Sunday, April 29, 2007

Enjoying Joe's grass

Here's a nice story. When Joe McCarthy was here last summer, he observed that we should reseed the part of the field which the horses were then using when it became empty in the autumn. Typically, helpful advice was followed up with practical assistance, and he went to his local garden centre and bought a couple of sacks of grass seed. He took this to Haydock in the boot of his car to give to me when he and Iris went there at the end of September when Brief was running. Inevitably, the excitement of Brief's win meant that we all forgot about the seed, and he went home with it still in the boot. No matter, because we'd see each other again before too long, or so we thought. As regular readers of this site will know, Joe died in his sleep four days later but, proving that the good which men do live on after them, Iris loaded up my car with the seed after Joe's funeral, and a few days later I, feeling very emotional, scattered it around the by-now empty field. Since then, it has been a source of joy to us to observe just how well "Joe's grass" has been growing. A mild wet winter followed by a very warm spring has meant that we've now got a field full of the lushest grass you could imagine - and today we moved the horses across into it. As you can imagine, we now have, thanks to Joe's kindness, the happiest bunch of horses in town, as this pic of 'The Dawsons', Jack and Jill, will show. I've partitioned the field off with the electric fence, so the horses currently only have about a quarter of it so, although the herd will do its usual 'plague of locusts' impression in no time at all, I hope that they will be able to continue to receive the benefit of Joe's thoughtfulness for a few weeks yet.

Watching the horses enjoy the grass has been one of the pleasures of today, the latest in a long line of idyllic summer-like days, and another has been watching racing on At The Races. Easy first-up wins for the superb Dylan Thomas (Group One in France) and the mighty Yeats (Listed race in Ireland), plus a great race in HK in which Viva Pataca, Vengeance Of Rain and Admire Moon filled the trifecta, plus a Group One in which Delta Blues ran (unplaced) on his first start since thrilling us in the Melbourne Cup (pictured) - and we could watch it all in our own home. What a great TV channel. And what a way to warm up for Guineas/Kentucky Derby week. We've already started Guineas watch, as Emma will tell you in her blog, because she photographed both Sander Camillo and Drayton galloping on the Rowley Mile on Saturday morning. I'd seen Drayton the previous morning on the trotting rings on the Severals and on the walking ground on the Heath, and had been puzzled by the sight of an unfamiliar horse that I couldn't identify to any trainer. At that stage I didn't even know that Drayton was no longer trained by Tommy Stack, never mind that he was in Newmarket under the care of Mike de Kock and being aimed at the 2,000 Guineas, but when I found those facts out I soon put two and two together. The reason why I found out was because Adrian Beaumont of the IRB called me at lunchtime to ask if I would be able to provide a work-mate for the horse the next day. I would have been genuinely thrilled to oblige, but realistically there was no horse in the stable that I could volunteer, because nothing here would be nearly fast enough to do the job properly. Apparently Adrian was meeting with no offers of help from local trainers, which is a source of true shame to the trainers in this town en masse, and a mate was only found, so I'm told, once Tommy Stack's son persuaded Neville Callaghan to produce one. If one were a casting director for a film company and one cast Neville in the role of the good Samaritan, one would probably get the sack - but there you are, Nasty Nev comes to the rescue and redeems his "I'm alright Jack" colleagues. Shame on the rest of 'em! (Trainers who have no 90+ rated sprinter/milers in their stables excluded).

My feeling, incidentally, on the Guineas is that Teofilo will win if he's at his peak, and Adagio will win if he isn't. And that Miss Beatrix EW is the value in the 1,000 Guineas. I've already got one prognostication right this weekend: as Dempsey passed the post after his exhilarating win in the two-mile chase at Sandown yesterday, I said that I guessed he might have broken the track record. Nothing was said on tv, but I checked the time in today's Racing Post and see that he did, by about a second. The previous record, I was interested to see, was set by News King, owned by the late Newmarket identity Terry Foreman, in 1982. So that brings us back to Neville Callaghan, although I seem to recall that when News King, although he won plenty of hurdle races for Neville, was trained by Fred Winter while he was a steeplechaser. A lovely horse - how many track records stand for 25 years nowadays? There was good flat racing at Sandown yesterday, but Dempsey and Hot Weld were the stars. And thus endeth another wonderful National Hunt season. We usually manage the odd jumps winner, but we didn't have one during the season which ended yesterday. But I've enjoyed it enormously - so many thanks to all the terrific and brave horses who have lit it up, and to the many excellent jockeys who have helped them to do so.

I'm sure there would have been a few post-season parties around the country last night - and there'll surely be one in Malton when one of the hoops I most admire, Russ Garrity, hangs up his boots in a couple of weeks - but it was purely by coincidence that we were in party mode last night. Emma and I attended a surprise birthday party for Francis Graffard, a very nice Frenchman who is one of Sheikh Mohammed's racing managers. It was organised by Lisa-Jane Moeran, Francis' long-standing girlfriend, and was a huge success: Francis had no idea in advance, and was truly "gobsmacked" (as Leslie would have said) when he walked around the corner to see so many of his friends and relatives, some of whom had come from overseas for the occasion. It was a very happy night. It started at Diana Cooper's lovely farmhouse on Sheikh Mohammed's Moulton Paddocks estate and ended in Francis' and Lisa-Jane's house in Stamford Street, just around the corner from where I used to live in Warrington Street. Diana was very kind to host the gathering (Francis set off for the evening with Lisa-Jane in the belief that they were going there for a quiet dinner), and her excellent little terrier Patch coped with the invasion very cheerfully. The Moulton Paddocks estate is, of course, home to several very characterful dogs, but apparently Patch Cooper and the notorious Timmy O'Neill are not regular pals: they are both great dogs, but very different. We'd been at the party for quite some time when it dawned on us that nobody had seen Diana for half-an-hour or so. On that basis that she must have either gone to bed or to De Niro's, it was felt that evacuation was the correct course of action. We re-grouped chez Francis where we were treated to the 'all our yesterdays' of the generation who began listening to music in France circa 1980. This was really good, and not being able to understand the words didn't hugely diminish one's enjoyment of the songs. In a truly mighty night, Roger Varian won man of the match and the only casualty was a very nice Ukranian called Andrew (that can't be his real name, surely, but that's what he answers to) who works in Coolmore's publicity machine, Primus, in Fethard. No doubt exhausted by having sold 76 Holy Roman Emperor nominations in the past week, Andrew measured his considerable length on Francis' living room floor as he made an unforgettable entrance, but happily he recovered quicky and was able to provide the bulk of the opposition to Roger in the battle for the title of 'King of the Dancefloor'.

3 comments:

The Lemon said...

let's hope Teofilo is fully recovered and that he can be a real Triple Crown contender. He is the only possible winner if he is back to form this weekend....

problemwalrus said...

Life is getting complex.You used to be able to read the form,check the going and make a reasonable stab at picking the winner.Now clerks of courses speak of the evapo-transpiration rate when they water courses.How exactly do you judge this rate?And to what extent is it related to the bounce factor?

John Berry said...

I suspect there's some correlation between the evapo-transpiration rate and the amount of hot air wafting around any particular track.