Bling bling. Bling bling.

I had to really push myself to go today. The weather looked bad, I didn't want to have to drive there and back, we were tired after having Allan's sister here the last two days ...... but we went and I am glad we did.

Between the hailstorms, luckily timed, we did our prelim 10 and I was as pleased as punch with him. First the important bit - the bling! :

Can't miss it, can you??? He fell in love with a big grey horse in the warm-up and every time we passed it he tried desperately to stay with it. It was very funny. Then he did the test and the only mistake he made was a canter strike on the wrong leg, which I corrected at the first attempt. Other than that, he was calm and obedient and forward, never once tried to go above the bit, rush or drop back, and really smashing. As I came out of the ring I thought to myself that if we had a kind judge and they realised that he was in the young horse class, we might just touch 70.

We didn't have a kind judge, we had an exceptionally hard marker. A friend asked me who her judge would be (same as mine) and when I told her she made an "oh damn that ruins my test score" face and said that Mrs Simms used to give scores a good 5% higher but recently has got very tough. And the judge didn't realise that I was in the young horse class and she scored him equally alongside the unaffiliated AND the affiliated entries. And he still came 2nd out of 7, beating ALL the affiliated entries by over 2% with a score of 64%. All 6s and 7s except one 5 for the wrong canter lead.  He won the young horse class, of course, but there was only one horse in it :-) 

I was pleased enough with that, but when I finished the test OH said "he looked like he was going to explode out of the ring at any moment"  and continued talking as if I must have been battling like mad to control all the energy he was showing. You could have knocked him over with a feather when I told him that to me it felt like I was riding a happy beach donkey! You could have knocked ME over with a feather to hear that he showed so much action that he looked explosive, when he had been so incredibly easy to ride!

On top of that he travelled well, loaded well both times, was an angel to tack up on the lorry in a hailstorm and was just, ....well ..... perfect is the only way to describe it. 

C