A recap for new peeps.

Several new people have joined us after some postings that I have been putting up on Horse and Hound Online. To save them reading back six years of old blog (!) , not that anyone would :-), surely?, I thought we should have a recap as to who was who.

First, and smallest, we have Button. He was bought two years ago to make us smile, and not a day has gone by when he has failed to do that. He is ten hands high, a true Shetland born on Orkney, and the cleverest equine I have ever had. I bought him unseen on the basis of his mouse-dun colour (which is uncommon) and he was delivered in the boot of a Landrover Discovery :-)  Button's primary job is bucket-licker and yard hoover, which he does exceptionally well :-) He is, though, possibly the most sensible Shetland ever born and can regularly be  found eating the oldest, wildest, woodiest grazing in the field, as if he is fully aware of what poison the green stuff can be to a little fellow like him. He's the kinkiest little beast, too, very tactile and he makes the most amazing faces if you scrub his back for him.

Next we have Radar, who "eats" 6 foot blackthorn hedges for breakfast on Saturdays in the winter. Radar was bought two years ago as an unbroken 6 year old from his breeder who was dying of throat cancer and wanted to see him settled before he died, so I got him for a bargain price from placing a wanted ad in Farmer's Guardian   :-)  He is 17 hands, nearly black in summer, ID cross Shire cross TB with reputedly Hill Farmer and Cavalier (Mary King's horse) close in his breeding. Radar lives to jump, and was a complete natural right from the start. Which is just as well as Radar's job is to be my hunter. He doesn't really like schooling much, and started out dreadfully one-sided. He will do it if he has to, and hacking out is OK, but he wouldn't choose it except that it's a necessity for getting fit to hunt. He adores drag hunting and his only fault is over-enthusiasm. At home he is a big dopy sweetheart who loves having his huge ears pulled. At a hunt meet, alert and ready to go, total strangers frequently take one look at him and say "isn't he magnificent!"

Ace you know all about, this diary was started because of him. He is a July 2006 Westphalian import who was in Germany until September 2010, exported to Holland to a dealing centre where he was backed and then imported to Irlam in Manchester of all places!! (Irlam is not obviously centre of the horse world - think more working-class-gritty-North off the telly and you'll be part way there. The dealer's house looked like an ordinary 50's suburban house with a standard garden gate and drive. But the back garden had 25 stables in it and behind those an arena and 8 acres of marshland, a bit like the Tardis!   Jean do you get Dr Who over there??)   Ace's job is to be a baby and grow up slowly to fulfill the potential he has to do Grand Prix work, hopefully. He has a temperament to die for (once we get over the ridden after-effects of him having had an acid stomach for a while).

And then there is Jazz. Well, what can we say about Jazz? He is a KWPN with the worst of the mental faults that over-bred KWPN's have become known for. He is nine this year and he has only just decided that hacking out can be fun. Before this, he would spend anything up to 55 minutes refusing to pass a place where, for example, a daffodil had grown on a verge where there was no daffodil last week. He has left arenas both over and through the fence. He has left a competition arena over the wing of the judge's car and returned to the warm-up 200 yards away! He was bought to event, but he broke my shoulder when we tried to teach him to jump. He simply does not have the courage to jump showjumps, never mind cross country fences, so we converted him to a dressage career, which he much prefers.


He has attempted as recently as last October to break out through the concrete wall of my tiny indoor school in protest about having to do what he is told.  He could not be kept in a stable without bars because he would either break or climb the door to get to the other horses. He still has to be tied down with a wither rope and back with chest straps in the lorry, or once in every few months he will rear and take out the windows with his front feet. He has the scars to prove it and so does his full brother who I have never seen - this is genetic from their GP showjumper father Opan. Jazz also has huge spavins, which have never made him lame even with flexion tests. And a tie-back because he had laryngeal hemiplegia.

On the plus side, he is a magnificent red ball of muscle with the most emotional personality I think it is possible to have in  a horse. He cries, and I mean cries like a child sounds, if I spend too much time talking to one of the others  and not him. When he puts himself to work, he is awesomely powerful to ride. He has flying changes and half pass and we are working slowly on pirouettes, piaffe, passage and tempis. He struggles to do medium trot and is nowhere near getting extended trot, but collection is a piece of cake for him, because he was bred to showjump i.e. to curl up and then release the spring.

As you know, we have recently done our first medium dressage test, a level neither he nor I have ever done before. It is much more fun doing higher level tests, especially on Jazz - he is such a natural at collection that it is actually much easier to get  a 7 for collected trot than for working trot with him. I was happy with 53.4 for his first attempt.  I know that we can improve the 5s to 6s and the 3s and 4s to 5s and 6s, so before the end of the summer I hope to have earned affiliated points at medium with him, that's our goal for this year.

Then there is OH. OH has to take the biscuit as the best Other Half in the world. He's tall, dark and handsome with  a GSOH. He's chef d'equipe, driver and video master. He analyses systems and can actually tell me where things are going wrong without even being a rider. He makes stable doors, fixes waterers, welds rusty exhausts on lorries, does fencing and we simply couldn't afford to live here if we had to pay someone else for all the work he does.

Five lovely boys, a lovely place to live and the time to enjoy it. How lucky does one person deserve to be?

C