Following the AGM on 16 November, we have a lot of new trustees, and together we have a lot of new ideas. And one of those ideas is the not-so-secret diary. You see, we the trustees all have lots of meetings (at least one a month, plus meetings of various subgroups) and most of the membership doesn’t hear a lot about what occurs at those meetings.

For a quite a lot of things, trust me when I say that’s not a bad thing, unless you’re one of those people that’s really into the intricate details of setting a budget, meeting other requirements of charity commissions or discussing insurance. But we do talk about more exciting topics as well (horses!) and, most importantly, we often manage to have quite a bit of fun in the process. And those are the bits we want to share with you.

The picture is of our most recent meeting. Starting from the left-hand side of the picture and going clockwise around the table, we are: H (Membership secretary), Mike (Sport), Debbie (Secretary & Treasurer), Jan (Youth), Tim (Chair), Freija (Breeding & Studbook) and Jemimah (Comms). Kristina (Education & welfare) unfortunately had to miss this particular get-together.

Now that we all know that meetings may actually result in published pictures, we may of course start dressing up for meetings… Or not. I almost attended this one in my pyjamas actually, seeing as it was at my house and Tim turned up an hour early when I hadn’t even got dressed yet…!

So apart from the Very Important Things which were discussed at this meeting (the new website, which is going to be cool, and there may have been some other Terribly Essential topics such as the annual budget too, but I may have snoozed through those) – what else did we get up to?

Well, Mike has a real soft spot for Tunnocks tea cakes, and he tried to eat them ALL. And then he tried to blame the significant pile of wrappers on H. But H does not fold her wrappers in that particular way(!) so he wasn’t fooling anyone. And Jan is not averse to crawling under and around objects to try to regain her place at the table (it was a bit of a squeeze), and not only is she perfectly able to get around on all fours, it was observed that she appears to be able to do so in 4-beat tölt…

The next instalment of the not-so-secret diary will be written by one of the other trustees, to give the others a chance to say embarrassing things about me too, and so you get to know all of us a bit. After all, at the end of the day we are doing all of this for you and your horses!