Thanks, Bob.

We've had a dry day with a lot of sunshine. There must be some serious weather going on out at sea as when I got home the bay was a surfer's paradise with large waves were coming in cleanly at regular intervals. Perfect for surfing.

Bob (of the title) was not my ride for the lesson that was still my lovely Tex, but  his morning Tex was standing in the stall next to Bob's stall. Bob has his own extra wide space as he's a very large cob.  

As I brushed the worst of the tangles from Tex's mane Bob kept leaning over the dividing wall giving me lots of nudges. Very sweet apart from the fact that Bob's muzzle with its magnificent moustache (Tex also has a moustache) was dripping wet after he'd had a drink from the wall mounted water trough. Of course I gave Bob some pets despite getting a soaking each time he had a drink.

We had a good lesson and after doing some work without stirrups went on to do the canter exercise again. But because there were seven of us and we were struggling to get canter Iola changed things so you had to wait for her to call you name and say which colour cones to canter round. After a couple of false starts Tex went well but we didn't get too many more chance for a canter. At the end of the lesson we were told that all of us need to work on our canters. Fine by me. Next week should be better as there will be another adult lesson at 12.00 and so far there are only four of us for the earlier lesson.

After riding comes shopping which I enjoy. Of course these days I'm in no rush nor do I have small children to supervise and we are in the fortunate position of being able to afford the things we need.

Not being in a rush was good today as after the cashier had had rung through some of my items his till closed itself down (don't you love technology?). Apparently that had been happening all week. As I unpacked my items so they could be rung up again while the till rebooted itself the supervisor suggested to the next customer that she moved to a different till. Then as a goodwill gesture to make up for the inconvenience she said I wouldn't have to pay for the first item which happened to be a bag of frozen blueberries. Not bad since they've gone up to £3.35. (Lidl's ones are small and are often already tasting mouldy.)

Then I went off to town. I took a bag of empty table blister packs to Boots for recycling and just for the fun of the hunt had a look in some of the charity shops. I was running my fingers over the rail in Oxfam when I came across this over-sized shirt in a deep purple/blue. Wondering if my fingers were telling me the truth I checked the label and sure enough it was pure silk. And at £5.99 a real bargain. It will be a perfect cover up for taking on holiday and weighs almost nothing. It's disrespectful to go into Cretan churches or monasteries with bare arms and I may need to cover up from the sun as well.

My shopping adventures did not end there. Every week at Lidl I buy seven bananas to go on our porridge. I generally pick a couple of yellow and the rest green to ripen through the week. But last week's green bananas were still green and inedible today a week later. I took them back to Lidl, no receipt of course but they offered a refund straight away. To make things easier the chap simply gave me this week's bananas at no cost so we ended up with seven for the price of five.