The Dutch Show – CME Lysander

I got to see my lovely Classical MileEnd Lysander, who we sold to Holland, at the weekend. The wonderful thing was that he was Show Champion in the halter classes and Show Champion in the fleece classes. Quite a result for Leo and Marieke and a nerve wracking afternoon for me. I had to go outside when it was his class and the light fawn championship. Once he had won those I felt fine and ate more chips. When we got to the champion line up to select the Show Champion I felt pretty calm as he had done very well already and there were some serious animals out there. When he won Chas leapt at least a foot off the ground – he’s not Nureyev you know – and Leo, already extremely tall, bounced about and made a lot of noise.

The Dutch press have gone a bit wild and he’s in their biggest newspaper and apparently national and local television are turning up to film him today. It will be good for the Dutch industry to have alpacas in the limelight and good for the Brits too. Lysander is a Dovecote Jaquinto son and the other Jaquinto progeny at the show Leo’s Alpaca Stud Quickstep won the intermediate white female class so the boy done good.

It was a very pleasant show to be at, held in an equestrian centre near Hapert, and well organised. There was a large British contingent, Bozedown, the Alpaca Stud and us and the judge of course Tim Hey plus Kit Johnson from Silverstream in New Zealand and Matt and Cathy Lloyd who represent Australia and Britain. There was a buffet dinner ‘do’ on the Saturday night at a big hotel which was fun where we met up with lots of European friends.

On the Friday we had shot up to London for Alex’s 30th birthday dinner as we were missing the all night party on the Saturday. Tom cooked an excellent dinner, we drank some fizz, handed over the presents and headed for Dover. Chas, at last, got the chance to be a white van driver as we had hired one to carry our trade stand to Holland. Writ large, in red, on the side was the name of the company To ‘an Fro, no chance of losing this van in a car park. Once on the other side we drove for nearly four hours without seing a single hill, like an endless Somerset level.