No Place Like Home

I've had such a lovely week in London. The horses are at home, resting in Ballylawn for the month - which gives me all the time in the world to catch up with friends and family, and basically have a semi-normal life.

The week's been busy enough. Surprise birthday party for my sister Trish (the big 3 0), apartment hunting across NW London with Allan, Dave's goodbye party in Clapham, Priscilla Queen of the Desert west-end show, catching up with high school friends Alex and Patrick in Camden last night - such great fun!

On a more serious note, trying to market the horses as best I can and see what happens by the end of the year. Always an experience to review the results of the year, what you did right, where you went wrong - adapt and improve for the year ahead. STRATEGY will be the word of the month. A lot of my year was spent chasing after points to perhaps attempt to "fit a profile", the straight and narrow (as they say) has never really been my thing. Merlin played a massive role in all of this, but I wont use him in the same way next year - no matter how tempting it is! He's in the best shape of his life and that needs to be preserved.

Hope to get to work on some non-horse related projects over the winter as well, here's hoping. Interview set for Monday (can't tell you about that just yet), christmas dinner in the City with Cass Masters class (can't wait to see everyone) Friday, and hopefully some ice-skating and Avenue Q muppet show in the weekend. Might try to nip down to Hickstead to ride a bit. I'll keep you posted :-)

CSI3W Leszno

All is well that ends well... 

We had such a great weekend in Poland. Started off very unlucky - Merlin injured himself at Hickstead the day before we left (only slightly, nothing to worry about!) but what timing! Obviously he came along "for the ride"  -  could never leave him behind :-) but he just had a bit of a vacation in freezing leszno. This meant that Curly would have to hold up the fort. 

There were two qualifiers for the World Cup and two for the GP - the same horse could not compete in both and the average result (in terms of ranking) after both qualifiers would determine the top 60 riders eligible for each class. 

I decided to put Curly (Heracross) in the World Cup qualifiers and hope for the best as neither of us had ever done one before. Last fence down in the first phase on day 1 (ended up 33rd) hmmm.... clear and 7th in ranking class day 2, great result. World Cup day, the course was actually much bigger than I'd expected - apparently one of the FEI judges was there to inspect that the course was in fact at the dimensions specified in the program i.e. up to 1m60 in some spots. Luckily for me Curly is a bit of a beast and quite frankly isn't phased by anything... The triple combination was quite spooky for the horses and having watched the other riders, they all seemed to struggle as they came in too fast - i went the opposite route and actually took him back too much which meant he really had to stretch to get us out... my bad... that's life -  you live you learn. He is so elastic that i should have trusted that I'd have no problems getting him back from a higher pace.

I really think he showed himself off though, jumped absolutely beautifully and I'm thrilled to say we're back in sync.  

Other than that, must say that Pam and I had a fab time in Leszno - really a great show and special thanks to Edward and Julia Bunn (Hickstead) for driving us there and back, what a treat! On such a high now... we left the show early Sunday morning and I hopped off the lorry at Gatwick airport to take the train back to london. the boys will be back home at ballylawn (Waterford) Thursday morning.

Coming Soon

Just had a crazy week... driving back and forth to Hickstead, helping my brother with his dissertation and generally trying to keep on top of things, i haven't had much time to write! very sorry about that. Training show on at Crofton Manor tomorrow to prep for Poland next week - hoping to get some good pictures of our "new digs" on Sunday so you can see for yourselves where we've been hiding :-). planning to write this blog post (properly) Monday afternoon to fill you in on my wonderful Hallo-weeK at home in London. In other words, to be continued....

home sweet home