Day 3 - Thursday

Another day started with the light creeping through the shutters, which I opened to reveal the deer grazing outside. In the kitchen things were busy as ever and it gave me a chance to spend some time looking out at the landscape and attempting to draw some of the distant hills using one of the iPad drawing apps.

One of the most amazing things about Monty is that he wants to help everybody who passes his way in need. Despite the full on schedule he has, he's always thinking about what he can to help others. Other people who are as well known as he is and as busy as he is just wouldn't give the time and thought that he does. His mission to leave the world a better place for horses and for people is absolutely genuine and every minute of the day he's doing something to advance this aim.

Monty and Lomitas

The first event of the morning was going down to 'The Container' - a shipping container that has been converted into an edit suite where Dawn, his film-maker was working on a programme that needed his input. The programme was about Lomitas, a famous champion racing horse who had recently died. It was really touching to see the emotion breaking through when he spoke about the horse and there was no way it was anything but genuine. It takes a strong man to be able to show emotion like that.


Next we went down to the stables for a ride and this time I was given a different saddle, not nearly as wide as the previous one and the stirrups seemed to be aligned differently so they didn't feel as likely to slip off. I was riding Celebrity - one of the horses that was featured in the Equus Online University. In the arena I had the chance to try out the saddle and do some cantering and this time my feet stayed in the stirrups and it it all felt much better though I did realise just how extremely unfit I am as only a few circuits had me breathing hard.

After a while in the arena we went out and rod around the farm a bit, including up and down that iconic tree-lined avenue with paddocks full of beautiful horses every which way I looked. This was Lisa's last ride before she had to leave and I felt for her as I could tell she didn't really want to go at all.

Over lunch we were shown some horrifying footage from a riding school in Devon showing a young horse being brought into the ring for the first time and the young rider was being instructed to canter him round and round for far too long for a horse that was neither fit nor experienced enough to be doing that. That wasn't the shocking part through. The instructor was yelling at her to hit the horse with her crop, and not just hit, she really wanted her to lay into him - for no obvious reason - and was also chasing them around with a longeing whip. Later she even brought in second instructor with another longeing whip to back her up. This wasn't historic footage, it was recent. The story does have a happy enduing though as I heard that the instructor had been sent to work with Kelly Marks and had managed to change her ways.

After lunch we bid farewell to Lisa and I spent the afternoon sitting in on presentations from the advanced exam students. They all have to do a research project and present it as part of their course. It was an interesting experience to see novice presenters doing their thing. They had all obviously put a lot of work into it and really believed in what they were talking about, though I did wonder about how they might begin to put their theories into practice. One was talking about Theraputic Riding centres and how they might use Monty's methods in their work. She was talking about disabled people doing Join-Up before riding, but didn't say anything about how that might actually work in practice. I'd be interested to talk to her about ways of enabling that.

I had a bit of time then to edit some of my photos and upload a few to Flickr before dinner. Monty arrived back from doing his tutorials with the students and called us out to see the deer as there was so many of them gathered on the lawn. There must have been 15 or 16 of them, from the big bucks through to the suckling babies. Monty has a special whistle that they come running to and seems to reassure them that they are safe, and he can walk right up them and shake out the food and they are quite happy to stay within feet of him. During dinner we watched some old black and white cowboy programmes, with Monty pointing out the all the actors that he knew about and what had happened to them, and who did what when, like a one man IMDB.