Kiwi is back in work again which is great news except he is feeling very well and has become seriously cheeky! He seems to think anything random is a great potential excuse to rear and spin, so I am relishing the challenge! I have to keep my wits about me at all times and keep driving him forwards so he gets no chance to misbehave!

I helped Mange2 in their new delicatessen for the first time in the afternoon, the shop was very busy and an unco-operative till wasn't helping! I eventually mastered the one that was working (I think!) and was delighted to be given loads of leftovers to take home that wouldn't be fit to sell by Monday!

I later had a meeting with a man in my village who is clever with music and has the right equipment to (hopefully) try and sort the music for my freestyle at Express Eventing in Cardiff! It's quite daunting and I am not sure where to start, but I have put together a good potential test to ride with the help of Lizzie Murray and Sarah.

My mother has been amazing and spent 2 days hacking my garden (jungle) down and after endless pruning, chopping, weeding and clearing it is unrecognisably neat and empty! She also made proper Polenta, one of my favourite dishes!

After packing in the evening I dashed off to the Tunnel pub near Cirencester, a crazy move before having to leave home at 4am for Italy the next day! It was more than worth it though for an exceptionally exciting evening catching up with many of my favourite friends! I also collected Tom as he was coming to Rome the next day with me! We got home about 1am and as I still had to complete my packing (to include inconvenient things like my uniform for the prizegiving I was attending). I barely slept more than an hour before the trip to Gatwick!

More hacking in the morning, but ran out of time to start Kiwi back in work, as I had to get my MOT sorted (rather urgent now as need road tax too!). Turned out that as I had been misinformed - it was a bigger job and the car was going to need a full retest (no cutting corners with the DVLA computer system!) but at least the Honda garage manager was not going to charge me for it as it was their mistake! I then had to zoom up to Bristol to select the Uni' team (I was a member of the Bristol Uni' riding team as an undergraduate, and our team did very well under my friend Anna Bates' leadership!). I was a bit worried about making wrong choices but luckily the final verdict was not down to me! All the students did very well to force a jumping round and a dressage test out of stiff school horses, but some were clearly more capable than others and dressage letter and corner accuracy often left much to the immagination!

I was pretty worn out after judging countless mini "dressage" tests, so I was really unimpressed to then find myself in dreadful Bristol rush hour traffic. My sense of humour evaporated entirely after taking a foolish 'short-cut' to Gloucestershire involving very wiggly lanes and closed roads only to find I had been heading for the wrong place anyway as Tom has moved into a new cottage with a friend in Ablington near Cirencester. I have to say, I arrived in a shocking wound-up state but some food, dog-walking and picture arranging eventually made me feel better and become more sociable!