Red Rosettes

Clyde was having a bath, which he tolerates gloomily but without any of the frisky joy and gratitude you might hope for, considering that it’s no fun for me either - I get as wet as he does and I wasn’t hot in the first place. It was time to hang up the hosepipe, a job given to pony-mum who is entrusted with these less demanding tasks. I was grappling doubtfully with 100 meters of slippery, wet, heavy hoseline with a random sprinkly surprise on one end when I was hailed by a shout from afar:

“No, no, NO!!!!”
Yes, it was the Gaffer....
“Ye can stop that RIGHT NOW!”
.....storming across the yard towards me on attack run. I froze to the spot, standing there with my wet blue knees knocking and looking around for support from Pony-girl: strangely enough she had disappeared, except that Clyde seemed to have sprouted an extra pair of booted feet between his other two pairs.
“Ye NIVER hang up the ‘ose pipe like that! Niver, niver, niver!”
“You show me how,” I simpered, in a shaming attempt to win sympathy, which was frankly a disgrace to Womanhood everywhere, but if your lip is curling with scorn, then you take on the Gaffer in full battlemode.
“Ye DON’T let it trail in the muck an’ slime, don’t ee know that yet? Ye fixes it round the peggle-notch and then ‘ee 'angs the nozzle off the under-dangler – loike this!”
“Ah yes, I see!” I lied as he deftly lassooed the hooks from right to left in a dazzling display of hose-slinging. “The under-peggle and the nozzle-dangler – gottit.”
His faded blue eyes met mine piercingly. “And ‘ee pulled the pipe full down off the tap, did ‘ee?”
“Oh yes,” I said quickly, “Straight off.” I confidently mimed the action of a sharp downward tug. The Gaffer pounced:
“Well ye shouldn’ta done! You’ll spoil the twistle-threader on the nozzle-pipe with youm sloppy wummunly ways, and then I’ll be ‘anding ‘ee a bill for a new ‘un, see if I don’t!”
I was backing away by now, but he had one last trump card:
“And 'ave 'ee seen THE YARD PRICKLE? Summun’s bin usin’ it for wot it shouldn’t nivver be used for, and I bet I knows who it is!”

Not even the Gaffer could spoil our joy, for that was Sunday, the day we went to Blade’s Hill for a dressage competition, Prelim 18 (restricted) and Prelim 7 (Open). Both classes had a big entry, Pony-girl was the only junior and Clyde the only pony (not to mention the only one of dubious breeding, though we vigorously deny the rumour that he was born 11 months after that donkey got into the mares’ field) and yet unbelievably they won both classes – yes, won them both, took two red rosettes and with it the exclusion from entering Restricted dressage, ever again.
Needless to say our joy knew no bounds, as they say in the Jill books, since a first place seemed an unobtainable goal to us when we started competing, and two red rosettes in one day – well, that’s the stuff of Dreams, isn’t it?

It is not easy to blog about success as failure is much more fun to work with, and I hope to resume normal Doom-and-Disaster service after Sunday’s Combined Training event – dressage and showjumping - but for now, just look at Clyde. Didn’t he do well?