To Bromont! I will be there for the CCI3* (Canada’s only one, eh?) this coming week. Since it’s a Canadian event, most of my posts from there will be on my Canuck blog, Straight-Up; so please head on over there if you want to stay up on the action from Bromont, where a large percentage of the field comes from south of the border. Last year, in fact, Americans won all four divisions at Bromont, leaving the home town competitors rather empty gloved. We won’t know until July 1, which just happens to be Canada’s version of the Fourth of July, whether the FEI has deemed Bromont fit to be the host of WEG 2018. But I’ll be sure to keep ears, nose and eyes peeled for any rumours, hints or suggestions of what the decision is likely to be. If Bromont does get WEG, it will become the first venue in history to have hosted both the Olympic equestrian events (Montreal 1976) and WEG!

If you are one of the few who can  bear to expose yourself to further discussions of the FEI’s dirtiest discipline, have a listen to this week’s podcast from Chris Stafford Radio, where the editor of the magazine that parents this blog, Pamela Young, weighed in on some of the latest muck in the world of endurance.

Finally, I thought you might be interested in this latest exercise fad floating around the www these days. It’s called Prancercise and its ‘inventor’ (if you can call bad disco dancing an invention) claims to have been inspired by trotting horses when she dreamt it up. Tell me if you can find even one stride that looks remotely like a trotting horse (unless that trotting horse has been smoking some of the good stuff).  Mme. Prancercise’s gait may fail to resemble Equus, but part of her anatomy does resemble the toe of a certain ungulate from the genus Camelus…I’ll give her one equine gait similarity: she canters like a Friesian.

I think she ought to prance right on back to the loony bin from where she escaped.

I actually suspect Our Lady of Prancing may have stolen her idea from a certain group of funny English men who invented silly walking some thirty years ago…

Okay, that’s enough silly trotting for today. I have to go pack my Pepto (duck is a delicious, if difficult-to-digest, specialty of the region), sunblock, rain coat (they get all the weather there, often on the same day), and English-Quebecois dictionary (the French I learned in France bears only a passing resemblance to the twangy argot they speak in Bromont).