next upright. In this round he DID get past the gallery without being a div but then just ran out of puff and parked up before fence 7, twice. So I retired. It took me all my effort to convince him just to go into trot and jump an upright on the way out. He had definitely blown all his chips.
And so I've put up some of the not so pretty pictures because it was hard work and you can see it in the pics and it's a reminder to me that it's not always sunshine and lollipops - this show was Freddie the Flying Carpet.
To Jayne - thank you for supporting us x
Mum - I hope we gave you a giggle up there with nanny xx
