More clues

Good progress today. Jazz is fully sound on his hind leg and the filling is reducing and should, hopefully, eventually disappear completely. He is also sound on the front foot on the road, so much so that he turned tail and took himself at a spanking trot straight back to the yard! So I could see just how sound he was as his bottom disappeared at a rate of knots. That's my boy!!! But he is mildly lame when trotted inside with stuff in his foot. So that's a bruise or an abcess and I had a good poke around and found the stinkiest little hole you have ever smelt right in the middle of his frog. It's only a tiny hole but by crikey does it stink or what - ughhhhhhh! So that accounts for why his leg is not much filled today, and why he is less lame. Tonight I will poultice the foot in the hope of keeping that little hole open and draining. It's difficult with frogs, they often heal up over infection and then it bursts out of the heel two weeks later. Meanwhile today he's out in the natural poultice of a wet field and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that I believe in hunters wearing boots, because if he hadn't had one on that shod horse would almost certainly have done serious damage to his cannon bone.

I schooled Zippy again and have definitely got the measure of him bucking. It is related to putting him under too much pressure to carry weight on his hocks. He never bucked until he started more advanced work, and since he is now for sale I am going to work on the temperament issues and leave his fabulous movement to speak for itself. He was much better today about going forward to the relaxed contact that I am giving him. He struggles to get walk to canter because he has too big an understep with the lead hind leg and can't get the power to bring his weight forward over it. The solution to that is to do jog to canter to build the strength in that hock and to teach him not to overstep in the first place. That length of step under will be fabulous when he is strong enough to control it, but for the moment we need to lessen the pressure.

I told you Buttiebutkins learns fast. He got a whack for biting yesterday and now he thinks I am going to whack him whenever I raise my hand near him. I'm giving him lots of strokes and cuddles to reassure him. He just adores having his left ear rubbed just behind it. For some reason he's not keen on the same thing on the right, but do the left and he's leaning his whole tiny body into it :-))))

I'm feeling more positive today. That fall was a dreadful shock, in the physical sense of "shock" and it's taken days to get over it. I'm scouring Horsemart several times a day for my stress-reliever horse. Haven't found one yet, but let me know if you hear of anything BIG and young and cheap (£3000 max). (not you Jean - import costs might ruin the proposition :-)))

C