Highlights of this week and of last year

Happiest news of the week is that we can add another name to the list of newer owners to the stable. The Fordham family - Tony and Becky and their two children, who live locally in Reach - have taken their first venture into ownership with the Key Of Luck filly - and, if first impressions count for anything, then I can say that they go straight onto the list of people who deserve to own a nice horse. So let's hope that that is what she turns out to be. We can thank my old friend Andrew Neve, alongside whom I worked at Woodditton Stud fifteen years or so ago, for the introduction - he and his wife Biddy live in Reach also, just along the road from Tony and Becky - and I'm confident that they will prove to be people whom it's a pleasure not just to train for, but to know. Tony has been a racing enthusiast ever since taking advantage of a successful tip for Fact Finder in the 1989 Lincoln, so let's hope that I can help him to find that ownership is the pleasure he's spent a long time hoping it will be.

Second happiest news of the week is that Dave Morris has already doubled his tally of winners for the year, Wodhill Gold having saluted the judge at Southwell on January 8th under Hayley Turner (and congratulations, by the way, to Kirsty Milczarek for her first treble yesterday). Dave's setting a hot pace, so let's hope that Run From Nun can give us some hope of keeping within striking distance of his tally when she runs at Wolverhampton on Saturday. She's a nice filly, but she certainly won't be the most nicely-named horse running on Saturday. As she is by Oasis Dream from Nunatak, I was thinking that the only excuse for her rather cumbersome name was that Nunatak didn't mean anything - but then, flicking through the dictionary on Tuesday to check out the given description for 'obdurate' (I'd seen Rahul Dravid described as "India's most obdurate batsman" after the controversial Test in Sydney), I happened to stumble upon 'nunatak', which is 'an isolated peak of rock projecting above a surface of inland ice or snow'. She's by Bering, so that fits - but surely we could have had something better than 'Run From Nun' for her Oasis Dream foal.

So who will be the nicest-named horse running on Saturday? For many it will be Arnold Layne, the likely favourite for the big steeplechase at Warwick, who shares his name with Pink Floyd's first hit. That's nice, as was the fact that Malcolm Denmark had two horses running in consecutive races at Plumpton the other day, Can't Buy A Thrill and Nightfly. It's thus as easy to identify him as a Steely Dan/Donald Fagen fan as it was to work out that Martin St. Quinton enjoys Leonard Cohen's music, after he had two fillies in Mick Channon's stable called Tower Of Song (subsequently claimed by and successful for David Chapman) and Take Manhattan. It's too much to hope that the Philip Hobbs inmate Like A Hurricane should run this week too.

From the pleasing to the not so pleasing, was I the only one startled by what yesterday's Racing Post (yes, that's the one whose front-page headline was 'BERRY CLEARED ON FRAUD CHARGES') quoted Nic Coward as saying at the TBA dinner on Tuesday? Apparently, getting fed up by repeated questions from the floor as to what he, as head of the BHA, was planning to do about racing's falling income from the betting industry and therefore falling prize money, his response apparently was, "You've got to stop going on about it and do something about it. If this is a real issue, you, the horsemen, have got to resolve among yourselves how you're going to address it"! Leaving aside his implicit questioning of whether this actually is a real issue, it is truly bizarre that he doesn't seem to see racing's financial administration as being the responsibility of the BHA. If that truly is the case, one's got to wonder what role he believes he and the BHA are meant to fulfill. The disciplinary department hasn't been covering itself in glory recently, so now that we find that the leader of the BHA seems to have abdicated responsibility for organizing racing financially, it's becoming ever harder to have any confidence at all in our well-paid leadership.

Well, Nic Coward may be loath to administer, but I'm proud to say that, in my own little corner of the racing world, I've been administering like a dervish this week. (Yes, I know that correctly that means that I've done no administering at all, because dervishes don't administer - but you know what I mean). Emma's away for four days in the Alps with some friends. I'm rather 'take it or leave it' with skiing. I was lucky enough to go skiing a few times as a child, when I was a real dare-devil and loved it. Then I had a gap of probably six or seven years, and when I tried it again I found I was already getting over-cautious and rusty. That was 19 years ago, so I know that if I took it up again now I wouldn't do it anything like well enough to get the most fun out of it. So I elected to stay at home, which I rather regret - but I shouldn't really regret it, as I've spent the week getting the least behind with my paperwork that I've been for ages. One of the things I least enjoy about life is that I constantly have it hanging over me that there are umpteen unfinished administrative tasks which I should be addressing and, however many hours a day I spend on them, there are always more. It's like painting the Forth Road Bridge. Anyway, this evening I can say that there are fewer girders in urgent need of fresh paint than there have been for ages; and come this time tomorrow there will be even fewer.

Which brings us back to my ongoing review of the year. It's a major help as a small trainer to have some other employment as well as training. Training a small string is so much running to stand still financially that other sources of income are invaluable. And in the past year I've been very fortunate to have a lot of writing work - at least I have to keep reminding myself that it's work because, as I generally list my hobbies as reading and writing, it never seems like work. Thoroughbredinternet has become a great supporter (if you don't know it, check it out on www.thoroughbredinternet.com - it's a great site and source of bloodstock data, and will become one of your favourites) and allows me to churn out two or three 700 or so-word 'Grey Panels' each week. I really enjoy doing that - when one feels one's written a good one, or when someone tells one that one has, it's a very easy way to get the satisfaction of 'a thing well made'. It's certainly a lot more instant (and frequent) than training a winner! On top of this I think we're into year sixteen of the International Report in Winning Post, and other publications kind enough to find me printable recently have included Thoroughbred Owner and Breeder (a Gai Waterhouse feature), the Racing Post (a review of Nick Godfrey's book) and the FRBC yearbook (an article on the really friendly Thierry Doumen, who was a pleasure to interview over the telephone). The Gai Waterhouse commission was a real gift from God, because spending the morning with her was one of the highlights of the year; throw in a morning with Martin and David Pipe at Nicholsashayne and an evening and then morning with Mark Johnston in Middleham, and you can see that 2007 wasn't short of red-letter days for me. The other stable visit which was a real treat was an excursion into the forest of Chantilly with Jean de Roualle, and then I mustn't forget two great studs visited: Haras du Quesnay and Dalham Hall Stud. The last-named is on our doorstep and it's easy to overlook things that are so nearby - which is why visiting Newmarket Heath several times a day doesn't even get a mention - but I went up there four times last year, and each time remembered what a thrill it is to see some of the world's best stallions.

And one final thing - best wishes to Lord Huntingdon, who I was startled to read in the Racing Post is recovering from an ELEVEN-HOUR heart operation in California a few days after Christmas. It's quite chilling that someone who always looks as fit and well as he does can be thus afflicted, but happily it sounds as if he's on the road to recovery. He's not only one of the sport's characters, but also one of it's really decent men, so fingers crossed he'll be ok.