Goody and Jess on the owners morning

Owners morning - reasonably in control...

Scruffy (Exclusive Rights) and Toby

This morning was very different from yesterday -all horses were really well behaved and no empty saddles. We were absolutely delighted with the way they all worked around the field and their fitness is progressing nicely. Tic (the unnamed grey filly) had her first pair of shoes put on this morning. She has been a little superstar and loves going out with the other horses. Yesterday, Kerry rode her and it was her first day without the leading rein, we had only gone 200 yards when we had the Budge incident - when he decided to drop Lucy and gallop off across the field. All the older horses started to misbehave, we then had a low flying C130 who roared above our heads sending the horses mad - The timing couldn't have been worse if they had tried. They were so low that we could see the pilots faces and when they saw a body (Lucy) lying in the field and a loose horse galloping flat out in the other direction plus all our horses jumping around they quickly did a hard right to get out the way. Tic had every excuse to bolt for home but she was the best behaved out of the lot, bless her - who would have thought it for a horse that had only seen one human being before we bought her in Ireland?!

These dark evenings mean that I am watching more TV and a couple of things have sprung to my attention - It was on the news this morning that for the first time in 50 years the Disaster Emergency Committee has made an appeal for donations for the ebola crisis. We have also sent out army medics to fight the 'ebola battle' Whilst ebola is a tragic disease one has to wonder whether the whole thing has been whipped up into a frenzy by the media. To put things into perspective Ebola has infected 3495 people and killed 2170 in total. Compare this with cholera that annually infects 5 million and kills more than 100,000 a year and malaria which infects 200 million and kills 600,000 a year. Bearing in mind that ebola has been around for 30 years would the press be even slightly concerned about it if it hadn't spread outside Africa I wonder?

The other thing in the news today was that there is now a new App you can put on your phone to alert you if any of your 'friends' tweets are suicidal - You can then send them a comforting 'tweet' back. What a sad reflection of modern times where people have hundreds of 'friends' on facebook but absolutely not one that they can actually talk to. Social media has it's place but it seems to be rather tragically taking the place of human contact. Where will it all end?  It reminds me of something we observed whilst out for a meal the other evening. There was a family on the next table to us - Grandparents with what looked like their daughter, son in law and approx 18 month old child. The grandparents were sitting there in an uncomfortable silence whilst the parents were tapping away on their phones, the child started to cry and the mother got an ipad out of her bag and shoved it into the child's hand - instant silence. This went on throughout the entire meal and barely two words were exchanged between them. Very, very sad.
Anyway, I will get down from my soapbox now and go and feed the horses!