....Dougal!


Yes this France and France likes making rules and regulations, it likes making so many that most french people don't seem to be that bothered about breaking them. Especially road rules like speed limits and solid white lines or private property and no hunting/shooting/fishing signs. I'm with them on this, I hate rules and restrictions so I find it particularly galling that one of the rules that can't be bent if I wish to have Dougal registered with the Haras Nationaux  as Origine C...
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Please, no more snow
So although this is what it looked like last week from tuesday til friday we did finally get a snow plough round which coupled with a day of rain allowed us to get out. Everywhere was back to a delightful wet bog by then and the spring looked ever so far away.
Thankfully that meant an end to lugging round hay on foot and amusing ourselves watching the little birds feeding

which has been quite amusing since the big fat finches have learnt to ride the carousel,

giving the litt...
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Before the year is done( and the clock's ticking now) I wanted to catch up with a few of our fearsome and fairsome adventures from this particularly pretty Autumn.
Boy, that seems a long time ago now after weeks of greyness, mist, cloud and rain. How can you have Christmas in a soggy mizzle? It's depressing enough anyhow, at least with a sunny day of crispy snow it feels right!

So anyhow this Autumn we got up to a few tricks outside of the usual pony stuff like breaking Visa;



with spotty dogs, t...
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Okay so now I'm going to do a little bit of the catching up as promised..........
Firstly Le Haras du Pin, after several hundred phonecalls the dogsbody finally managed to discover that every tuesday  throughout February and March a young horse clear round showjumping day is held, from 4yo's in the morning to 6yo's in the afternoon. But noone checks the age or passport of your horse, so it basically means the jumps go from smaller to bigger. They informed us on entering that  the height of the...
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It may be necessary for you to refer to last week's post to really get this photo and realise I haven't lost my marbles just yet. You may recall on my first day of breaking Monty I introduced him to being ridden by a bear, it just happened the bear was to hand. I have a decent selection of large fluffy toys used for breaking and jumping and lots else besides. Most purchased for a pound a piece, well a euro actually at the local junk shop.
Since Monty was accustomed to bears it only seemed ...

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It's that time of year when hitting the beach is one of my favourite past times. Must be the weather for it!

I guess during the summer it's a drive too far and the days are too full of other more constructive activities. I do like the young horses to go to the beach a couple of times because they usually get to see a string or two of racehorses and they get to experience wide open nothingness which I guess surprises a lot of modern day domesticated horses so used to having close boundaries a...

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So we got to ride at Le Lion after all..................

Okay, okay so it's not in quite in the capacity we all dream of but I can still say in all honesty that I got to ride at Le Lion d'Angers with a young horse.

It all came about by chance, I had been trawling the internet to find evidence of some “entrainement” show jumping classes at the Haras du Pin which someone told me about over a year ago. Entrainement in France means' a training class' for a young horse or rider wanting...

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So I have been sloppy and idle and off the ball in not posting in a very long time. Infact all the time I've had good stuff to talk about I haven't bothered!
It has been a long year in many parts, I feel exhausted from being here there and back here again, over and over.
BUT NOW I'M BACK HOME, HOSED AND VERY HAPPY.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to take a little while to catch up on the blogs, a little bit for you, if you are so kind as to be reading it- THANK YOU. A little bit for me, so I c...
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I had bit of a confidence failure the weekend before last,took Neddy down to Avranches to do 1m05 preparatoire. Had one look at the jumps under lights on slippy ground with a water jumpa and lost my bottle. I swear my shoulder was throbbing in anticipation of another tumble.
Being too scared to ride is not a good place to be but it obviously shouldn't have been as I'd only jumped once since my crash and Ned has never seen a water jump.
I needn't have worried; as luck would have it when I took N...
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Since I've still been hurting from my crash it seemed a good reason to get some dressage practice in, I can't imagine another scenario where I would willingly forfeit an event or even showjumping to spend an entire weekend doing dressage.( I'm not knocking dressage? I'm sure I'd be hooked if I could pull off all the fancy moves.°

So a fortnight ago we set off early saturday to Brittany with Turnip and Charlie for a premier annee dressage class. I had rather high hopes for Turnip as he was so ...
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Why is Neddy looking all flashy and dressed up on the beach?
Aahh uurrr Well............... Neddy was supposed to be competing again on sunday but it errh didn't turn out to much, just past Avranches Mick put the address in his sat nav (on the new all singing all dancing phone to replace the one Doughnut chewed up) and discovered a second 'La Fleche'.
All my niggles fell into place and the bizarre disjointed conversation I'd had with Mr. Fagnen regarding the competition. Yes, we were headed out...
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