First-timer's countdown to Badminton: nine days to go

For once I got to have a vaguely normal social life this weekend, which made a nice change. Friday night I went out in Glasgow — my cousin is over from US; he has very cool job working as a design engineer for Oakley (sunglasses that is, not horseboxes!) and Saturday I spent all day and night in Edinburgh with my fiance.

After Ivesley was cancelled, I thought I better go show jumping, but I didn’t want to take a lorry load of horses as this week is going to be quite busy for me and them. So I got Fortunesnight entered and I was getting him all ready to go on Sunday morning when I realised he had managed to bump his leg in the field on Saturday and it had come up slightly overnight so that was the end of that!

I thought that perhaps someone was trying to tell me something, and that I really shouldn’t be going anywhere, so I had a nice day at home instead. But then one of the four-year-olds, who has just been broken and turned away until after Badminton, decided to jump out of his field, again! He’s done this a couple of times, but not for a while. This time he was found wandering up the road — not so good! Luckily he is fine. I think he’ll make a great event horse but my sister, Mailin, is trying to steal him as her dressage horse!

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First-timer’s countdown to Badminton: nine days to go

Badminton final scores