Friday 24th April

Apparently Xaile was a very naughty boy this morning. When Tania was mucking him out he climbed over the wheel barrow, knocked it over, looked over his shoulder to see if she'd noticed then took himself off for a walk. Poor Tania was still muttering about 'BAD ponies' when I arrived a couple of hours later.  

Lunged in side reins again before riding again. This time I did them a hole tighter so there was a bit of a contact and he giraffed a little when I put them on but very soon dropped his head and worked in a lovely long outline again. He stretched more and lower on the left rein and had a good consistent bend on the circle but he couldn't quite work out where to carry his head so it went up and down a bit. On the right rein I had to make a real effort to get any inside bend, his head carriage was much more consistent, but higher and tighter.  

This transferred interestingly to the riding. We started on the left rein and he felt quite good- taking a nice contact and nice and low but his head was tilted quite badly- nose to the left. So we did lots of changes of direction (serpentines, figures of 8 and 10m circles) and this seemed to straighten his head. I also made an enormous effort to keep my contact as consistent as possible and my reins as even as possible, I want to be as clear I can over what I want from him.  

After a while he was going the best he has, but then I noticed that somehow even though we were changing rein the whole time every time I did a 20m circle or went large it always seemed to be on the left rein. So I did a circle on the right rein and it was awful. He was bent to the outside and his shoulder drifting continuously to the inside. I tried so hard to push him with my inside leg to my outside hand, but the more I tried the faster he went sideways to the middle of the school! So back to lots of little circles and changes of rein. This helped but not nearly as much as I would have liked. So we tried some shoulder-in in walk and then trot. The first few goes at shoulder in he ground to halt when I insisted on angle as well as bend. But eventually I managed to unblock something and once I'd got the shoulder-in in trot working I tried a 20m circle again and it had worked.  

So I got off and left the ridden work there. I then spent about 10 mins playing about with Spanish walk, I'm really beginning to get the hang of how to get him to do both sides at the same time! Then we played about at liberty for a while, he was like my shadow, I thought I was filming it but my video camera had run out of memory. Then someone else came in to lunge so I thought it would be polite to catch my horse!  Anyway he was quite tired so back to bed for carrots and cuddles.  

One thing I noticed that worried me a little was that he was really chilled when I went to get on and his head was really low and relaxed, when I put a foot in the stirrup he giraffed. I'm a little concerned that maybe the saddle really doesn't fit as well as it might so I think I'm going to get someone out next week to have a look as it.