The three of us (Big Vin in the back, mummy and daddy in the front) set off for Allenshill this morning.<\/p>\n
Vin and I were entered in two tests: Prelim 7 at 13.14 and Prelim 12 at 14.38.<\/p>\n
We arrived, unloaded, groomed, tacked up and worked in.<\/p>\n
Prelim 7 had moderately good parts.<\/p>\n
And parts that were less moderate and way less good.<\/p>\n
Despite working in gradually he was tense – and it showed.<\/p>\n
Afterwards – when we got our sheet – I was pleased with the overall mark (62%) but felt that (even on the day) we could have done much better – and that we are capable of turning in a much better performance.<\/p>\n
For the second test he was a different boy; he was brilliant, relaxed, supple and showed more than a little spark of the talent he has.<\/p>\n
Several times during different movements I found myself grinning like a loon – everything felt like a partnership and Vin felt he was going really well.<\/p>\n
The qualifying statement for this is that Prelim 12 is really a fcuking not nice test. The movements are peculiar, they come at you too quickly and they’re arranged in a testing combination for – frankly – a Novice test, let along a Prelim.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the mark I thought we did brilliantly – and I loudly told Vin that he did brilliantly as soon as we got back to the lorry.<\/p>\n
I untacked, groomed and slipped his ‘string vest’ on and gave him a net of haylage, then The Lovely S and I disappeared over to the food stall where we stocked up on badness.<\/p>\n
Then we strolled back to the lorry to tell Vin how wonderful he was (again).<\/p>\n
While we were there a beaming Maxine brought our test sheet over.<\/p>\n
The judge had given us lots of nice comments as well as a column of almost-straight 6s for every moment – except for the halt where we scored a 7.<\/p>\n
Good marks!<\/p>\n
The more difficult test, good marks and we got placed – yay!<\/p>\n
So thanks to Maxine for calling both tests for me too (even though I’m going to reward her with a couple of small prezzies).<\/p>\n
We eventually arrived back at our yard with lots of bad food and many mugs of hot chocolate inside us (the humans; Vin had lots of haylage inside him!), and with a bright pink 6th Place<\/em> rosette in the lorry ‘kitchen’.<\/p>\n I unrugged Vin from his travel rug, groomed him, changed him in to his field rug and then turned him out after apples and scratches were dispensed.<\/p>\n Beech got apples and strokes.<\/p>\n Then The Lovely S and I came home via McDonalds drive-through (2 apple pies, 2 McFlurries, 2 Sundaes – so rock’n’roll! We know how to live!).<\/p>\n Back home we sat, we ate, we watched three episodes of Buffy.<\/p>\n And now it’s 20.00 and I don’t know what to do next.<\/p>\n Perhaps a book?<\/p>\n Sunday evening on the cutting edge of life.<\/p>\n Great, isn’t it?<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The three of us (Big Vin in the back, mummy and daddy in the front) set off for Allenshill this morning. Vin and I were<\/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-257","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\/257","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=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}