Dressage then Solihull and Withington

• Top Gun won scoring 80% at a local dressage show. Wow, the judge loved him.


• At Solihull Top Gun did a fab dressage to score 33,would have been good enough to win it. But (always a but in eventing!) he was crazy in the SJ as he heard and spotted the XC and tried cantering sideways into the fences so had 3 down, annoying but he is still lovely. The ground was firm so I withdrew him from the XC to save him for another day. I went with my web designer Louise Calverley, she had a really good day clear XC to finish 13th. Like Top Gun her horse is also just starting to do BE100 and is looking very confident at this level now.


• Icon went to Withington to do the Advanced, again the ground was firm. A few minutes before I was due in to dressage I realised they were not riding the test I had learnt. Weird as I check this several times before an event as I am a bit dyslexic. Turned out I had been put in the 3* section who had a different test. Arghhh....panic, someone gave me the test to learn but my mind couldn't take it in that quickly so I decided to withdraw. Turned out lots of other riders had the same problem. Pippa Funnell told me she luckily found out just before she got on so had time to learn it and Mark Kyle said he managed to learn it in the 3 minutes just before he went in the arena! I decided it was fate telling me not to run Icon on the hard ground!