“Oops! Where did November go? In a whirl, that’s for sure! Early in November Monty and I went to London to meet with Heather Killen and Richard Burdett of H&C TV to plan for the future. I do hope you are enjoying the programmes we’re making for H&C. If you aren’t, be sure to email us and let us know how we could improve them, and if you are enjoying them, do be sure to let them know.

We went on to visit the War Horse puppeteers and some of the production team to plan Joey’s (the main War Horse puppet) visit to Your Horse Live (YHL). Pie was Joey’s guest at Cheltenham – there’s a glimpse of that on the YouTube link below. Pie is extraordinarily blasé about Joey but when Monty’s normally relaxed mount, Copy, saw Joey for the first time he couldn’t believe his eyes! His first instinct was to get in that cutting horse crouch as they do when they focus on keeping a cow from getting past them. Luckily Pie was on hand to come alongside Copy and say, “Don’t worry mate, I’ll look after you.”

We also visited Martin Clunes and family in Dorset as Martin is doing a programme about horses, similar to the very successful programme he did about dogs some time ago. Monty talked him through doing a Join Up with his own horse which went terrifically well. Off camera I did the same with Martin’s wife, Philippa, which was fun too. Lovely people, lovely horses. I also learned that Philippa was the producer of the amazing film ‘Sliding Doors’. One of the most thought provoking films I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it to try and get a copy to watch over Christmas – you’ll see what I mean.

On the Saturday night after the amazing YHL demo Monty did a lovely thank you speech and said that this fabulous ‘Willing Partners’ tour was one of the best tours of his life. After all the excitement one suddenly had to face the fact that in ‘real life’ that December was coming up, which generally means cold, wet, very short days, everything taking twice as long to keep clean. I was ready to be horribly sad as I said goodbye to the wonderful team members and volunteers but it wasn’t so bad because of two things:-

1. I’ve been so busy with courses since the tour and the IH students are just so uplifting. We’re catching up with the indoor Horse Psychology courses during these winter months and then I’ve just had 12 students doing their Stage Two (final part) of their Monty Roberts Preliminary Certificate of Horsemanship and for the most part they’ve done terrifically well. Some of their Horse Psychology projects could or should be put into mainstream publications. We’ll be publishing them on our Members Area of the website shortly.

2. The Willing Partners tour is back on the road again in February! It was just too good to finish so we’re taking it to the places we didn’t reach before:-

February
Sunday 7th South View, Cheshire - 1 pm start
Sunday 14th Hadlow College, Kent - 1 pm start
Friday 19th Berkshire College - 7.30 pm start
Friday 26th The Hand, Somerset - 7.30 pm start

March
Friday 5th Keysoe College, Bedfordshire - 7.30 pm start

So do come and see us. You can find more details on my weblink below.”