{"id":1568,"date":"2012-02-07T19:05:58","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T19:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/?p=1568"},"modified":"2015-08-19T17:54:31","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T17:54:31","slug":"a-day-in-the-life-of-the-cotswold-horse-whisperers-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-cotswold-horse-whisperers-1\/","title":{"rendered":"A Day in the Life of the Cotswold Horse Whisperers, 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>March 2008<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>One of the nicest things about having our own yard, is that there is no \u201ctypical\u201d day. The energy and pace of a Riding Clinic will be very different to a day off, or a day around the yard \u201ccatching up\u201d on those many jobs that always seem to need doing. Days spent fixing the electric tape fencing, or doing one too many trailers of muck,\u00a0 could have us question the wisdom of having our own place. But the sheer pleasure of having the horses on site, of being able to ride within minutes of deciding to, and to be able to offer them the very best life we can manage, makes it all worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>This autumn and winter we\u2019ve done all the muck clearing of the fields ourselves, with most of it done by Nicole with our lovely son, Marley, on her back. He seems to love it, and makes it all much more fun. The money we saved not paying other people to do this fairly huge task (10 horses\u2026) means we were able to go to Hawaii for most of February. It\u2019s probably best not to say anything more about that, in case we get lynched by a muddy mob, and you can probably guess it was the most amazing trip.\u00a0\u00a0 Just before we left, we let the horses out onto their winter pasture &#8211; 12 acres of superbly well sheltered ancient pastureland. There is a long \u201crunway\u201d made of electric tape, leading to our yard, and with the help of Scrabble, our collie, the horses can (usually) be called in. This regular trot\/canter across the runway is a great way to check how the horses are doing.\u00a0 But possibly the very best thing about our set-up is that our very good friend, Meg, lives on site and works normal-ish hours, and will either check the horses or bring them in for us in the mornings, so, young baby son allowing, we sometimes get to lie-in!<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re just beginning to gear up for the clinic season, which starts this year on the 19th March, and usually continues through to November. We\u2019re an outdoor venue, so this feels pretty brave, but in fact it\u2019s the horse flies of the summer we can\u2019t really deal with, and we\u2019re planning a mid summer break from clinics then. We love the teaching aspect of our lives, and find doing the Clinics very energising even if they do exhaust us, too, sometimes. We\u2019ve both done a fair bit of teaching with Marley in arms, so although we have wonderful back up from Nicole\u2019s mum, we\u2019re hoping that he\u2019ll join us for some of the teaching, and we won\u2019t have too many hours apart from him!<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s the usual tidying, sorting, and fencing to do for the influx of visitors, not particularly helped by last night\u2019s gale which took down a tree in the carpark, but we\u2019re looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>March 2008 &nbsp; One of the nicest things about having our own yard, is that there is no \u201ctypical\u201d day. The energy and pace of a Riding Clinic will be very different to a day off, or a day around&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisperingback.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}