Ooh it'll take some getting used to!

It touches in places no saddle has ever touched before :-0 and the balance is really interesting. You can feel as if you are sitting way over the top of the horse if they are stiff, but when they relax all the movement comes through to you. It's very easy to sit tight and push them out in front of you if they drop back, too.

Neither of them were in a mood for work unfortunately, so I didn't get the best feel of it. I think I have the flaps in the wrong position - you can set them forward or normal, and I have them set forward at the moment because I thought I needed that to hack out on it and to ride Tia a little shorter than I would ride Tetley. I'll put them back in a day or two if I'm still not "on" the knee block.

It is FABULOUS quality. The most classy piece of leatherwork I have ever owned, a real craftsman's job.

I managed to "get away" with riding them both with the one gullet plate. Technically it is too wide for Tia, but it seemed to work really well to me, and she was happy with it. I'll keep a close watch and if she is unhappy at all I can change the gullet size for her. What I can say is that the pressure pattern in the coat when I took it off each of them was both huge and perfect over the whole surface of the saddle.

Tia was interesting - you remember when I saw her she threatened to bite as they did up the girth. Well she did it to the saddle fitter yesterday and again to me this morning. She has not done it once with the wide fit saddle that I had on her. WOWs fit very differently from other saddles - the air bags come very high up the gullet and touch the horse higher up the wither than other saddles. She reacted to that, I think, as if I was putting a narrow saddle on her. I hope she will get used to it and realise that although it touches where the saddle they were using on her did, it is not going to pinch her.

News on the horses themselves - Tia is sound in boots, second day in a row with no problem at all. She is "short" without boots in front, so clearly feeling the pressure on her feet, possibly her frogs. She can stay in boots a while, it's no problem. I'm about to buy her a pair of Boas because Old Macs are completely the wrong shape for her feet and there is half an inch inside them in front of her toe when we finish. Tia's soundness got gradually better, which fits with a bruise and not with an abscess (which tends to come and go suddenly, or to get much worse day by day). Tetley's foot is cooler and I have dug out the rotten bar in his foot and shoved it full of peroxide. He is still not sound, but heck yesterday he was hopping lame and today he is just a bit lame. I think the mistake I made with that foot was not to dig the rot to the bottom. Then I thought it was cured and put formaldehyde in it and that sealed in the infection and let it brew. Now it's open from the bottom again, fingers crossed he will be OK soon.

If Tia is still happy tomorrow, and it is not raining and hailing like it is right now, we are going to do some clear round at 2ft 3 tomorrow.

C