Street urchin.

I have gone mad with the scissors and cut the whole bottom piece off the Butterball's ruggy. It was so long on him that it got dragged in the mud and I was fed up with the horrible mucky task of doing up and undoing the surcingles. So I put some leg straps on and cut the surcingles off (he's so short it doesn't need both). But then it was just hanging there all coated in mud and bedraggled, so I cut the whole bottom section off. Like a bigger rug, it had an extra piece sown on to make it longer - but it didn't need it. So now he looks like some poor street urchin whose mother can't afford to buy him any new clothes and did an adjustment to his hand-me-downs after a day on the gin and laudanum :-) I will get you a picture.

I worked on bend in walk with Jazz today and got some really good results. When the bend is correct, the head comes down and round, the shoulders lift and everything goes lighter. Then I tried the harder canter changes that Sonia told me to start doing. So - remember it's only 11m wide and 27m long - I came around the bend in true canter and asked for a change to counter canter. It was a big surprise that he did it, right to left, on the second time of asking. He is a clever boy.

Completely unsurprisingly, he couldn't get it from left to right, his worse side, though he did try very hard. He got flustered then, so I did some trot travers and got a much better result than last time. Then we went back to try to improve the quality of the right canter he was giving me, because that is responsible for the poorer change left to right. It took a while but we got some nice light 10m circles after a while, so it was a very good session all in all .

C