Reasons for not blogging

Oh dear. It is August 21st and this is only the fourth chapter this month. That's not good. Our dear friend Joff (pictured with Anthony) must take a large share of the blame for that, as enjoying his company while he was with us was so time-consuming that blogging has been one of the things to have been neglected. Joff had been here with his girl friend Wendy during July week at the start of their European odyssey, prior to heading to Italy and then London, and then he rejoined us after he'd bade her farewell at Heathrow, the end ofher vacation looming. (He, being 'between jobs' on account of having been 'let go' by his long-time employer, was able to enjoy the luxury of a longer holiday). So we had him here for a week, Sunday to Saturday, before he, Emma and I, plus my father, travelled to Deauville for three days, where we enjoyed my father's 70th birthday treat, which we really did enjoy and which was a true treat for all of us.

I hope that Joff enjoyed the time as much as we did, because if he did then it will have been a real highlight for him. I was only sorry that being busy enough in the stable meant that I had to leave him twiddling his thumbs for longer than I'd have liked, but all in all I hope that he'll feel that we covered a lot of ground while he was in Newmarket. I think that the previous chapter covered our party on the Sunday and then the couple of days when Anthony was here. I took Anthony home on the Wednesday, and while I was away Joff and Emma enjoyed a viewing of the Juddmonte stallions at Banstead Manor Stud, kindly arranged by Jamie Trotter. As this band of lovely horses includes Dansili and his Arc-winning son Rail Link, not to mention Oasis Dream and Zarkava's sire Zamindar, plus others, this was obviously a real treat. The evening contained a couple of drinks in one of the town's best racing pubs, the Grosvenor Yard, followed by dinner in Pizza Express, while there were highlights galore the following day.

Francesca Cumani (left) had been booked to ride Brief Goodbye in the Ladies' Derby at Newbury at the weekend so she kindly came in for first lot on Thursday to gallop him, which was the source of excitement as she is, of course, a huge celebrity in Joff's homeland of Australia. Brief went very nicely for her, leaving us confident that he would put his best foot forward two days later.

That, though, was not the last Joff saw of the Cumani family that day, because Emma and he headed out to the Heath the following lot to watch Luca's string exercise, Francesca having said that she was heading home to ride last year's Melbourne Cup runner-up Purple Moon in a canter up Long Hill: this, obviously, was worth a Melbourne boy's while watching, and what was really nice was that when Luca saw them standing on the Heath to watch his string go by, he rode over to watch with them. My friendship with Joff dates back to 1989 when we found ourselves working together in Luca's stable, and Luca last week demonstrated just what a gentleman he is by making his former employee very welcome on his brief return to the town. His parting words to Joff as he rode off to rejoin his string were "I look forward to seeing you this evening", and later in the day he duly allowed Joff to accompany him on his evening stables round of inspection of his charges.

This, as you can imagine, was a real treat, and Joff returned here afterwards buoyed up with the pleasure of a really special visit, not to mention a gin and tonic. That wasn't his final drink of the night, as nine of us - Emma, Joff and myself being joined by Aisling and Charlie, Gemma and Simon, plus Emma Candy and Gail Hacking - then enjoyed a really good dinner in a lovely pub, the Star in Lidgate, to celebrate Emma's birthday. The birthday celebrations had actually begun earlier in the afternoon when we drove up to Colton Stud near Norwich to inspect Emma's bloodstock empire, ie Desiree and her Sulamani colt, named Oscar Bernadotte (pictured).

The following day was my father's birthday, the big Seven Zero, and he drove up here to celebrate it with us. We had two particularly interesting events before his arrival: firstly William Kennedy, a very good jumps jockey, came to give Jill Dawson her first jumping lesson up at the Links, and then in the afternoon Joff and I enjoyed a visit to the National Horseracing Museum in the High Street, which is a must for all visitors to the town. The exhibits are great, and the visitors' books are worthy of inspection too. Earlier in the week I'd thrown a fly over Anthony about his views on a visit there, but stupidly I did so not long after Joff had regaled him with tales of his visit the previous week to the Natural History Museum in London, home of dinosaurs. Anthony's first question, inevitably, was whether there are dinosaurs in the racing museum; I replied to this as best I could, something along the lines of, "No, but there are some really good old racing things and lots of lovely pictures and trophies", to which his reaction was, "So nothing very interesting then". When he discovered that there aren't even any dead horses there, Joff and I decided that it would be wise to save our visit until after he'd gone, so Friday afternoon it was. Scanning the visitors book upstairs in the British Sporting Art Trust gallery, I noticed that some people from Bendigo in Victoria (ie Joff's home state) had been there the previous week, and this prompted me to look at some other entries. The more remarkable of these included the comment "It was very nice, but boring", and someone whose address was "Somewhere under your bathroom sink"; not to mention "God", whose address was "Heaven". But really the guest book comments are merely a side-show to some really interesting and entertaining exhibits, of which the current Lester Piggott exhibition is perhaps the main attraction.

Saturday saw us head to France via Newbury. Brief duly ran in the Ladies' Derby and Francesca rode him well. She put him in a nice position and he ran honourably, but he just found things happening a bit quickly for him and, although he wasn't beaten very far, he finished slightly worse than midfield. He'll be seen to better advantage back over farther, and he certainly demonstrated his fighting spirit: at one point of the turn another horse attempted to bear down on him and knock him out the way, but Brief and Francesca were not for jostling, and the horse who barged into them found himself more bargee as barger. That was very good! It was a good card at Newbury - a very taking Street Cry colt called Cry Of Freedom made all the running for an emphatic win in the Usk Valley Stud Washington Singer Stakes, while a nice collection of horses, headed by the 2006 St Leger winner Sixties Icon, lined up for the Geoffrey Freer Stakes, but we had to head for the Channel Tunnel. We enjoyed a particular brahma in the car park at Newbury when the attendant volunteered the surprising news (make that the very surprising news) that I have a doppelganger called Joe Grimmer who lives in Malta and who is, apparently, quite a ladies' man, and this set us up nicely for the general brahmatmosphere of our break in Deauville.


We spent three nights in Deauville and each included an excellent dinner, as one would expect of a notoriously pleasant seaside resort. One dinner came with the bonus of an outstanding magician who entertained/baffled our table on Sunday evening, which was a lovely way to end a really good day at the races, where we'd seen two tremendous horses, Tamayuz and Natagora, running first and second in the Prix Jacques le Marois. Otherwise, perhaps the most interesting horse on view was this year's Stayers' Hurdle runner-up Kasbah Bliss, winner of a 3200m handicap on the card, and another point of interest was introducing ourselves to Damien Oliver (pictured), who had represented Australia in a jockeys' challenge the previous day and whom I took it upon myself to 'interview' for Winning Post. Our hotel was in the town, within walking distance of the racecourse, sales complex and seafront, and the only time we had to get the car out was to head down south of Lisieux to Haras de la Cauviniere, where my mare Minnie's Mystery and her Largesse colt foal are under the excellent care of Sylvain and Elisabeth Vidal. It was lovely to see them, and to visit again this beautiful property, on the Monday morning. All good things have to come to an end, and sadly that end came on Tuesday morning, when we dropped Joff at the station to catch a train to Paris (and thence a 'plane to Singapore and then Australia) before we headed back to Calais and home. It was actually nearly Joff, rather than the holiday, who came to an end as he nearly got himself run over, but fortunately he survived, only to find that the next Paris train wasn't for another three hours. Happily, Nancy Sexton, who had been covering the sale for the Racing Post, had arrived to find herself facing the same wait, so we left them to kill time together, which I'd guess would have worked out really well for both of them, because they are both great company and I presume would both have found the delay a pleasure.

So that's what I've been doing instead of blogging recently. I'll try to make chapters less infrequent in future.