Loose ends

The muse has been too absent from my shoulder recently so I'll try to put that right. Sadly rain hasn't been absent, although we did have a couple of lovely days over the weekend, as these photographs show: firstly we have Grey Panel, now happily ridden away, as this photograph of our fat little young grey friend shows, and then Ben, now at last able to canter like a normal horse,
as he demonstrates here under Adam, leading Douchkette and Hannah up the newly-resurfaced Long Hill polytrack on Saturday morning. All we've got to do is get him galloping like a normal horse, and the past four years' of waiting will have been worthwhile! So things have been fairly straightforward in the stable, and fairly pleasant too while it hasn't been raining - which sadly is far from all the time.

Outside of our own little corner of the world, there have been a few things worthy of comment. Firstly, it would be wrong to let the death of Bill Wightman pass without saying how sad it was to read of his passing. (Although I'd have to qualify that by saying the sadness was offset by the knowledge that he'd had a great life and lived it until the age of 95, which is an age which was probably beyond his wildest dreams for most of the three or four years which he spent in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the war - I'd say that for much of that time he'd have settled for knowing that he'd still be alive the following week). But it is just that, with his death, the racing world has lost another fine man, and I say that without ever having met him. He was just my idea of the ideal trainer: a true horseman whose integrity was beyond reproach, who just fiddled away with a small string for years and years and years, regulary coming up with a decent horse both Flat and jumping. The best horses I remember him training were the good miler Air Trooper and the Chester Cup winner Charlotte's Choice, although I'm sure that there will be other horses who stick more clearly in other readers minds. And I particularly admire the title of his memoirs, 'Months of misery, moments of bliss', which is about as good a summation of a working trainer's life as you could get. It was always nice to see his colours carried in recent years by the honest Mick Channon-trained sprint handicapper Digital. You'd like to think that Salisbury would name a race in his honour - and that they wouldn't need his friends and relatives to pay them to do so, which is what generally happens nowadays even for people whose contribution to racing has been considerable. One would have thought that his war record alone would merit recognition in this way, never mind his long service as a trainer. We shall see.

Fast-forwarding quite a long way, Our Vic must just about have raised himself to latter-day equine hero status after his oh-so-brave victory at Warwick yesterday. He's a wonderful horse. I don't think you'd ever see a braver horse, nor a horse ridden better than Timmy Murphy rode him yesterday. And one has to take one's hat off to David Pipe too, because to have him still running as well as he did yesterday at the age of eleven (nearly twelve) really would have been easier said than done.


Going a little farther back, I ought to rectify a few of the omissions of November, because I made a few journeys which were worthy of comment. Emma and I had three very enjoyable trips to London within a fortnight, one of which was to see the excellent play 'War Horse' (which is illustrated here in one extremely poor photograph, which I probably ought not to have taken - although I didn't use a flash so it wouldn't have been an interruption to anyone). Our interest in this production had been piqued by Brough Scott's excellent talk on 'Warrior's War' in the summer which had really brought it home to us that horses had it at least as bad as humans in the Great War. Which really is saying something. Anyway, 'War Horse' is a great play, the highlight of which is the superb depictions of the horses, which are spot-on in movement, mannerisms and expressions. It was a lovely trip.


Another lovely trip was to the Cartier Awards, which was a first for both of us. It was a real privilege to attend, and we were lucky enough to find ourselves on a table which had the owner of one winner (M. Wertheimer, owner of Goldikova) and the trainers of two winners (Freddie Head, trainer of Goldikova, and his sister Criquette Head-Maarek, trainer of Special Duty). Some years I am sure that there must be some doubt as to which horse would be announced Cartier Horse of the Year, but this year there was only going to be one winner: Sea The Stars.
It's a shame that he's been retired, but while he was racing he was magnificent and it was right that his team should be up there collecting the prize (pictured). And it was good also that John Oxx should collect the special award (also pictured), because his faultless handling of Sea The Stars this year has merely been the icing on his career's cake. His speech was as amusing and disarmingly modest as you'd expect, making it all the more right that he had been thus honoured.

And another very enjoyable trip which I took during November was when I went up to Kerry Oldfield's farm in Norfolk to drop off Anis Etoile and Rhythm Stick for a spell.
It was a lovely day, as you can see here in this picture (with Anis in the foreground) of the two horses surely feeling that they'd just landed in paradise. Obviously for most of the time since then the weather has been considerably less idyllic, but they'll still be well catered for with grass. Aren't they lucky? I was lucky too, because it was such a nice day to drive through the beautiful Norfolk countryside, the trip made all the more special by the fact that I had two deer sightings that day: a couple in a field by a road near here, and then two more who scampered across the main road in front of me once I was north of Swaffham. Sadly I wasn't quick enough on the draw with my camera on that occasion - nearly, but not quite!