"With the summer regionals looming and the winter season having started, we took Delboy (Headmore Delegate) and Bracks (Headmore Boadicia) out to Fair Oak Grange on Friday 9th July for a bit of a practice as neither of them had competed since they qualified for the summers!

As promised, it became swelteringly hot and doing three tests in the space of two hours starting at midday proved a challenge! Delboy was on first in the medium and, despite the horse flies which were awful and were eating him alive, he produced a stunning test, making a difficult test seem easy. It wasn’t at full power but he was very expressive at it flowed beautifully, scoring a massive 74.6% and scoring five 9’s! About 15 minutes later we did the advanced medium, only Del’s third attempt at the level, and this was also a lovely test, achieving another superb score of 73.2%, and four 9’s! He won both classes and it is so lovely to know that he is capable of scores like that and that there is still more to come!

My final test was on Bracks in the elementary. She warmed up well but got tired very quickly in the heat and, despite doing an awful lot of walking in the warm up, she boiled over a little bit in the test at the beginning of the canter work. She did settle back down afterwards and I was very pleased with her simple changes. It was one of those tests where there were really lovely bits and then some not so lovely bits, but I would rather that than a boring test! She scored 67.9%, which was good enough to win it so, all in all, it was worth me cooking to get those results!"