Brighton actually

I usually enjoy going to the races at Brighton, and our trip there on Wednesday was another pleasure. We were lucky in that the weather was lovely, which wouldn't been the case had we gone there any other day this week (month). The horse (Run From Nun) ran well - ok, in the great scheme of things finishing sixth off a rating of 46 is no great shakes, but it was a creditable and genuine performance, and Emma and I were both very proud of her, as were John and Terre McNamara, from whom we lease her - and the jockey (Taigdh O'Shea) rode her very nicely; so the sun was in the sky, God was in His Heaven and all was well with the world. And the really nice thing was that we caught up with Lawrence Wadey, back home on his annual summer vacation from the Far East. Lawrence, formerly of firstly the Racing Post and then the South China Morning Post, doesn't go the races that often when he's home, but he made the trek up the hill to join us in supporting the filly, and he seemed to enjoy a very sociable afternoon during which he caught up with numerous old friends. After racing he treated Emma and I to a lovely dinner with himself and his mother Pam in a really nice restaurant in Brighton (well Hove, actually, or it was in Hove rather than Brighton until the two places became one) called The Meadow, which I'd recommend whole-heartedly. Inevitably in a country in which nice weather seems only to last for a matter of hours before breaking, a spectacular and torrential thunderstorm hit Brighton at nightfall, but that did nothing to dampen the pleasure of a lovely day.

We saw Lawrence again today as his travels - he rarely leaves Brighton during his few weeks in the UK every year, but he does venture outside the odd time - took him briefly to Newmarket, which was nice as it enabled him to have his first sighting of Ethics Girl, whom he owns in partnership with Gerry Grimstone and Bill Benter. Sadly, the day wasn't quite as satisfactory as Wednesday had been, because Lawrence arrived in the stable in the aftermath of a cock-up, which thankfully didn't have the serious consequences it might have had. Tony Fordham had the day off today, so I suggested he might like to come and watch us do some stalls work with his filly Struck Lucky. So he duly arrived with his friend Ally, and we headed down to the stalls for what I thought would be a fairly straightforward session. All was going well as I led the filly, ridden by Martha, through the stalls a few times, going through both ways, as is my wont, to ensure that the horse is totally comfortable with her surroundings. However, order became chaos in the blink of an eye as the filly turned her head to one side as I was leading her into the stalls from the front for the third or fourth time: her bridle caught itself on a piece of metal on the front of the stall - a million to one chance - and she panicked, pulling back, and in the process pulling her bridle off and breaking it. Inevitably Martha fell off and the filly galloped off into the distance. Martha landed heavily on her shoulder and we were faced with possibly a badly injured rider on the ground and a lost and endangered horse. Thankfully, and surprisingly, the filly galloped back into view a minute or two later, homing in on some of John Gosden's horses and allowing herself to be caught by one of his lads, who handed her over to me. And thankfully, although we didn't know this at the time, the X-rays which would be taken a couple of hours later of Martha's shoulder after I had taken her to A&E in Bury hospital showed no fracture. So that was an irritating and worrying - and for Martha very painful - diversion this morning, but all was well that ended a lot less badly than might have been the case; and the one consolation for me was that it provided me with vindication for my policy, which I regard as a common-sense safety precaution but which many others regard as weird, of always sending the horses out to exercise with a headcollar under their bridle, on the basis that once a decade we will have a loose horse who has broken his or her bridle, and who could then be saved from a potential disaster by the fact that she is much more catchable than she would be if she was wearing neither bridle nor head-collar. The debacle was hardly much of an advertisement for the smooth-running of the stable, but really it was just a freak accident that genuinely was no one's fault, and it proved a salutary reminder that one never knows what is around the corner with horses.

And I'll end on a safer note by congratulating Graham Dench for writing one of the funniest paragraphs ever to appear in the Racing Post. One has to understand the lines of military precision and formality along which Sir Mark Prescott's stable is run to appreciate this, but I guess that most readers of this blog will do that. What I now quote is a paragraph from the Folkestone report in today's Racing Post, after Casual Garcia, a shock winner of a selling handicap at Lingfield on his previous start, had followed up with an effortless nine-length success under a penalty in a better race: "Prescott was not present, and Ted Williams, representing the owners the Ne'er Do Wells, clearly knows his place, for he did not have much to say. He did, however, reveal that Casual Garcia had been "expected" here, whereas his Lingfield selling win had been one of the stable's almost unheard of "unexpected" winners. He added, rather unnecessarily, that Casual Garcia is improving now, and that plans will be left to Sir Mark, as always."!