Update

Although he's starting to put a little weight on, and get a nice shine on his coat (thanks to hours of grooming and baths), he's still having terrible trouble with his stiff and sore legs. The physio came out again this morning, as she's doing each week, to work on him, and there was some improvement today. He's loosened up a little in his hamstrings, but is still very sore in his off shoulder. After she'd worked on him, I gave him a good trot up and down, and he was much more free and happy, which I hope continues.

He's got the dentist coming out in an hour to do his teeth, as he's not exactly managing to eat a lot of his (ridiculously expensive) feed. Hopefully now he'll stack on some weight, and have a bit more energy to build up some muscle tone. I am finding he's getting a bit buck-happy at the moment, which I'd like to think is because he's feeling better, and not because he doesn't want to canter.

I had a spectacular fall off him a few weeks ago, which resulted in some very attractive gravel rash up my arms, a sliced open forehead and a rather sore hip. We were quite happily cantering around the sand arena for the first time, pretending to be doing dressage, and horror of horrors, the owner of the property walked past with a piece of tin. Darcy shied left, I was grinning in victory due to staying on, then he put in a lovely buck to the right, twisted around and nearly came down, and off I flew (or, as Cameron put it - hit the ground like a sack of shit) and ended up with half the sand in the arena in my mouth. Very elegant. I hopped back on straight away, walked him around twice then retired to the pub to drown my sorrows.

When he's been feeling better, we've been loving jumping - none of the big ones, just the nice little cross rails and trotting grids as I'm trying to work on getting a straight line and a perfect take off. It's certainly been interesting, and some days I feel like I have to practically haul him around to make him straighten up, whilst others I can barely hold him once he sees the jumps.

We've certainly been having fun together, and hopefully he soon feels better and gets over his stiffness and we can start working on bigger jumps and longer rides. I'm going to start lunging him this week, and trying to supple him, and I'm starting lessons with a guy that has been training horses in Germany, who seems very good and appears interested in trying to teach me how to get Darcy going better. We shall soon see!