First day of spring!

You'd think that today was the first day of spring! It's great. Autumn was really here with cold winds and grey skies, but on Wednesday it warmed up - but with the rising temperatures came rain, and it pretty much rained all day. But the past two days have been great: the skies have cleared but the temperature hasn't (yet) dropped, and today really was just like a perfect spring day.
It was just so nice, and I think the blue of the sky above Henry Cecil's flag (flying over Warren Place this week in recognition of Twice Over's win in last Saturday's Champion Stakes) sums it up well. Mind you, Mark Tompkins seemed to think that I'd over-reacted to the idyllic conditions by riding out in a T-shirt and shorts later in the morning, so got his step-daughter Clare to take a photograph which I think will probably be appearing on his excellent website www.raceworld.co.uk.
By the way, I'd meant to alert anyone who might be interested to that site a couple of weeks ago, because Clare took the most lovely photographs on Side Hill (seen here mid-morning today, under a clear blue sky and through the ears of Ethics Girl) one golden morning (9th October, I think it was). One of these currently adorns the home-page, and there are always plenty of great shots in the 'Daily News' section onto which one can click. There are even some lovely films sometimes, including the one reached by this link http://www.raceworld.co.uk/09.10.08Sunrise.wmv of that ghostly Side Hill sunrise. It's safe to assume that anyone reading this would also get pleasure from perusing Mark's site, and I can thoroughly recommend it.

But, although we're on the eve of a rite of spring down under (the Cox Plate), today here is actually an autumn landmark for us, because it's the first meeting of the autumn at our local track Fakenham. (Well, Huntingdon is actually closer, but as it's west of here and on the A1 and the A14, it's so accessible that in reality it's everybody's track, whereas Fakenham is peculiarly and specially East Anglian.
So Fakenham's first meeting of the autumn is always a landmark for people in this area who enjoy National Hunt racing. We might have been going because I entered Christy Ring (seen here crossing the Fordham Road under Con Ryan a couple of weeks ago, when the leaves on the lime trees in the grounds of the Catholic school were only just beginning to turn) in the bumper which Take Me There won a couple of years ago, but he's ended up not running, so I'll just have to make sure I catch a few races on ATR.


One would often find a few jumps jockeys calling in to Newmarket en route to Fakenham, so it was no surprise to find the town awash with jumps hoops this morning - although curiously I see that none is actually engaged at Fakenham. The first whom I saw was Tony McCoy, whom Aisling and I passed first lot as we were riding off the Heath at around 7.20. He was riding out for Chris Wall, trotting around the Severals on a bay horse, which wasn't the most obvious sight you'd expect to see.
My guess would be that there is a horse trained by Chris which McCoy's patron J. P. McManus is contemplating buying, and Tony was having a ride on him to find out what he felt like. An hour or so later we saw two more jumps hoops, because Hugh and I met William Kennedy up at the Links so that William could put the finishing touches to Ex Con in advance of his intended hurdles debut eight days hence.
Before we met him, William had been schooling for James Fanshawe, but the real stroke of luck was that we found Paul Moloney up there too, having just schooled a couple of horses for Barney Curley. Happily Paul was kind enough to lend a hand so that we had two jumps riders so that Ex Con could jump in company, so he ended up having a ride on him too with William on Cape Roberto after William had jumped Ex Con on his own.
Hence this series of photographs of the two horses and riders (William in the black jacket, Paul in the red) which I think are rather nice. There were a couple of other nice touches. One was that I bumped into another (ex) jumps hoop, because Mick O'Shea, a Lincolnshire-based jumps hoop of the '70s who subsequently became one of Luca's head lads and who is now a security guard at Dalham Hall Stud, appeared to take his border terriers for a walk.
While another was that the session precipitated a meeting between Barney Curley and William: when Barney found that William was there, he took the opportunity to introduce himself, never previously having met him but knowing his parents well and also having used William's eldest brother Vivian
(who shared his name with their father, the former T. P. Burns apprentice and jockey) before his tragic and fatal fall at Huntingdon on August Bank Holiday 1988. Being a friend of the family, Barney was clearly pleased finally to meet William, and the meeting was a pleasure to see because William was clearly pleased also to meet such a well-respected identity. (And how can one possibly sum up the multi-facetted Barney Curley legend in just one word?)