While the Coronavirus hasn’t affected me too much, day to day, with still being at full time work, I am certainly feeling the boredom in the evenings and weekends with no shows and a lot less riding.
I have made the personal decision at present to not ride Travis. Ben has been foot perfect, so I have chosen to carry riding him at home, but spring grass and turn out, alongside a few weeks off, with an already quirky horses seems like pressure the NHS does not need with Travis!!
However, there is still plenty to do around the yard. We have lots of land that needs a huge amount of renovation, so what better time for us to get all the boring jobs done! Over the long weekend we tackled 100m of new fence line.
This involved digging out the old posts, winding up the old electric fencing, folding up the old stock fencing, unpinning and rolling up the old barbed wire. Then putting in the new posts, painting them, hanging new stock fencing and putting up new electric. In 3 days between just me and my partner, I am super proud of what we have achieved!
Cannot lie though, I have spent all of Easter Monday covered in paint, bruises, cuts, scraps, sunburnt and sore!! But I did still find time to have a rummage through our tip pile and make myself some poles and pole raisers!
Once again I threw Arlo in at the deep end, affiliating him purely for the Arena UK second round show, and once again he pulled it out the bag. How lucky am I to have such a wonderful little horse? We haven’t really competed this year. I don’t really compete over the winter, and also my horsebox was away for repairs up until the beginning of June, so I had no transport even if I’d wanted to.
With the dry ground we don’t seem to be having much luck with shoes, as little madam managed to pull both her front shoes off within 12 hours the other day! We entered the arena with two shoes on for a schooling session and left it with one missing (took about an hour to find it). Then that afternoon, as I went to put some hoof ointment on, I looked down and had to double take, thinking I was looking at the wrong hoof. But, no, the other shoe was missing too.
After having a long wait and some lunch at the onsite café, it was time to get ready for the Joan Wolfe Overall Supreme Shetland Pony Championship. I got changed out of my usual showing outfit into black trousers and a maroon top with white spots, as you are expected to be a bit more “bling” in the evening.
We were all set to go for our next outing, and were super excited. That was until I heard the dreaded clunk of a loose shoe! I checked it over, praying it wasn’t too loose, but, nope, it was going to need a refit.