June 2024 - what a depressing month for me!

So following Bicton, things are going to be quiet from Harveywetdog for a month until the dressage at Hartpury. As you will appreciate Bicton didn’t go quite as planned and I’d had to bail out (quite literally) at lunchtime on Saturday due to an incident at home.

Setting up Base in the Bicton media centre
©Harveywetdog

It had all started so well; we’d decided to rent a holiday cottage in Devon rather than me have to drive down in the Bank Holiday traffic so we arrived on Wednesday with high hopes. Unfortunately Budleigh Salterton Beach wasn’t the dogs’ idea of fun and the secure private garden we’d expected at the cottage certainly wasn’t pointer secure. I woke up on Thursday morning and had a bad feeling - I said I thought the dogs weren’t safe and we ought to go home immediately.

Anyway we persevered and made the best of it we could. Beach walks were replaced with countryside walks with dogs on their leads and luckily managed to pass off without incident (you can always tell the locals they're the ones with their dogs running free). I either came back early or at lunchtime to help with mid day walkies so we survived until Saturday morning.

Devon walkies
©Harveywetdog

The team worked well first thing Saturday and I was out the cottage and parked outside the media centre for 08:45. I videoed the 3 Star cross country, got myself a lovely cup of coffee from two enterprising young ladies parked near the cross country start and headed back to the media centre.

My plan was to cool down, transfer the 3 Star clips from the camera onto my laptop, have something to eat and make my plans for the afternoon; timings had been thrown out by the hold due to Marcio Carvalho Jorge’s accident. However, as soon as I looked at my phone, and saw all the messages detailing the situation at home I knew the party was over and it was time to head North.

Somehow it wasn’t a difficult decision to make; Sunday promised rain so I wasn’t totally looking forward to that, I still wasn’t happy about the situation with the dogs so I just had this bad feeling about the whole trip. Devon is one of those counties where there simply isn’t enough room for all the people who want to be there and it was clearly getting to me.

We loaded stuff and dogs into the Discovery in record time and headed straight back, sailing North on the M5 and feeling sorry for the poor souls stop starting in the queue heading South. When we got back we found our neighbours had done a great job on damage limitation and mitigation and luckily things weren’t as bad as they seemed from 120 miles away.

So I’ve got lots to do during my month off from events. Dealing with the insurance company has shown me why the country is in such a mess, even before we hand it over to the reds to turn it into a real shit show. Multiple levels of bureaucracy, no one willing to take responsibility, hiding behind health and safety and procedure while all the time covering up the real problem which is a lack of skilled people to carry out the trades that matter. And they don't seem to mind that their service is so obviously crap - five weeks to clean a pair of curtains, why is that not acceptable!?

But at least after three weeks I can see a way through to completion and getting the house fit for viewings again. Not that anyone seems serious about buying the property - obviously the fear of “change”, promised by the socialists, is real. People know things can change for the worse and are highly unlikely to get better with the likes of Angela Raynor and David Lammy in charge.

Enjoying their holiday
©Harveywetdog

I’ve noticed that YouTube subscribers are gradually drifting away from the channel due to the current lack of output. Oh well, easy come easy go. As a measure of how morbid people are I’ve had to get a lot of videos from other creators removed where they’ve copied my old clips of Georgie to create their own click bait. “Why did you report me for Copyright?” they cry; "why did you copy my video?" I reply. What did shock me was the number of people who viewed my video of the Bicton water complex; Fence 5ABC appears in a single clip for all of 10 seconds and yet nearly 17,000 people have felt the need to watch it. That's only a 1000 less than have watched my Badminton video - talk about rubber necking. 

So add to that the miserable weather and it’s a pretty depressing outlook for me at present. Luckily I have got Hartpury to look forward to, both for Dressage in July and Eventing in August (with a little bit of show jumping in between). I don’t know what to expect of the Dressage as most of the Olympic Selection questions seem to have been answered but hopefully the International classes won’t be too depleted.

But the eventing is going to be top drawer with two days of cross country this year to accommodate the National Championships that have been transferred from Gatcombe with the Festival of British Eventing not running this year. We were talking to Tim Price in the media centre at Bicton and all agreed Gatcombe as an occasion will be sadly missed and is possibly irreplaceable, but let’s hope Hartpury gets somewhere near and delivers a Championship event to remember.

Festival of British Eventing reminiscing

©Harveywetdog

I’m told we’re still awaiting the final timetable for the horse trials - I imagine there’s going to be a lot of logistics, early starts and late finishes - let’s hope the weather plays its part!

Of course Hartpury have indicated that they too will be tightening their accreditation rules, so things will be different in that respect as well, and these days I treat every event as if it will be my last.

But for now I’ll say a big thank you to the team at JBP for Bicton and note that Otter Barn at Otterton is lovely but not entirely BorisGWP’s cup of tea.

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Harveywetdog/Author - David Robinson CEng FIET

David spent approaching 50 years in Her Majesty's Electricity Supply Industry before retiring

He was part of the highly successful design team on the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station Project before spending 25 years producing safety cases to keep our aging AGR fleet generating for the good of the nation

He is responsible for the Harveywetdog YouTube Channel which he maintains as an outlet for his creative talents

David has recently recovered from blood cancer but refuses to be a victim

All views are now his own but might be influenced by the medication he's had to take