6 June 2004

Well, my young neighbour Christopher is coming on a treat as a carriage driver. He's keen to ride as well, and has had a go, but he is not yet secure in the saddle, which means carriage driving is really the safer option for him to do daring things like (gasp) trotting and cantering. We have been out for a couple of drives, learning about rhythm, contact, and how to relax his back, hands and shoulders and really feel when he's communicating with the pony's mouth and what is coming back to him from there. We also learned about balancing the carriage up and down hill and discussed whether certain gradients on our route were safe to drive up or down. He thought one might not be, as he always brakes down it when riding his bike, but Mr T copes with it OK.

Today he started to learn to steer more accurately by building and then driving through a simple cones course. He's still driving two handed at the moment but I shall be teaching him to drive coachman style before long (that translates into Achenbach of course; but here in Cumbria we just call it "coachman"). Seemed to me that coachman AND contact were two separate concepts, and of the two, I wanted him to understand contact and feel, before I wanted correct style.

He's learning the right order of harnessing up and unharnessing, and the names of the harness parts (and remembering them too), and in between all that we tell each other terrible horror stories, and learn the names of the wild flowers and animals we see while we're out driving, and discuss the ethics of such things as myxomatosis (he is an unusually tenderhearted child, so I didn't push the financial details of bunnies vs sheep too strongly; kind 12 yr old boys are hard enough to find!).

If only my daytime students - the "cool" 18 year olds studying computing - could string reasoned thoughts together in as articulate a fashion as my weekend driving student, who is so much their junior!

Sue in the English Lakes

Intelligence is no defence against one's own stupidity

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