A lot has changed....

So it's new Year's Eve, traditionally time to look back over the last year, a lot has changed for us in the last year. In January, we said goodbye to our lovely Fina as she went to her new home with Sheila in the Lot. When we went to visit a few months later, it was clear she'd settled in well and was happy with her new life.

She'd grown her hair too, suits her......

 

Ali and I then started the sometimes hazardous job of teaching Kinna how to behave, she began the year with many tantrums and arguments.....

Slowly she started to realise that some cooperation would result in an easier life, although she continued to express her opinions........

Sky too began her ridden career, and she also had her moments......!

Mr G was as ever, the perfect gent and took the girls' antics in his stride.

He may or may not have been impressed when after Kinna departed to Sarah's for summer school, she was replaced with another baby, the Blonde Bombshell.....

Towards the second half of the year, we made the decision to relocate back to the UK so some decisions needed to be made. As it was apparent that Kinna wasn't going to grow as much as we'd hoped, we asked Carole up at the riding club if she'd be interested in taking her on, and so off she went. She's now having to work for a living, being schooled by Carole and hacked out by her husband, John, who has his eye on her for a bit of endurance.

And so after 8 years of having horses in France, Gandalf, Sky and Tari moved with us to the UK in December.

And here we are, in Gloucestershire, the horses seem to like their new digs (although they still have some reservations about the cows). The hacking here is.....different, I miss the ease of riding through the vines and the hacks to the river or the lake, but the countryside here is just as scenic and we're looking forward to discovering more of it.

So here's to a good year in 2014, well, it should be, after all, it is the Chinese Year of the Horse!

Yes, I am still here.....!

Ooops, have been neglecting this blog a bit, partly due to Christmas etc but mainly due to not having internet at home - until today. So time for a bit of an update......

Well les Francais have been in the UK for 3 weeks now and they seem to be taking it all in their stride. They're not spending all their time on their own down the far end of the field any more, they sometimes actually graze alongside others in the herd and when we went out with G and Sky yesterday, Tari didn't even look up and styed with the others, although they called for her when they got back and she came running.

Had to laugh yesterday when the farmer who owns the place was shooting some clays, the main herd came barrelling up the field to investigate what the hell that noise was all about and our 3 didn't even stop grazing, so all that Chasse activity across the channel was good for something ;-)

Sky's leg seems to be well and truly on the mend, she was sound yesterday so Ali rode her out for the first time on English soil and she was pretty good, considering she hasn't hacked out for weeks. It was cold and frosty and  bit slippy in places so she did have a couple of interesting moments but soon figured out that going on the verge was a good thing to do. We have to go past the 2 stallions up the road and I thought there might be some silliness, especially as the younger of the two was racing up and down the fence making a right racket, but she was just a bit looky then she carried on :thumbup:
We also had to go over the M5 bridge, Gandalf I think was expecting the river Dordogne to be under it rather than a load of noisy traffic (and it's SO noisy, you just don't realise when you're in a car!!) but again, apart from a few looks, they were fine with it. We had walked the girls over it a few days ago and Tari was so not bothered she was eating the grass by the edge of the barrier.....

Unfortunately you can't go for a quick ride on anything other than roads (curse those ramblers and their stiles) but so far the drivers seem far more considerate here than in France and there are lots of little roads to ride along. Our horses still seem to think they should be on the right though ;-) When I get a bit more time I can get up into Nibley and go through miles of bridlepaths in the woods where that monument is. There's also a disused quarry where the mountain bikers have made a load of obstacles which look pretty darn good for TREC practise to me!

En Angleterre......

Well, here we are on the other side of the channel and so far so good. Got a text on Tuesday from Loraine, the new YO, saying the horses were expected to arrive at around midnight, then another one to say they'd actually arrived at 3am! But were fine and calm and not too stiff :-)

We came over on Thursday, arriving at about 1am, so first thing Friday morning we went down to see them. Predictably they were right down the far end of the 16 acre field.....
Sky was limping a bit and it looked like she's been kicked, why am I not surprised that she'd be the one to try and get bolshy? Hopefully she's learned her lesson.....

Been going down to check Sky's leg every day. Fun and games getting her out of the field with loads of other horses running about, G gallantly trying to fend them off and Tari thinking it's a huge game and charging around with her tail in the air. Think they'll settle down slowly. Sky is very interested in the resident stallion and calls to him every time she's up in the yard......

She's still limping and not too keen on me cleaning her wound (probably because I'm using TCP and it stings) but apart from that she's her usual self and eating fine etc so I'm not too worried. 

(On the hill in the background is the Tyndale Monument in North Nibley, the village we lived in when I was a kid. William Tyndale was a 16th century reformer who translated the Bible into English and got burned at the stake for his pains and the Victorians decided to build him a monument......)

The rest of the herd is still largely ignoring them, apart from telling them to get lost, although the little coloured cob, Murphy, is sort of hanging out with them and another horse is starting to look interested so bit by bit they'll integrate.

Gandalf REALLY likes the local mud and only has a few white bits left......

And they're off.......!

Got a phone call this morning saying the transporters were en route and they came to fetch the horses a couple of hours later. Met them over the road in the car park by the salle de fetes since there's a big car park for the lorry, and yes, it was an impressively sized lorry!

G, bless him, went straight in and Tari was trying to follow him before she was asked to, she spent a while standing up on the ramp then reversing off, so I just left her to it til she needed to go for it in earnest and up she went like it was nothing new :-)

Even the spotty oik decided to behave herself and go straight on, maybe she was worried about being left behind :-)

Dead posh in there!

Weird without them here, can't wait to go and join them now....

Bolshy youngsters, small ponies and goats.......

As you've probably gathered from the last post, we went to get Kinna back a couple of weeks ago. She's clearly decided that her summer off means that she's retired, at least when it comes to having to do stuff in a sand school (hacking out is apparently still an acceptable occupation, even if she's not always allowed to get her head down to the green stuff whenever she wants). So this week is week two of lessons for Kinny Whinny. Mademoiselle has decided that walking and trotting in the school is OK after all (unlike last week, she tried stopping dead when asked to move at first) although being asked to trot still requires an angry swish of the tail just to register a protest at having to do this kind of thing.

But when asked to canter, we are still trying the old "bounce to a halt and see if that gets rid of my rider/changes her mind about continuing with this dangerous rodeo ride" technique that you may remember from earlier in the year when first expected to run across grass rather than stop and eat it. When the answer is no, pull a face, swish tail and proceed with bad grace.......

Some work needed there, then.

In other news, Ali decided she wanted to ride the smallest pony up there for the second lesson. Brynbella Lady May, as she is known to the Haras, is a little Welshie who has a terrible reputation for rushing fences and bogging off with kids and dumping them to get back to her herd. I reckon she does this because they pull on her mouth too much. So Ali rode her with little or no contact on the reins and slowed her down with squeeze/release on alternate reins rather than a tug of war, and I suggested to Carole that we put the other ponies one in each corner of the carriere rather than all together. Certainly got her attention......

And in other other news, we took the goats up to the club as Carole has said they can come and live with the sheep and goat already in residence. They were deeply unimpressed at having to get into the car....

...but once they arrived in a huge new paddock with  little houses and everything, they soon got over it!

One last TREC...

As some of you will know, we are heading back to the UK at Christmas, dog, (most of the) horses and all, so yesterday was our last French TREC competition. Fitting that it was the Beaumont Christmas TREC which was the first competition we ever did here four years ago.....

This time we went with Carole and John from the club and Ali took Kinna for her first ever competition. We didn't have a particularly early start time but in true French style, we still managed to be half an hour late. Nobody minded though, so after some strong coffee, second breakfast and a quick bit of map copying, we donned our tinsel and off we went.

The weather was perfect, sunny and not too cold and for once we didn't get rained on. We managed to get our average speed about right because Carole's Arab, Nadjma, wanted to rush off thinking she was doing endurance and poor old G, despite wanting to keep up with her, just couldn't do the speed, especially at canter, so they had to wait for us every so often which meant we didn't lose any marks for going too fast.....

But he still had a nice spring in his step, even though I'd ridden him the 15kms up to the club last Friday and he'd been out on a hack with Kinns the day before.

Kinna was ace, she seems to really enjoy hacking out. Carole reckons she could be good at endurance as she doesn't seem to stress about much so her heart rate shouldn't be too high. She will be staying here in France at the club as Ali is already too tall for her really and Carole is just the right size :-)

Chox came with us too and really enjoyed herself, especially as when she looked longingly at the snacks on the checkpoints people took pity on her and slipped her bits of the charcuterie....

Those last three pics were taken by the professional photographer and really show the colours well, my little camera doesn't unfortunately, although I was surprised that this pic I took whilst cantering came out quite well:

After a few wine stops, or checkpoints as they are usually known, we got back to the stables for the main event, the slap up meal in the indoor school. Posh this year though as there were tablecloths and everything! In the absence of the SNO who had opted to go to the Bordeaux Christmas market with Mamie, Aliénor did her trick of hoovering up all the free chocolates and then not wanting her dinner.

And then it was the prize giving. Tamzin and her friend won the fancy dress prize for their angelic look.......

....and our team came.......second out of 8 teams/individuals in the Club competition, really pleased with that :-) Especially as if you look at the team only comp, we were first out of 3.

How to make Coq au Vin

The aptly named Drumstick a few days ago, blissfully unaware of his impending demise.....

This isn't really a recipe for the Lazy Cook, as it's hardly a 5 minute job, nor is it for the faint hearted, really, so stop reading now if you're a vegetarian. Or you don't like seeing a bit of blood.......

First, catch your cockerels......this proved impossible to do during the day with my super-fast Silkies, so I had to wait til they had roosted for the night and sneak up on them that way. So the condemned  spent their last night huddled in a cardboard box in the garage....

Next, greet your 85 year old neighbour when she arrives on your doorstep armed with a very sharp knife and some garlic. The garlic has to be chopped onto a plate before you begin the proceedings to go into the famous sanguette,  made from the chicken blood, which is traditionally eaten after you've gone to all the trouble of murdering your own dinner. I think it's revolting, but the OH quite likes it.

Then  put a large pan of water on to boil whilst you go outside to dispatch your disgruntled poultry. No photos of this as I needed both hands to restrain the protesting birds as they presumably sensed their impending doom. My neighbour, Josette, swiftly pierced their arteries with said sharp knife and they bled all over the plate full of garlic. Looks appetising, eh?

This is what it looked like after the OH had cooked it, still not appealing to me.....

Anyway, back to the slaughtering. Next, hang up the birds to ensure they are properly dead, since if they aren't, the next bit could get messy....also, if you have a dog, don't leave it unattended with all that temptation hanging right there.....

Next, dunk your chickens in a vat of boiling water. At this point, my neighbour chose to regale me with the story of how she'd once almost incurred third degree burns when dunking a not entirely dead chicken.........

 The boys had definitely shuffled off their mortal coil though and the boiling water stayed in the bucket. Apparently this loosens the feathers making them much easier to get out. Don't leave them in too long however, or chunks of skin come off too.Then it was plucking time....

It became swiftly apparent why we don't usually bother going to all the trouble of eating the Silkies as they look exactly like a joke shop rubber chicken under all those feathers. Not exactly enough eating on one of them to feed a family of four! Still, as we've got three of them and my neighbour volunteered to do all the work, coq au vin it is. Jon Snow was definitely interested in the proceedings and had to be ejected from the kitchen for trying to gnaw on a leg.....

Next it's gutting time, Josette spent a while wrestling to pull some unidentifiable bits out of each bird and removing extremities, since we didn't want to eat the heads (apparently this "delicacy" was her father's favourite bit!). Good job she was there as I would have had no idea what to remove and what to leave in.....

Now you have your ready-to-cook birds, complete with a couple of nice wobbly things beside them on the plate which are apparently good to eat. I think some of them are gizzards......

So, having thanked your neighbour for her services, wiped the blood from the kitchen surfaces and swept up the stray feathers on the floor, the next step is to cook the poor buggers. For this, I waited until the OH came home and handed him a knife to chop them into chunks....

Then you fry them in a bit of butter, chuck in some onions, cognac, lardons and lashings of red wine. If you're feeling extra adventurous you can even set fire to the brandy. Yes, normally you'd add mushrooms too but the kids don't like them.

Finally, put it all in the slow cooker to cook for ages, since these boys are old and tough! And guess what? It was delicious.....

Why do I do it?

We went to another SJ competition yesterday. The usual sort of thing, had to be up at the stables for 6am (!) to just stand a round for half an hour whilst people faffed about kissing each other, smoking and generally not getting the horses loaded and off in a timely fashion. Such is French riding club life......

Stupid o'clock in the morning.....

Anyway we eventually set off in the dark following two trailers full of ponies. Had to have some loud rock music on in the car to keep me awake. Not much else on the roads which was just as well seeing as we had to keep stopping to apparently deal with something wrong with one of the trailers and thus blocking the road.....then we turned off the main road onto little roads through the vines. Aha, I thought, they know a short cut.....but no, after 20 minutes of driving around in circles it appeared that we were merely lost. Eventually we made it back to the main road and tried a different route and finally arrived at the stables where after a teeth-rattling drive down a track we had to park in the traditional muddy field.

Then there was a mad dash to get a child and pony ready for the first class as we'd missed the course walk at 7.30 (when it was still pretty much dark) due to our scenic tour of the local goat tracks prior to arrival. Then after a scramble to get the rest of them sorted and on board, there was the equally traditional wait - hours of standing around whilst subsequent classes totally failed to start on time.

As a counterpoint to all this frantic inactivity was the local chasse banging away in the background. Not sure what they were after but presumably they were hunting it with machine guns since a lot of the time it sounded like there was a firework display going off somewhere in the woods. This didn't go down to well with many of the equines, who started an impressive display of formation snorting, eye bulging and in some cases, bogging off......

 

The it was over to the collecting ring to watch the usual uncontrolled galloping about, near collisions and unscheduled dismounts. One poor girl managed to get chucked off a total of five times before getting anywhere near the actual competition arena. Think I'd have realised my horse was trying to tell me something long before reaching such an impressive tally of falls. Our kids managed to avoid the action and I was pleased to see the Ginger One taking it in her stride...

Unfortunately a couple of the other kids from the club got eliminated and had falls so there were the inevitable tears and after listening to them being consoled by various parents and the instructor to no effect I lost patience with it and ended up doing The Speech: "When I was your age I didn't even have my own pony so think yourselves lucky you're even here to get the chance to balls it up and fall off!" etc.

Ali did a couple of reasonable rounds on Nahiade, she had one pole down in the Club 3 as she lost concentration and the beastie rushed at it and pretty much the same thing happened in the 80cm class which resulted in 2 down. They looked pretty good together though :-)

Between rounds we discovered a nice TREC course in the woods so sneaked off to see what Nahiade would make of it....

Then it was back to standing around, trying to drink thé pas bon which is all you ever get at these things and eating cold anaemic frites. Still, there was always the ongoing spectacle of people hitting the deck to give us something to watch, and the usual unpleasant handling of frequently stressed equines by over-horsed children wearing spurs and carrying big sticks. And not just the kids, one bloke treated us to such an abysmal display of terrible riding and totally unsympathetic handling of his horse that I had to suppress the urge to go over and kick him in the bollocks. Could be the last show I attend in this country for a while and I don't think I'll miss it.....
Still, gets you out of the house, eh?