The deluge continues

Now this is truly awful.  We've had probably the wettest week I can recall here.  I'm going to fool you now by putting up a couple of photographs which imply otherwise, but in reality all that they do is to say that for a couple of days we have had the stereotypical April dose of sunshine and (very heavy) showers, but in reality the sunshine only appeared very briefly, and only on a couple of days.  Other than that it has just rained pretty much all the time.  The first picture I took while we were walking down Warren Hill mid-morning.

Idyllic conditions - except by the time that I'd got home and put the horse away, it was pelting down with rain again, with no blue visible in the sky.  Unbelievable.  The second picture was taken in the kitchen at around 6.00 yesterday morning, with the sunshine pouring in through the window.  The only trouble was that by 7.00 the sky was a solid covering of dark grey skies, and we went on to have possibly the wettest day so far, with some really ominous thunder accompanying the heaviest of the showers.  Where does that leave us, then?  I've lost count of the number of meetings abandoned this week, but Sandown does go ahead so we'll be heading off down there.

Silken Thoughts (pictured at feedtime yesterday evening in a view more typical of the week as a whole, surveying with distaste the scene outside her box, with the bottom of the yard almost entirely underwater, and torrents more falling all the time) has to be a very major doubt to handle the conditions.  But we'll run her and see - after all, she did win at Lingfield last September after a major morning deluge which had turned a good track into bog, but the very wet conditions that day would have been nothing compared to the gluepot on which she will be asked to gallop today.

And she did run very badly on heavy ground at Chepstow last May.  So we'll just have to see what happens.  But it's just nice to be heading off to one of the best racedays of the year.  We initially looked like having the icing on the cake (The Champ and The Greatest, A P McCoy, our race being the Flat v. Jumps hoops challenge, riders allotted by ballot) but it then transpired, in the type of cock-up one comes to expect, that he wasn't even going to be at Sandown (despite being in theory needed there to collect his latest jumps championship award at this end-of-season jamboree) as he'll inevitably be at Punchestown to ride in a Grade One for his retaining owner J P McManus.  Still, we've ended up with Aidan Coleman, who is a very good hoop in his own right.  If she's good enough to win with one, she'll be good enough to win with the other.  We'll see.