What’s in a name?

I’ve got two successes to report: Number One, the rosettes have arrived for our Online Show so here is a photo of our Zimmerman modelling them. And Number Two, I’ve finally worked out how to access a blog on blogger.com that I apparently set up in 2008 and promptly forgot how to find it again. Happens all the time to me on this maze that they called the World Wide Web. So easy to become entangled…

I felt obliged to write something on the blogger.com page (which I have linked to this website) after all these years so decided to do a more personal piece for a change. Here goes:
I’ve ridden horses since before I was born. Now that might sound like a typo but it’s actually true. My mother, bless her, hunted regularly until she was six months pregnant. She only admitted this to me a few years ago and, when I tackled her about safety issues and how she could have killed me and so on, she pointed out that my father made her go! My poor father was in the Happy Hunting Ground in the Sky at this stage so I couldn’t say anything to him. My mother wanted to name me ‘Diana’ after the Goddess of Hunting but my grandfather (not a lover of horses) intervened and so I was named Suzanne, meaning ‘Beautiful White Lily’. In no way do I resemble a beautiful, white lily, alas.

Naming a child after your own loves is a bit of a risk. I ought to know. I named my first born son ‘Philip’ (from Greek, meaning ‘Lover of Horses’). He hates them. He’s allergic to them and he’s totally bored by them. I attempted to put this miserable failure behind me, so I bought a beautiful white horse. (Grey is the correct terminology). Now I had a name already lined up for a grey horse. He was to be called Zimmerman, after my all time favourite musician, Bob Dylan. If you’re not a Dylan fanatic, you may be forgiven for not knowing that his real name is Robert Zimmerman but he preferred to call himself after a Welsh poet.

Zimmerman, the horse, is 17.3 hh, Irish Draught x and has a powerful stride which throws the rider into the air at every step. I bought him from a dealer and he was quite unmanageable in the beginning and earned me several tellings off from my sister-in-law (a BHSII instructor and very, very knowledgeable). He was too nervous, too big, too strong, too badly behaved… While my husband worried that I’d wasted my money, I worried that I’d wasted my name.But all came good in the end. Perseverance is the most important thing with horses. Never give up. As the years passed, Zimmerman improved. He was taught basic dressage and he developed a talent for showing off, winning heavyweight hunter show classes and two championships. He was launched on the Irish dressage scene in his early teens and made his way (even with the handicap of having me on board) almost to Elementary. Which all goes to show, my son’s name may have let me down but my horse’s didn’t.