A busy week

You can tell when I've not got much on, and you can tell when I'm snowed under - and nothing added to the blog for well over a week means I've been busy. Doing what? Hard to say, really. We are busy enough in the stable just now, and I've just had some catching up to do in the office, but I feel a bit more organised now so I just thought I'd put fingers to keyboard briefly in advance of our trip to Thirsk tomorrow. Polly aims to build on her last-start staying-on third over seven furlongs at Folkestone by competing over a mile there tomorrow. The extra distance should help her, but will it be enough? I don't know. The facts that the ground might be quite fast - I don't think they've had the rain farther north that we've had here over the past day - and that she's drawn 15 of 18 contribute to my thinking that she might find them still going a bit too fast for her at the mile, but we'll see. She will have a different jockey. The two who have ridden her previously, Neil Pollard and Kirsty Milczarek, are both unavailable - Neil because he's riding at Newmarket for Willie Musson, and Kirsty because she's riding against us for her boss Marco Botti - but the fact that we've ended up with the excellent Paul Mulrennan, one of the best jockeys in the country, never mind the north, will not be a disadvantage. So let's hope for a pleasing day.

I've really enjoyed the fact that several very deserving people have recently enjoyed nice days. Top of the list has to be Chris Dwyer, whose purple patch hit new heights yesterday when Mia's Boy and Jimmy Quinn landed a thrilling win in the Listed Hambleton Cup at York. Cliff has been taking some of Chris' runners to the races and he led him up, so let's hope he can pay another visit to the winner's enclosure with Polly tomorrow. Throw in lovely old Geordieland's victory under an outstandingly cool ride from Shane Kelly - and great to see him announce his return from the long suspension through which he has conducted himself so admirably in such fine style - in today's Yorkshire Cup, and the Listed race win for Marco Botti's very brave filly Raymi Coyma under Kerrin McEvoy half an hour later, and we've had a really good York May Meeting. And sandwiched in amongst all this has been the win of good old Monsam for his enthusiastic part-breeder and part-owner Richard Sims at Bendigo today, which was really nice.

Less nice has been the weather. The great week and a bit of summer weather - I heard something about Britain having its highest May temperature ever recorded, but I don't know if that's right - couldn't last, and when we turned on the television for Yarmouth (where the weather is never as nice as you expect) on Tuesday and saw that it looked cold and very, very grey, the writing was on the wall. Cue Matt Chapman's exclamation of shock, "We haven't seen weather like this for at least a week". And, sure enough, it couldn't last much longer, and by Thursday it was gone. But happily the summer did last for Wednesday, when Emma and I enjoyed a blissful drive to the west side of the country to see Desiree's three-day old foal, who shall be called Oscar Bernadotte. Mother and son are doing really well, as well they might living in the luxury of one of Britain's loveliest studs, Batsford Stud, just outside Moreton-In-The-Marsh, and under the care of a really nice studmaster, Alan Pavey. It was a lovely visit, and topped off by calling in to see Desiree's prospective husband Kayf Tara at Overbury Stud, where Simon Sweeting showed us him as well as his two other stallions, Proclamation and Zafeen. Kayf Tara is such a lovely horse, and is justly in much demand. We saw him at 5pm and he'd already covered three mares that day - and had another lined up for eight that evening. You can understand him being docile with that schedule, but all the stallions there seem very placid, which I think is no coincidence, because Simon seems to have their routines very happily organised. They live in a courtyard in which some mares are also stabled, and they seem very content with their lots indeed.

That was one outing, and another we've had since I last posted was our trip to Lingfield last Friday. Jill ran awfully well on her resumption: she didn't win, but it was an excellent second, so that bodes well for the rest of her campaign. She was in the first race, and I then spent the rest of the afternoon co-presenting the At The Races programme with Jim McGrath, which I really enjoyed. There was an additional highlight because we bumped into Brian Rouse, whom I really admired as a jockey and whom I'd never met. Just over thirty years on from his 1,000 Guineas victory on Quick As Lightning for John Dunlop, he looked really well and he came across as a really nice, really unassuming man. He and his wife were there on an Injured Jockeys' Fund outing, which I guess Hugo Bevan might have been organising because Hugo was there and he's very involved with the IJF; Tony Clark was there too, looking very fit and well - too much so to be an EX-jockey, really - and he might have been involved with that too; or he might have been there in his new role as salesman for Mactrack all-weather gallops. It was a very pleasant day, although quite a long one as we collected Anthony on the way home, which made for a long, slow Friday evening crawl around the M25. But that was a very worthwhile trek, as he was in great form over the weekend, enjoying all sorts of activities around the yard, including having his first rides on Panto, which he seemed really to enjoy. We'd told him that he could ride him once he'd had his birthday, and when I went to pick him up he said, "I'm five now so I'll bring my hat so that I can ride Panto". It's lovely to see him so keen on the horses, as the picture at the top of this blog shows - even though if it was an either/or between horses and tractors, the horses wouldn't get a look-in!