22nd March Fully Recovered from the Journey

When I arrived at the yard this morning he was looking a little disgruntled and keen to get out.  However I do have two horses and with the excitement of Xaile's arrival poor old Clover has been a bit neglected.  We were meant to be hacking out, with a friend riding Clover and me Xaile but the friend cancelled at the last minute.  I decided that Clover was desperately in need of work- he was going round the walker bucking!  So on I hopped, and I can honestly say I don't think he's every gone so well. His head carriage was really steady and he felt forward and consistent, if HUGE compared with Xaile.  He worked really nicely in the school for half an hour with only a couple of little temper tantrums and then we went for a little walk down the road.  As we were on the road my husband passed us on his way to meet Xaile for the first time so we quickly turned round and trotted back to the yard.

I was very keen for Xaile to show himself off well to Hugo, but it didn't start well with me not being able to get him to stand still at the mounting block for long enough for me to get on.  Eventually Hugo had to come into the school and hold his head.  Well Xaile hadn't done much yesterday due to his over reach and has been really quiet since the journey up from Hampshire.  I think he's now recovered as he was much more like the hot little horse I tried in January.  He had a lot of energy and just needed to canter it off, so round we went burning energy, sadly not very interesting for H.  We did try to vary it with a bit of collection and extension and some small circles.  At one point he got a  bit strong and decided what he really wanted to do was gallop down the long side, luckily a friend was watching and pointed out that I was raising my outside hand when he was trying to run off thus letting him run through his outside shoulder, when I dropped the hand right down I regained control.  Excellent.  Well after our fun I hopped off to show Hugo the spanish walk.  I don't think he was very impressed, but I was as he managed it with just the rein aid and the stick to keep him moving forwards and he kept going forwards consistently without stopping after each stride so we ended on  a good note and I washed him off and put him back to bed.