Significant days. And a very sad one

There seems to be a lot of birthdays just now, many of them 'significant' ones. One which definitely fell into this category was Tony Morris' 65th, which fell on Monday, the day after he had hosted a party to mark the occasion. We were lucky enough to be invited to the party, and a very jolly occasion it, unsurprisingly, proved to be. There was already jollity aplenty even before the party started, courtesy of an article by Laura Thompson in that day's Racing Post: her articles are always entertaining. Just in case anyone isn't familiar with Laura's work, her Racing Post offerings generally centre on the magic of racing, and on the fact that for so many people the sport has, supposedly, to be debased in order to become appealing. I hope that she won't mind my quoting from her most recent article, because I do so to illustrate just how beautifully she writes:

"The novelist Nancy Mitford once said that the key to success, as a writer, was to produce books for people who don't read. This principle has certainly been applied to horseracing, whose dearest wish seems to be to stage meetings for people who have no interest in either horses or racing.

"Are you a contender for the Champagne Quaffer of the Year Award? Come racing! Do you yearn to wear a pair of feathery pink antlers on your head? Come racing! Are you a fan of horses galloping to the sound of Rossini, or of out-of-work actors walking around on stilts, or of Rick Astley concerts? Come racing!

"If, however, you are a fan of watching thoroughbred horses create a spectacle of unparalleled romance and beauty ... well, come racing if you must, but please do not make a nuisance of yourselves by poking your binoculars in the eye of somebody trying to drink a pint of Pinot Grigio.

"... There are meetings, like the Shergar Cup, that are marketed towards people who have no interest in racing: the 'new audience', who must be bribed to attend. Then there are the meetings, like the poor old King George, for the reviled purists: the people who dream at night of Sea The Stars winning the St Leger.

"Ah, the Triple Crown ... At one point (yesterday, Shergar Cup day) I walked through the grandstand and saw a picture of its last winner, gleaming and arrogant, above the Nijinsky Bar.

"He seemed to be looking down upon a different world."

Great stuff, eh? I know that we are currently supposedly on the point of benefitting from the (very expensive, I fear) assistance of the marketing types whose wisdom has been filling the Racing Post over the past couple of days, but I'd have thought that we've got as much chance of increasing racing's popularity by making Laura's words compulsory reading as we have by any "premierisation", or whatever it is that our saviours are going to recommend.
If anyone could read Laura's prose and not feel that maybe, just maybe, there might be something rather special about this sport, then I don't think there'd be much hope for them. Or us. Anyway, Laura was one of our fellow-guests chez Tony, as this picture of three Racing Post writers (one full-time, two occasional) shows.

I can't claim to have been the life and soul of the party, I'm afraid. The problem was that the party took place in the afternoon, and for some reason I can't cope with drinking in the afternoon. I had two glasses of wine with my plate of roast hog, and that finished me off. I felt as if I was going to faint, so I sat down quietly with a mug of water.
Unfortunately I still felt very strange, so I took myself off to a quiet corner of Tony's house and had a sleep for an hour. The most worrying aspect of this was that it transpired that nobody noticed my absence, apart from Larry Stratton (pictured) who afterwards said that he just assumed that I'd gone home!

One person whose absence everyone noted was Geir Stabell, publisher of Globeform, the racing information service which is currently taking a sabbatical as a protest (I think) against the BHA's leniency in the Nicky Henderson doping case. Anyway, Geir had declined the invitation because he was one of the Newmarket residents who was spending the weekend in Norway, a group which also included the vet Simon Waterhouse. One of the attractions of Norway last weekend, apparently, was the 'Norseman' competition, which is a Norwegian version of 'Iron Man'. I think that's a great thought: Simon and Geir swimming along side by side through a fjord, each wearing a small Viking helmet, complete with small horns, on his head. Simon, incidentally, and his partner Gemma (ie one of the Angels) are another two of the people who have significant birthdays coming up. For anyone struggling to think of a suitable 'significant birthday' present for this most outward-bound of couples, I'd be bold enough to suggest that a visit to Daniel Fowler-Prime's horse-boarding academy in Middlesex, as memorably featured in a recent Racing Post, might make an appreciated gift. So don't be surprised if you see a horse galloping by, ridden by Gemma, with Simon being towed along behind on his skate-board. Whatever next?!

Emma, too, has a significant birthday on the horizon. To start the process of marking this, we drove up to Colton Farm near Norwich today, where Chris Murray and Nicky Howarth preside over a broodmare band which includes Emma's mare Desiree, plus Desiree's Sulamani yearling Oscar Bernadotte (pictured, along with his friend, who is a yearling by Ivan Denisovitch).
I recall us making a similar trip up there 52 weeks ago when we had Joff with us. Oscar was only a foal then, but he's a strapping yearling now, and he looks very nice indeed. I think that Emma can be very proud that the first horse she has bred seems to be turning out so well, although obviously the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
Desiree, currently in foal to Bertolini, also looked great, and kindly gave us a sitting demonstration when she noticed that I had my camera in my hand. Motherhood seems to suit her, but then the life of a broodmare is a particularly good one, and it would be a strange horse indeed who could live as a broodmare on a nice stud without finding the world a very relaxing place to be.

On which subject, I can't end this chapter without referring to the tragedy which has struck Newmarket this week: the death of Pip Payne. The fact that Pip left this world by his own volition does nothing to lessen the extent of the tragedy; in fact, it arguably worsens it, because it is awful to think that Pip - as decent, well-liked and respected a man as you'd ever find - was apparently so unhappy that he felt that the world had nothing left to offer him, and also because of the intensity of grief which his family must now be enduring as a consequence. It is impossible to understand why Pip should have chosen the course which he did, but then the human brain is a strange thing, and who knows what goes on inside another man's head? The upshot, for whatever reason, is that we have needlessly lost a very good man, and the world is much the poorer for his departure. Perhaps he lost sight of the fact, but he was a man who had earned a huge amount of good will during his lifetime; that fact alone is worth re-stating, as is the fact that the thoughts and prayers of an entire community are now with his soul and with his family. May he rest in peace and may they find comfort.