Horse Talk.

Fairly mild today but quite grey and book-ended by showers. I had to have my early morning cuppa sitting just inside the open door but then it stayed dry all the time I was out and about.

There were only four of us in the lesson today and once again I rode Hazel. She had a different saddle on today, a dressage saddle with knee rolls something like this (below). Unusually there was also a loose fitting strap between the saddle flaps that went under her stomach but not through the martingale. One more buckle to be dealt with as well as the two extra straps that went from the martingale to the d-rings on the saddle.

A lot of the lesson was in walk which sounds like it could have been boring but in fact I felt I learnt a lot.

When I first learnt to ride as a child it was mainly a matter of scrambling onto ponies and not falling off. In my teens when I had money from babysitting I hacked out from whichever small stables I could find not too far from my home in West London. I rode on Putney Heath and Streatham Common and during the summers I'd be back in Cornwall helping out at a local yard and riding ponies bareback to and from the fields. Eventually in London I discovered a stables right next to Richmond Park and oh what bliss! Wide sandy tracks all the way round and during the week you were allowed to ride to ride off the tracks often between the herds of deer who took no notice of the horses. Fast forward to my twenties when I was living in East London and as well as looking after and riding other people's horses in Stepney I went to Lea Bridge for formal riding lessons. That carried on until the children arrived by which time we'd moved further east and I didn't have the time to carry on with either the lessons or looking after the horses. I kept my hand in by teaching for a local RDA group and going out for the occasional long ride when I could. But the standard of teaching I'm having now is of a far higher standard than anything I've had before with a lot more detailed explanations and individual attention. That's why all the work we did in walk was still interesting as we learnt about all the different muscles we as well as the horses were using as we attempted to create 'bend' in their bodies. Hazel still tends to look outwards and there was an awful lot of head tossing all the way through the lesson but the bend is beginning to happen. We did trot as well and worked on leg yielding. That all went well until I was supposed to get Hazel to do a few strides of leg yielding then some strides of straight and then back to leg yielding. That wasn't so easy and on the last try Hazel refused to go straight at all and did a beautiful sideways movement all the way over to the wall.

Some of us are organising to go on a two and a half hour ride in a few week's time. It's not my favourite as it's the same route every time but I need to check on my fitness before we start asking for some all day rides.

 

Afterwards I did the usual - dump, Morrison's, town and Lidl before heading home for a large mug of tea and a rest. I've ordered some more snails for my mini-pond as although it has been blanket weed free all winter I've noticed a small patch in one corner and it would be good to keep it under control.

Sometimes walking across the shingle in the front garden I find a shell or in this case, an interesting stone.