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A big thank you to everyone who helped make the Branch Show on Sunday a success despite the dampness. Most importantly the show ran at a profit and, as always at weekends this time of year, there was plenty of choice of show to attend. I hope to publish a fuller report in due course. Proof photographs of the event taken by Craig Payne may be viewed here and clearly Craig would be delighted if you bought some! I have the following complimentary tickets for Hickstead which I am happy to give out on a first come, first served basis: Thursday 23rd June – 30 tickets I would prefer if they were collected from me in Lindfield by arrangement. Note that none of the tickets are for the main competition days and tickets are freely available FOC in the Mid-Sussex Times and other journals. With a bit of planning nobody should pay for admission except on the main days! Mike Please welcome back two past members to the branch: Chloe-Louise Macdonald from Buxted and Livi Penfold who lives in Maresfield. I think this is best left to Sienna Howell to explain and the answer to her final rhetorical question is a resounding YES! The England trial is a yearly event giving just one selected member from each pony club the opportunity to represent their country in Prince Phillip Cup mounted games at Windsor. Selected to proudly represent Southdown East was me, Sienna Howell riding Mandy, which was a great privilege for us both! Unfortunately Mandy is a grey, which means having to get the shampoo out on a regular basis. So our weekend started with drastic scrubbing in order to try and get her as close to clean as possible. Luckily my tack and boots were already clean till they were shining, so everything was eventually prepared and all that was needed to be done was to get Mandy in the lorry (always a tricky operation) and get going. Some of our older members have been out Eventing this season. Hazel Perry and Amy Dunn have been active and Hazel writes “We did the Intermediate at Coombelands where I finished 2nd and Amy 4th. We then did the intermediate at Nurstead where I finished 2nd and Amy 7th. We then did the intermediate at Eridge where Amy finished 5th and I finished 9th. And finally we did our first open at Tweseldown last Sunday where Amy finished 7th and I finished 10th.” Louise Lewis is kindly stewarding the senior Eventers and she kindly submitted the following update on progress “Hazel Perry and Amy Dunn went to Pulborough for the Chiddingfold Farmers ODE on Sunday 8th May and did the Level 4 class (3’3) although they are both working up to do their first level 5 later this month with the view of doing Level 5 ‘Open’ at the Area this summer. Really thrilled for Hazel as she finished on her dressage score and finished 2nd whilst Amy finished a very creditable 4th incurring a few time penalties – this time for being too slow – which we’re all really pleased about as she now has some brakes for the horse!!! Better that than being too fast. In addition, we had one level 2 competitor (2’6) from the Southdown East competing at Pulborough on 8th May. I think lots of other Level 2’s went to the Eridge which I’m sure Rosanne Heagerty will let you know more about. Annabelle Irwin (Alexandra’s younger sister) competed on Alexandra’s Pony Percy (formerly Ceski Goddard’s) in her first ODE on Percy – She won it finishing on her dressage score of 28. Not bad for a first effort. Alexandra had better watch out!!!” Well done to all of them and its good to know that branch members are out there showing the flag! Hazel perry and Amy Dunn went to Pulborough for the Chiddingfold Farmers ODE on Sunday 8th May and did the Level 4 class (3’3) although they are both working up to do their first level 5 later this month with the view of doing Level 5 ‘Open’ at the Area this summer. Really thrilled for hazel as she finished on her dressage score and finished 2nd whilst Amy finished a very creditable 4th incurring a few time penalties – this time for being too slow – which we’re all really pleased about as she now has some brakes for the horse!!! Better that than being too fast. In addition, we had one level 2 competitor (2’6) from the Southdown East competing at Pulborough on 8th May. I think lots of other Level 2’s went to the Eridge which I’m sure Rosanne Heagerty will let you know more about. Annabelle Irwin (alexandra’s younger sister) competed on Alexandra’s Pony percy (formerly ceski Goddard’s) in her first ODE on percy – She won it finishing on her dressage score of 28. Not bad for a first effort. Alexandra had better watch out!!! Jo continues to have a cracking year having helped her school team (Mayfield) to glory in the 2010 National Schools Equestrian Association county championships. More recently she entered her first proper horse trials at Mattingley on 8th May and won her section of the Intro competition with a double clear on top of an amazing dressage score of 20.5 (BE91(2009) test). Fiona Mitchell is obviously proud of both Jo and Mushroom who did so well for a 14.1hh pony! Hearty congratulations! Congratulations to the following members on passing their Pony Club Efficiency Tests over the past two days. May I also congratulate all those who I saw on their smart turnout – well done! C Test William Beldham, Charlotte Burden, Lara Curtis, Rosanna Curtis, Beth Giddings, Greta Israel, Jo Mitchell and Alice Reffin; D+ Test Katie Beard, Emily Burden, Georgia Corrin, Fliss Cottrell, Evie Curtis, Ava Frohmader, Georgie Henderson, Vicki Henderson, Georgia Marsland, Izzy Pennington and Ellie Tijou; D Test Georgia Bashford, Rebecca Harvey, Charlotte Hutt, Jasmine Newman and Amy Newton; E Test Tilly Appleyard, Megan Austin, Jessie Berrill and Lucy Rigler. Thanks also to the examiners, organisers and parents/carers. To anyone who did not pick up their certificate and felt on the day they will be posted on to you. Everyone should also have the specification for the next test. There’s no rest in the Pony Club! Mike I don’t intend sending an e-mail each time I post a new item to the blog. However, the blog does support RSS (Really Simple Syndication). What this means is you can set up a ‘live link’ in your web browser which will display the titles of the most recent posts making it quicker and easier to see if there is anything new to read. Alternatively just visit the blog periodically. To set up an RSS subscription simply click on Posts in the top right corner:
Just try it and see how it works! Mike Long standing members, past members and friends will well remember the monthly Branch Bulletin’s which were very ably written by the late Toni Russell. Even after I took over as DC in February 2010 Toni continued to ghost write the Bulletin for me and did so right up to her untimely death in December that year. You will have noticed that no Bulletin has been forthcoming since. It has always been my intention to put one together and I have been diligently saving ‘copy’ for inclusion. I will admit that the job of sitting down and putting it all together has never reached the top of the ‘to do’ list and my guilt has increased with each passing month. It then dawned on me that a better approach may be to replace the Bulletin with a ‘blog’. The sorts of reports and announcements seem to me ideally suited to the medium and there are other advantages. Toni always wrote the Bulletin in Microsoft Word and I these were originally printed off in hard copy and mailed out to members. Over time we migrated to e-mail distribution and I started converting them to PDF format. I also diligently transposed each Bulletin so it could be seen on the branch website. This is all quite a lot of work (especially ‘translating’ complex Word formatting to display legibly in a web page) so it struck me that a blog would be more efficient. In short I hope the blog will demonstrate the following benefits:
Of course nothing is truly straightforward! The Pony Club website uses the same software that I am using for this blog but seemingly can’t support the style of use I intend to use. If I can migrate using the official web server then I will. However, many of you already use my own web server (theFourFootWay.org) to access the photographic collections. At this point this new service is an experiment and if there are substantive problems I can have another think! I will clearly have to start with a backlog of ‘old’ news! For the few who are not ‘online’ I am sure we can manage to print off the content periodically and mail it out by traditional methods. Mike
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