26th October, 2016 Hoogle

I have to confess to feeling a little grumpy this morning. Late cancellations, even for good reasons, can cripple a small business which relies on just one or two concrete appointments a day and provides a high quality, connected, and thoughtful service rather than just listing one appointment after another with no aftercare. Self-employed people have to cover everything themselves, from equipment to transport, to insurance, and have to think carefully about holidays and even sick leave! As it is I end up effectively paying for rain, a horse being ill, an owner being ill, their family being ill, or just coinciding with a forgotten dental appointment, whenever it is too late for me to offer the appointment to be anyone else.

Godshill mule - found some salt or an interesting shaped rock

Mules are always good for the soul though...

Henrietta and Jack waiting for some attention

I was cheered up a lot by Whifflegig and his owner this afternoon. She would be the first to admit that she should have taken my advice and asked me to come with the panels to his first endurance ride. However, by the time the ride came round, he had been loading consistently at home, with and then without the panels, and all around the yard and fields; she was feeling pretty optimistic. Unfortunately, Whifflegig proved that horses don't make the same links between training in one place and training in another, and she ended up riding him home when he would not load.

A horse's brain seems to work like Google, put slightly different terms into the search engine and you get a completely different set of results. Thus "loading + home" brings up a happy website with Whifflegig cleverly marching in and out of the horsebox, but "loading+away+tired+hungry" brings up a miserable looking website instead. We can change that just as we did for loading at home.
The good news is that we haven't blown it. At home today Whifflegig loaded in and out of the horsebox, with no fuss at all.