Barrel bother

Blimey I hope Radar calms down a bit before hunting starts. I took him out on my neighbour's fields today and he was barely controllable. The grass is slippy and the hills are steep, so it wasn't altogether the most relaxing ride I have ever had :-)  Mind you, he's fit! I turned him and galloped back up a steep hill we had just bounced down and he was like a rocket. He needed a bath after that.

Ace was a plonker today. I didn't lunge before I got on and he was fine. Walk, trot, canter, no issues. But he was spooking at the barrels so I decided to do the walk 10m trot 20m exercise to get him focussed on me. He was still spooking at the barrels. Once he spun away, so I walloped him. Next time around he did it again and then got his retaliation in first before I hit him again, spinning and jumping around in a circle. I just about stayed on, with the added encouragement of not wasting a £20 CO2 cannister. It's a marvellous incentive that :-)

Anyway, the upshot of it was that I just kept going round and round and round until he stopped moving away from the barrels. He did it in the end, and he was more tired than me!

Guess what? Lightning last night. No broadband from BT today. We knew this was going to happen. Thank goodness we bought satellite last time.

C