Phew, another amazing day to add to an already amazing season: The Longines Royal International Horse Show got into full swing today here at Hickstead. Action packed with nail-biting competition, the day brought with it the requisite comedy and drama that no self respecting horse show could run without!

As regular readers will know, Catherine and I are the sponsorship team that dreams are made of. Efficient, organised, highly intelligent - of course - and not in the least bit chaotic, and perhaps on the ODD occasion, a wee bit dappy! We are fondly referred to as the ‘Terrible Twosome’, a term of endearment I’m sure. Much to everyone else’s amusement we are often to be found sporting the famous and highly attractive ‘dog face’ (a special, hideously ugly facial expression that can only be achieved by working flat out for two months with very little sleep, and then having to work with horribly annoying radio earpieces that don’t work properly and cause us to squint for the majority of the time, with heads slightly cocked and a finger in one ear trying to hear properly). So famous is our ‘dog face’ around the showground that the TV crew put together a specially edited DVD (which of course everyone on the showground had seen before us) of carefully selected footage of us during presentations sporting classic ‘dog face’, set to Prince’s classic tune ‘Could it be, the most beautiful girl in the world?’ Mean, eh? Mean, mean, mean.

The comedy heat was taken off us for a brief moment though when David Simpson, an Irish rider based at Hickstead, very kindly decided to launch himself off the very top of the bank during the Quantum Saddle Eventing Grand Prix, which resulted in a very dramatic fall, and an even more dramatic opening of his Point Two Air Jacket… a new concept in body protection that has built in airbags, the like of which you’d find in a car, that inflate when rider and saddle part company. David was thanked profusely for providing such good coverage for a sponsor, and incidentally it gave us time to hoof it into the main ring and move some advertising boards that weren’t receiving prime time TV coverage! One of the pitfalls of ever increasing fancy camera work – if the angles change even slightly from the previous years, hours of studying brand exposure on repeat are rendered useless!

Despite all of this craziness, the main event of the day was the Quantum Saddle Eventing Grand Prix, and the tension was almost unbearable as it reached its climax. An excellent, flat-out round from Nicole Pavitt mid way through the competition put her in pole position for quite some time, until the last five riders… four of whom were past winners. Shane Breen went like the clappers on his little chestnut Dorada and looked like he’d clinched it, until his brother Trevor came in on his 2009 Bunn Leisure Speed Derby Winner Adventure De Hanan and nearly pipped him to the post, but had a few unlucky rails down… a Breen Brothers 1,2 was almost assured until Gary Parsonage, the last to go and last year’s winner, zoomed into the ring and delivered a faultless round that Lewis Hamilton himself would have been proud of.

Its 10:30pm and we’re still in the office readying ourselves for tomorrow’s Meydan FEI Nations Cup, the only chance for the great British public to see the home team compete on home turf and one of the most prestigious show jumping events in the world… I wonder which team will ride off with the famous solid gold trophy, and who will be closer to Series relegation by this time tomorrow?