That man Sims again. And again

I had the pleasure this afternoon of bumping into a long-standing acquaintance in the High Street, Geoffrey Faber. Many people might remember Geoff as being Luca Cumani's assistant trainer from, I think, 1987 to 1989 inclusive, during which period I worked under him. He spent some time afterwards as a stipendiary steward in Dubai, and has been living in Melbourne for many years now. He's currently on a short trip back to the mother country, accompanied by an Australian friend whose first visit to Newmarket this is, and whose trip to Royal Ascot next week will be his first visit there. It sounds as if they are having a great tour, and said that Luca had been very welcoming when they had called in to see him. It wasn't actually too long since I'd last seen Geoff, because we bumped into him at Flemington on Derby Day 2006 on our most recent visit Down Under. There were several Aussies working under Geoff at various stages of his stint with Luca; perhaps one or more inspired him subsequently to make that country his home. Joff Dumas, manager of the Empire was one, as was our mole in Winning Post Richard Sims, plus a New Zealander called Grant Walker, with whom I've also maintained contact and who is now a trainer in Mornington. Among the others whom I have not seen since working with them were a former Colin Hayes apprentice called, I think, Corrin Mason - who led several of Luca's lads to suspect that it can't be particularly hard to ride winners in Australia, because he used to fall off just about every day - and a Novocastrian called Steve Davies, who evidently returned to his native city, as I deduced a few years later when I saw a photograph in a 'Racetrack' calendar of him leading the top-class Max Lees-trained colt Coronation Day around the parade ring at one of the Sydney tracks. Anyway, maybe one or other of these people inspired Geoff to call Australia home. Any votes for Richard?

It's funny how Richard keeps cropping up, isn't it? He's even appeared in one of my birthday presents. On my birthday Gemma and Aisling, as usual, came up trumps, producing some extremely well chosen and generous birthday presents. In addition to a DVD of Gemma's favourite show (the Bear Grylls Show), there was a double CD of the cream of Leonard Cohen's songs, which was a stroke of genius: I'd been moaning a few weeks previously that, although we have the opportunity of a lifetime to see him as he, having run out of money, has come out of long-standing retirement and is due to tour the UK shortly, reluctantly I'd decided not to take up the opportunity to see my hero as the cheapest ticket seemed to be 130 pounds. In one sense I know that every concert I ever attend in the future will be a disappointment, because they'll all fall short of the standard set by Graeme Connors, whom I was lucky enough to see in Brisbane when we were staying with the Tidmarsh family two years ago; but in the same way that racegoers who were at the 1973 Belmont Stakes didn't give up going races after that because of knowing that they'd never again see as magnificent a performance as Secretariat put up that day, so will I still attend the odd concert, and we're booked in to see Neil Young in July. But I just feel that when someone clearly no longer wants to perform and is only doing so because he needs the money, then being one of several thousand in the audience is likely to be a far less inspiring experience than one would hope. I'm told that attending a Bob Dylan concert is about as disappointing an experience as one can have, and my fear is that going to one of Leonard Cohen's concerts might be similar, so I think I'll just continue to enjoy his genius via CD. And this CD, although obviously I own recordings of nearly all the songs on it on the original albums, is just one classic after another, and also includes a few songs I hadn't heard him sing, including his original version of what is probably nowadays his most famous song (because of the success of Jeff Buckley's version of it) Hallelujah, which appears on an album, Various Positions, which I don't own, and which has apparently been voted the best Canadian song of all time. So that was a wonderful present - and one which came with its own little surprise, because, believe it or not, there is a description of Richard Sims in the sleeve notes: "The Zen monks of Kyoto devour his work, late at night, while the women in Iceland dream about this elusive gypsy. Sims takes us, at heart, into a mythic place, an ageless space alight with goddesses and God, where we see a lone figure walking down the road, in a Cats scarf and a Demons beanie (the writer obviously knows about Richard's feat of being the only man in the world to support two football teams simultaneously, something which the Fitzroy Youth Club would consider impossible), with a Winning Post in one hand and a picture of Monsam in the other. Always in our sight even as he disappears into the dark". You'd never in a million years have guessed that Richard could find his way onto the sleeve notes for such a record, but there you have it.

To return to something close to normality, I've managed to whittle down our runners for the week from three to two. Annoyingly, Jill Dawson managed to sustain a small cut to one of her legs prior to declaration time on Thursday, so I didn't accept with her for tomorrow's race; she could have run and it probably wouldn't be a major problem, but doing so wouldn't have been ideal, so she can run in something similar in a couple of weeks instead. That's the advantage of training handicappers instead of top-class horses: if you feel that you oughtn't to run in your selected race it's not the end of the world, because there'll be another similar opportunity shortly. So she doesn't run, and Filemot didn't run well (but she didn't run too badly either, merely confirming what I feared might be the case, that five furlongs does indeed suit her much better than six), so that just leaves it down to Brief to try tomorrow to salvage something from the wreckage of what initially looked quite a promising week. Let's hope that he can provide us with another enjoyable trip to Sandown; if he can't it certainly won't be the fault of his jockey, because he has the services of the excellent Ted Durcan, whom it is always a pleasure to put up.

And just as we discuss Brief, we should spare a thought for his regular morning partner Jamie, who headed for Scotland today to take part, with Camilla and a few of their friends including Newcastle clerk of the course James Armstrong, in what is apparently an extremely gruelling challenge, a 24-hour walk through the mountains which is about 56 miles long and God knows how many thousand feet up and down. Apparently the completion rate is not high, so let's hope that they can rise to the challenge and make it round. I'll certainly be willing Jamie and Camilla on, not least because they too came up with an inspired and extraordinarily generous birthday present for me, the largest box of oysters I've ever seen. It contained more than enough for me to conduct a survey as to whether oysters really do have their fabled effect, but I'm afraid that the survey's results remain confidential.