Small earthquake in China - no casualties

'Small earthquake in China - no casualties' is apocryphally the most inane headline The Times has ever printed. Now I am pleased to announce that the Racing Post has put forward its challenger for the title: 'Paddy Power rep addressed SP staff at airport'. This, you might have noticed, was the FRONT-PAGE headline (over the front-page story, naturally) last Wednesday. Inside we got a clue as to why this bizarre state of affairs had come about: the previous day had seen not only the Godolphin/Racing Post Stud & Stable Staff Awards Lunch, but also the Coral/Racing Post Naps Table Awards Lunch, which between them probably left nobody at all in the Racing Post office. So a story which David Ashforth had written in, no doubt, the expectation of it being buried next to a few of Howard Wright's musings on page 17 found itself hogging the front page under this splendid headline. At least the small earthquake in China was of interest to the people in China; whether anyone in Luton airport was similarly exercised by this briefing is less certain!

But I mustn't allow myself to be too side-tracked, because I have different, but equally inconsequential, matters upon which to touch. Closest to home we had Ex Con's very pleasing run at Chepstow on Saturday. He'd disappointed all concerned (myself very much included) with his extremely tame (lack of) effort first time, but happily he took a huge step in the right direction on Saturday, running very competitively to finish fourth. All in all that made for a lovely, if long, day. It was easily the most pleasant day of the year as regards the weather, a day on which it was easy to feel that spring has arrived - even if the fact that there was still a solid pile of snow outside the Chepstow stable yard as the sun went down served as a reminder that winter can't be said to have disappeared over the horizon quite yet. The trip was also memorable for it being the occasion when we bade farewell to Jill Dawson, as she headed off to her new home in the south west. It's always sad to say 'Au revoir' to a nice horse, but when the horse is going off to lead what promises to be a worthwhile, active and happy life elsewhere, there are more positives than negatives to the occasion.

If I hadn't been at Chepstow I would have paid more attention to the racing elsewhere, and no doubt I'd have found myself tele-watching one of the nicest results of the year: Matsunosuke and Luke Morris winning the Listed race at Lingfield for Clan Coogan. If you don't know why this pleased me so much, the answer is in the previous chapter: suffice to say that any victory for Scobie Coogan's small stable is guaranteed to bring a smile to my face. Another similarly pleasing victory was that of lovely Lough Derg at Fontwell Park yesterday, which I watched on television. One could watch racing for many years without glimpsing a braver horse, so it was once again a real joy to cheer him home yesterday as he enjoyed what was, by his usual standards, a relatively comfortable victory (ie it was in the bag thirty yards from home). I'm a big fan of the Pipe stable, so it's going to be particularly exciting seeing it approach Cheltenham with a team headed by the likes of Lough Derg, Madison Du Berlais, Osana and Ashkazar - and I presume that Our Vic will be aiming for a second Ryanair Chase success, although I haven't noticed him doing much this season so I don't really know if that's likely to happen. If David Pipe, though, were to train the winners of both the Gold Cup and the Champion Hurdle, it wouldn't be the most surprising double of the year. And it would be a very nice one too. Incidentally, on which subject, if you were to look at David's website www.davidpipe.com, which is always an interesting one, and you were to go onto the 'Current News' page and scroll down, you would see a lovely photograph of Madison Du Berlais at Kempton taken by our friend Zoe Vicarage, which is really nice.

Sadder news from the weekend was the death at Kempton of lovely Endless Power, the little horse who scored such a brave win last autumn over the National fences at Aintree. One never likes to see any stable lose a lovely horse, but Jim Goldie's stable is one which one would particularly not like to see being hit by tragedy, so that was really, really sad.

Not having blogged for a while, I've had all sorts of ideas running round in my head of things I must mention. Most of them seem to have run elsewhere now that I have started to type, so I must make sure the next time I blog that I don't forget the phrase "a collection of sentences" - if you're baffled, all will become clear in the fullness of time! In the meantime, I must give Tony McCoy a mention in dispatches; not for riding his 3,000th winner again (he seemed to reach that milestone at Doncaster, and then again - on ground which surely under normal circumstances would have been deemed unraceable - at Plumpton three weeks later) which is, naturally, a tremendous thing to have done, but for being the first person ever to come up with a good answer to the invitation in the Racing Post Sunday questionnaire, "Tell us one thing about you which only you know". Most people, of course, answer as if the invitation had been "Tell us one thing about you which not many people know", but AP came up with a real cracker. Bear in mind that he is famous for his supposed dourness, so how about this response: "I'm very funny"? Superb! By producing that reply, he has proved that the reply is definitely true.