{"id":11,"date":"2007-06-09T22:12:36","date_gmt":"2007-06-09T21:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11"},"modified":"2007-06-09T22:49:41","modified_gmt":"2007-06-09T21:49:41","slug":"sticks-and-stones-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11","title":{"rendered":"Sticks and stones (2)…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The title proved to be\u00c2\u00a0prophetic in a way.<\/em><\/p>\n

This morning’s timing got changed; I rang William at 08.00 and said I was still up for the session but was going to be late down to Hilltop.<\/p>\n

He said they had a cancellation overnight and did I fancy a slot at 11.00.<\/p>\n

Did I?<\/p>\n

Is the pope a Catholic?<\/p>\n

I jogged back in to the barn and broke the news to Vin.<\/p>\n

He looked at me inscrutably over his haynet, paused mid-munch, thought complex equine thoughts then continued munching.<\/p>\n

I fannied about the yard, had a hot chocolate, did a final run through the checklist and went to get Vin.<\/p>\n

Getting Vin was incredibly tough.<\/p>\n

I walked past his stable – no large orange-coloured head looking over the door at me.<\/p>\n

I did a comedy double-take and walked right up to the door.<\/p>\n

He was in.<\/p>\n

Lying down.<\/p>\n

Fast asleep.<\/p>\n

And I mean fast<\/em> asleep!<\/p>\n

I’d already groomed him but Vin (bless!) had got down on to his knees, rolled over on to his side, curled his legs underneath him and fallen fast asleep.<\/p>\n

In a pile of specially laid (oh yes, I have no doubt of this!) horse poo.<\/p>\n

He had a green stable stain right up his belly, left side of his barrel and left shoulder.<\/p>\n

I called him.<\/p>\n

His body language said ‘La la la I’m not listening’.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t.<\/p>\n

He was actually fast asleep.<\/p>\n

I walked up to his slightly snoring form, slipped the head collar on and started calling him.<\/p>\n

He looked up at me as if I were out of my head, turned and rested his head on a foreleg and closed his eyes again.<\/p>\n

Sue and Laura were wetting themselves.<\/p>\n

I eventually got him to wake and with a little (lot) more coaxing got him to stagger to his feet.<\/p>\n

By now I was running out of time so I just loaded him, closed the lorry up and\u00c2\u00a0at 10.10 we drove\u00c2\u00a0out of the yard and headed down the A38, M5, M50 and on to Ledbury.<\/p>\n

We arrived in good time, I unloaded a very settled-looking boy and set about getting him ready.<\/p>\n

His stable stain brushed out as did the bedding shreds that were still all over him.<\/p>\n

With Vin tacked up and booted and his rider wearing the customary degree of protection I mounted up and hacked down to the start of the cross country course.<\/p>\n

We were late starting our session (we being three females aged between late teens and mid-thirties), late because one horse in the earlier group had lots of problems and William doesn’t like to give up on anyone.<\/p>\n

When our group started Vin’s initial canter-lengthening scared the living daylights out of me; he slipped straight in to racehorse mode and tried to tank away with me.<\/p>\n

I brought him back to the pace I wanted and we established a smarter rhythm and began popping over the warm-up fences in a short-course.<\/p>\n

William called on us to give a lead to one of the other competitors several times – I couldn’t decide if the horse or the rider was having the problems.<\/p>\n

We soon moved to the next field and Vin was absolutely brilliant, confidently jumping tree-trunks, shark’s teeth,\u00c2\u00a0helsinki rails and railway sleepers – light in to dark, dark in to light; my nerves long since vanished, Vin and I working together as a determined team with an objective at every fence.<\/p>\n

It was brilliant.<\/p>\n

We were brilliant.<\/p>\n

It didn’t last though; we didn’t approach\u00c2\u00a0one set of steps with sufficient impulsion and he clattered the first element with his near fore.<\/p>\n

The blood was flowing pretty fast; he’d cut himself on the coronet band – a very small cut but I don’t take chances, our day out ended there.<\/p>\n

Sarah (bless) walked back to the lorry with us to make sure we were ok; it was nice to have a little chat with her.<\/p>\n

Vin seemed fine, I flushed the cut with eight gallons of water, inspected the wound then flushed it some more, just for good measure.<\/p>\n

Then I gave him a bath; he loved that!<\/p>\n

We loaded up and made our way home.<\/p>\n

Back at the yard I flushed his cut some more, groomed him then turned him out, then I went and snuggled Beech before cleaning the lorry out, putting the tack away and parking the lorry in its bay.<\/p>\n

And then I got in my car and drove home, as high as a kite on adrenaline – despite Vin’s little mishap.<\/p>\n

A brilliant day!<\/p>\n

Brennig.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The title proved to be\u00c2\u00a0prophetic in a way. This morning’s timing got changed; I rang William at 08.00 and said I was still up for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}