Pumbaa's Blog: Catching Up

Hello ladies and gents, I hope you’ve all been keeping well - I know it’s been rather a long time. Once again, no, I have not fallen off the face of the earth; I was just hiding in its various corners for a while. It seems that if you throw a boomerang, it flies off and then promptly returns, however, if you throw a Languages Student, it flies off, spends 4 months in France, 4 months in Italy…and then promptly returns.
 
To give you a little context, I should probably explain that a Modern Foreign Languages degree is a 4 year course, the third year of which your university (mine being Bristol), rather unceremoniously turfs you out into the world with little more than ‘well go learn something then’. So off I merrily went. My first placement was an internship working for a wine merchant in Bordeaux, and my second and internship in a winery in Tuscany. If you’ve spotted that the common denominator there is wine, you’d be right – I believe that at some point in the life of any horseman (or woman, those ponies certainly don’t discriminate when comes to making a pain of themselves), they have been driven to drink by their not-always-entirely-helpful four-legged friends. Well, as it turns out, there’s rather more to it than red, white or bubbly, and after completing my first wine exams (yes, they’re a thing) last year I sort of fell in love with it all.

Of course, living in another country isn’t exactly conducive to gallivanting around the countryside on a pony. I did try to see if Soots would fit in my suitcase, but apparently all 17.2hh of him would have exceeded my baggage allowance and I was told by Mum that it would really be ‘a little excessive, darling.’After 9 pony-less months it’s safe to say the withdrawal symptoms well and truly kicked in, as well as the Italian 40 degree summer and my complete inability to deal with the heat, so it’s safe to say I was very pleased to come home at the beginning of July.
 
So home and reunited with the man, the myth and the legend himself, Soots and I set about getting our acts together. He had spent the past 8 months as my mother’s hack, and I had spent the time feeling equally out of place with the new label ‘runner’. While true that eventing is the very definition ‘insanity’, after hauling myself up one Tuscan hill too many, I quickly realized running was, in fact, the very definition ‘stupidity’. The real question, however, was whether or not I could actually remember how to see a stride. That said, Sooty didn’t seem to care for the answer either way and in his usual brilliant, if marginally loopy manner, took matters into his own hands and bounced around happily completely on his own agenda.

As it turns out, getting back out competing felt weirdly normal given our time off. Our first runs back have been the IN at Dauntsey followed by the OI at Wilton and, somewhat miraculously, we managed sub 30 dressages, 1 down show jumping and very happy (if rather slow) clears cross country at both events. I have to say I count my lucky stars every day that I’m fortunate enough to have a partner like Soots to enjoy these events with, and I have so loved being back trundling about with him.
 
With my final year of university looming, I’ve decided to step back from the really serious stuff (it’s just quite big ya know), so although you’ll see us out and about it will likely be with a Hawaiian-shirt-and-pina-colada-in-hand approach to the event scene.
 
I hope all of your seasons are filled with sunshine and rainbows…obviously metaphorically speaking seeing as England really graces us with either of those in the literal sense.
Until next time,

Px