Posts Written By Chloë

With our next event BCA BE90 on Tuesday I thought it would be a good plan to pop along to some local SJing as Soap hasn’t been over coloured poles for a while. Cholderton Equestrian Centre is a fab venue very handy to get to for me and now under new management they are holding a lot more competitions with regular unaffiliated dressage, SJing, and BSJA starting this month. I entered Soap in the 85cms as a warm up and planned on doing the 90cms afterwards. We warmed up and went in to do our round, after gawping at the…

I think I’m still in shock at what happened today so I’ll start at the beginning and maybe by the time I get to the end it will have sunk in! We arrived at Newbury showground and the size of the event suddenly dawned on me! We walked to get numbers and find out where ring 2 was, and generally get my many novicey questions answered by the secretary! We went back to the trailer and started to spruce Soap up, even after his bath last night he still looked dusty, and his 1/4 marks were not turning out well!…

In preparation for Newbury County Show tomorrow I dragged the unsuspecting Soap in from the field today for a make over. His default look is ‘scruffy urchin’ so it took some doing to get him looking neat and tidy, but after trimming his now fluffy ‘lug holes’, bridle path, withers, fetlocks, and whiskers the washing could begin. I think he actually enjoyed a nice warm bucket bath as his newly emerging winter coat is making him itchy. To try and hold our own against the pro showing peeps I decided the plastic 1/4 mark square had to go, and I…

I try my hardest to dispel the myth that all ex-racers are crazy, mad flighty, un-rideable, scatty loons, but look what I’m up against! It’s been lovely warm sunny weather for the last 3 days and today the drop in temperature, and a slight wind was enough excuse for some high jinks in the field. If I had to put my money on them in a head to head I think Soap would pip Dustry to the post, he is more of a speed machine where as Dustry is a big fan of prancey leapy on the spot antics! They…

In between my lessons I always try to ‘do my homework’ and work on what we have been achieving in our lessons back at home. I am taking both boys for a lesson this weekend so in preparation I have upped their schooling this week so they are ready to strut their stuff on Sunday. Soap is really getting the hang of being a dressage pony, and little Dustry is just so much fun to school. I love bringing on baby horses because they are a blank canvass and I get such a thrill out of teaching them even the most simple basics. The…

As well as collecting all things dark green I also like to pick up the odd horsey book. I snoop around car boot sales, charity shops, and junk shops looking for vintage equestrian publications. I love reading old fashioned books on training and competing because they hold some real training gems, and also some very funny outdated approaches to horsemanship.  I have scanned in a few of my faves below and some I found last weekend in a junk shop but resisted as they weren’t quite up to the ‘GHE Library’ standard! Happy browsing 🙂

It’s my personal mission to colour coordinate as much of my riding gear as possible, at first it just happened by accident but now it has turned into a small obsession! I find myself scouting the high street, eBay, and various catalogues for dark green items to add to my collection so imagine my excitement when I found some dark green gloves on eBay! I quickly bought them and was patting myself on the back for finding such perfect cheap gloves, that is until they arrived… The gloves I found were golf gloves and not being a big golf buff myself I…

Soap and I made the short 20min drive to do some local dressage yesterday and entered Prelim 7 and 10. This month I am trying to do as much dressage and sjing as poss so that when we enter another BE event in Sept we will have made some progress in the coloured pole department as that is what’s keeping us out of the BE ribbons! The warm up went well and I was happy after half an hour that he was sufficiently soft and attentive and ready for his test. We walked to the indoor and waited by the…

After attempting this event last month only to be thwarted by Soap’s self harming (see this post if you have a strong stomach!) I was really excited to be finally on our way to compete in the ex-racehorse only BE90 section at Ascott-Under-Wychwood. I’ve never been to A-U-W before so had no idea what to expect but was really pleased to see a good undulating xc course, fairly flat dressage arenas, and a nice big show jumping ring. We arrived at the dressage warm up fairly early and I mooched about working Soap long and low and getting him swinging…

I have to say I feel very lucky to live so close to such a brilliant event like Barbury. When I was younger competing my old tbx and thinking about affiliating (back when it was BHTA not BE!)  it was competitions such as Penton, Savernake, and Tidworth that made me want to event. I used to plead with my mother to let me have a day off school to go and see the top riders of their day go round these events, and I felt inspired by them and the fact that this kind of top class competition venue was right on…