Ready for tomorrow?

I've been very slack: I see it's nearly two weeks since I last put something up here. But in fact I haven't been slack: I've just been very busy. And, as often happens when one is busy, I'm now feeling very under the weather. I'm completely off my food and if I were a horse I wouldn't be racing for a while, but thankfully the horses seem much healthier than I am, so three of them (Ex Con at Newbury tomorrow, Ethics Girl at Wolverhampton on Saturday and Kadouchski on Sunday) will run in the next three days. I'm finding the prospect of it rather daunting, but they are all, I believe ready to run nice races, so we'll hope for the best.
Ex Con and Kadouchski are at the start of their preparations and Ethics Girl is pretty much at the end of hers, so one can't be confident of anything: three nice runs with the horses coming home undamaged would be nice, and a winner would be a real bonus. We've got three good jockeys too which helps: Paul Moloney (William being unavailable), Darryll Holland and William Kennedy. William, of course, is the regular jockey for both the jumpers and has won on them both, but Paul has schooled Ex Con recently (as this photograph shows, Paul on Ex Con in the red jacket, with William in the black) so he'll know how well his mount jumps and can go out with confidence of a nice ride, which is good. So that's the next three days planned out; I just hope that I'm up to it. I was, incidentally, taken aback to be asked today for the first time this year, "Are you all ready for Christmas, then?", which was a bizarre question to be asked on 26th November, so I contented myself with, "Not really, but I'm sure that I will be when the time comes". A more realistic answer would have been, "I'm not sure that I'm ready for tomorrow, never mind Christmas!".