A Wrinkle in Time

There was a lot going on last week, so I only managed to ride Flurry once all week.  I was fairly casual about it, to be honest.  After all, it's two months before I leave, I'll have plenty of opportunities to ride and compete before I leave for France, right?

Wrong!

On Tuesday, I looked at the show schedule for the Dressage club and I looked at my diary.  What with attending car boot sales to get rid of some of the crap we own, running the Silver Spurs finals and attending the Dublin Horse Show with the tickets my daughters gave me for my birthday, plus a road trip to transport all the ED's gear to London, it looks like this Sunday may well be my very last chance to compete here in South Munster before I go.  In fact, we've only got three (yes THREE) full weekends at home before we leave.

I guess I'm competing this weekend, so.

Flurry waddled happily out of the paddock beside me and we went for a nice easy hack yesterday.  Well, it was easy for him - he trudged along like a sedated snail while I kicked, whacked and cajoled him down the road.

Today, there was no avoiding the arena.  "More Ongoing" was foremost in my brain, but the only whip I could find was the same silly short one I'd had hacking out the previous day. Still, he wasn't too bad, lateral suppleness could have been better and he could definitely have gone forward more willingly, but he was as obedient as ever - he's such a good boy!

Finally, towards the end of our session, I spotted the LSH passing by and asked him to find me a proper schooling whip.  Once that was in my hand, Flurry produced ten minutes of decent, forward work, and we quit while I was ahead.

We've got two days to go before the show.  Plenty of time to run through the "iffy" bits of both tests, plenty of time for Flurry to magically become forward and supple!

One other consequence of time telescoping in on itself is that I won't get to compete Aero here before I go.  I'm pretty disappointed about that, but hopefully we'll be able to do fun stuff in France.