Horse phobias and Stealing Beauty

[alobear]

I've just finished watching Stealing Beauty - I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but it all seemed rather uneventful and pointless and has left me somewhat languid. Jeremy Irons is always worth watching and the film had a kind of leisurely grace about it, but now I feel as if I need to go to sleep.



Anyway, requesting Flossie at the end of last week's riding lesson worked, and I learned something new about her - she really has a phobia of doors. I'm already used to the risky business of putting her back in her stable, whereby she breaks into a trot a couple of strides from the door - you either have to be well ahead of her or just let her go to avoid getting squished. But, today, I found out it runs deeper than that. Normally, when we just walk down from the stable and straight into the school, she's fine. But, today, we had to wait outside for several minutes before Dominic arrived to pick out her feet, which gave her a good long while to realise where we were and where we'd be going next. When I opened the door to the school and tried to lead her in, she stopped dead and started shuffling backwards, clearly afraid of the doors. Eventually, Becky took over and literally dragged her inside, which meant it wasn't a particularly auspicious start to the lesson.

Luckily, we went down to the far end of the school so we didn't have to go past the doors at all, which I think helped. However, whether it was the trauma of the door episode or that I just had too many expectations of riding Flossie again after so long, I was really tense and nervous for the first part of the lesson and couldn't just relax and enjoy it. Spending most of the lesson in sitting trot without stirrups didn't exactly help with the enjoyment factor, either, since it got pretty painful pretty quickly, but Dominic seemed very pleased with my position, and we had a lovely canter at the end so overall it was quite a good lesson. I'm not looking forward to the pain of tomorrow, though!

I'm glad weaselbitch had a good lesson after last week, and everyone else did really well, too. There were a couple of individual lessons going on in our part of the school and I heard their instructors talking about us as I rode past at one point. They were talking about us spending so long in sitting trot and one of them said, "This lot are really good."

So, yay us!