Camera with you

Never ride out without a camera. That should be my motto, despite the fact that Emma seems to reckon that 'Never ride out with a camera' is the sensible idea. I really felt the absence of my pocket digital camera yesterday morning, as we rode past two of the most charismatic horses in the Heath in quick succession, and each was looking tremendously photogenic - and I was on Millyjean, who is like a moving armchair and thus eminently suitable to film from. We (Aisling on Imperial Decree, Gemma on Brief, Nikki on Jack and I on Millyjean, whom I don't ride that often but have been on a bit recently) had just done our usual first-lot exercise of cantering around Bury Hill AW, and as we walked back down the hill the adorable Bentley Biscuit strolled past us heading towards the strip of ground we'd just been around. He's such a sweet horse and it never fails to give me a thrill to see him mooching around the Heath: it's not just that he's achieved one of the greatest feats any horse can post - winning three straight Group One races - but that he combines this briliance with seeming to be the kindest, most placid and loveable horse you could find. I'd love to see him salute next week, which he really could do unless the ground dries up too quickly - after the wettest first half of a summer ever, it would be too harsh if it firms up in the next week and he ends up having two races in the UK and missing the virtually omnipresent boggy ground both times. And then, about two minutes after passing him, we saw another similarly special horse: Kribensis, ridden as usual by Stuart Messenger, was poking his nose into the trees on the side of the Heath, munching away as contentedly as such a distinguished old gentleman deserves to do, and presenting me with another perfect photo opportunity. But again: no camera.

Lesson learned, and I took my camera out in my pocket this morning, but predictably no sights as special as those two presented themselves. A movie camera, though, wouldn't have gone amiss when Martha and I saw a rather shocking incident, although one would have needed to be quick on the draw to capture it: as we approached the Fordham Road on a couple of the two-year-olds, the usual group of parents were coming out of the Catholic School on the corner after dropping their children off, about 40 yards from us, and suddenly a large branch crashed out of an overhead ash tree and dropped like a boulder, landing on the pram one of the women was pushing. It was very windy, but even allowing for that the speed and suddenness with which the branch came down was stunning. One would expect a branch to crack off and slowly detatch. This didn't: it just crashed down. Fortunately, the branch was more a huge frond, as much leaves as solid wood, and the child in the pram wasn't hurt, but it could have been so much worse. Particularly if it had landed on one of us instead of the group of parents, which would have been the case had it fallen a few seconds later, and we would have just been, over and above however we'd been injured by the blow of contact, entangled in this colossal mass of leaves. You can guarantee the horse would have bolted to the road and, if the rider was still on board, presented the her or me with a potentially fatal collision with a moving vehicle. Not a nice thought.

Thoughts like that makes one realise that being inundated by rain isn't such a big deal after all. That is what has been the country's fate recently and, although we haven't had it nearly as bad as thousands of poor souls, it has been pretty grim. The pond in the gateway to the field (which is as muddy as it would be in the depths of winter) has been just so deep. Showing the benefits of my physics O-level tuition, I've been siphoning water out of the pond more or less constantly over the past week so that we have a muddy stream running down the yard to flood the area at the bottom, and it is quite a sobering discovery to find when one wakes up in the mornings to find that the pipe has been running all night and that the pond still hasn't completely emptied. We've actually got a drainage project sort of underway for the field, as Mr Peacock (who is no relation to Captain Peacock) and his side-kick have started what he assures us will be a worthwhile operation, but so far all that has happened has been a hole drilled through a stable wall and a pipe fitted through it, and we haven't seen them since then. I might take a few photographs if and when the project progresses, now that my motto is 'Everywhere you go, always take the camera with you'.

(Editor's note: despite my routine protests, the author still managed to produce his camera from his shorts pocket as we finished our canter up Warren Hill this morning, resulting in the attached photo of Panto and Emma.)