The Unused Winner’s Rug From 2012 I Love Stickers! I must confess, when it comes to momentos of life’s little experiences, I’m a sucker! Like many of us who event, I will always go home from an event with a photo or two to remind me of the day, even if it was a bad…
Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials Press Preview Day In a little over 3 weeks 80 or so horses & riders are going to descend on Badminton with dreams of galloping round the hallowed grounds of Badminton House, where eventing as we know it really began. Some will be coming to prove to selectors their horse…
Cross Country App Like a bus, you wait and wait, and then 2 come along at once! Well now we have two apps for memorising your cross country course. To rival CourseWalk, CrossCountry is the latest iPhone App to launch that helps you memorise your cross country course, and it’s a pretty strong contender for…
Course Walk App The growing band of iPhone Apps for eventing fans everywhere is about to increase by one, thanks to the imminent arrival of the Course Walk app, that will help you record your course walk, automatically work out where your minute markers are and let you take photos of every fence along the…
Badminton | It looks tranquil, but just to the left….. I’m starting to sound like I live in the States already. “The world’s gone and got itself in a big damn hurry” It’s a line from one of my favourite films [movies], The Shawshank Redemption, and sums up the last few days for me. This week has…
Back to my Hyde Park Cross Country Course now with Fences 19 & 20, and the theme here is “dry dock”. London sits on the river Thames, which is a tidal river, and home to the famous Cutty Sark (that’s in dry dock). Here we have a relatively simple combination, nothing to physically testing or…
Have Fun Cross Country But Be Safe Eventing has become very safety conscious over the last 5-10 years, and quite rightly so in light of fatalities that occurred in the preceding years. An Australian Assistant Technical Delegate, John Lechner, even devotes an entire blog to eventing safety, and so vehemently champions the safety mantle he’s known as “Eventing Safety John”. (he…
I Said ‘Hedge’ Not ‘Hedgehog’ Now it can’t all be technical and about the corners and angles. Sometimes you just need a ruddy great big fence in front of you to get the blood up, and get you and the horse in the mood for the rest of the course. So without further ado…. Fence…
PETER PAN Did you know there’s a Peter Pan statue in Hyde Park (or rather Kensington Gardens to be precise), and apparently there’s quite a tie-up with Hyde Park in the origins of this novel. ‘Legend’ has it Peter Pan sailed on an old birds nest across the serpentine escaping the small island there. This is…
I just love big trees, there’s something majestic about a living thing that has been around for centuries, sometimes millennia. Here’s one of my favourite old trees that I pass everyday, and before you start thinking “he’s off his trolley and become a tree hugging hippie”, it this tree that has proved, in part, the inspiration for this…