alobear | Me pulling on the reins means stop, Boysie!

I've been having trouble coping with getting up so early on a Sunday, so I decided to move to a later lesson. At the start of today's lesson, I asked Dominic if I should move to an A lesson or a B lesson and he said he'd judge on my performance today.

I was riding Boysie, one of the stocky ponies and a horse I'd not ridden before. He felt very small after Conan and Flossie, and proved a bit more difficult to control. Karen on Pascoe was at the front of the ride and I had real trouble keeping Boysie at a decent distance behind them. Plus, Karen got confused with some of the manoeuvres we were doing and it was extremely hard to direct Boysie to go the right way rather than following Pascoe all over the school.

Of course, as soon as we did our turns at canter and I ended up at the front of the ride, Boysie slowed right down and was holding up the rest of the ride!

Apart from that, and the consequent attempts by Boysie to get a longer rein by jerking his head down and nearly unseating me every few seconds, the lesson went quite well.

We did some individual work at the end, where we took turns to go round the school, doing acute transitions from trot to halt and back again, followed by a ten metre circle and a canter to the back. Boysie and I did quite well on this and it was a good end to the lesson.

However, I'd decided early on that I should stay in a B class, because Flossie and Conan had lulled me into a false sense of confidence in my riding, and Boysie proved that I'm still not up to scratch with a more difficult horse.

It was really funny watching Dominic try to tell me this at the end without destroying my confidence. I let him waffle on a bit about how he trusts me the most in the lesson to do things right and ride safely, and how my control and instincts are really good, but that perhaps I might not be quite ready to move up to the A class yet. Then I took pity on him and told him that I'd reached that conclusion myself within five minutes of getting on, and he seemed very relieved.

So, 11:45am next week - hurrah! Lie in!