Keeping fingers crossed

We're still in the same boat as we were a couple of days ago: weather still very nice, but still praying for Panto.  He's so lucky to be in the best hands possible at the NEH, where they are doing absolutely everything for him, plus letting Emma spend plenty of time with him, giving him moral support.  If he can pull through, he will; but that, sadly, is not guaranteed.  The next couple of days will be crucial.

Yesterday was such a lovely day at Sandown, a proper gloriously hot summer's day.  Sandown's a lovely track under any conditions, but yesterday it was particularly lovely - even more so than this photograph suggests.  Batgirl's run wasn't great, but the ground was probably a bit firmer than ideal, plus her best form is, of course, on flat tracks.  It was funny walking the track beforehand as I was thinking that maybe I'd become too accustomed to walking on wet tracks, which is all that we've had for months, because really the ground felt a lot quicker than good, good to firm in places, or whatever it was; and then I came back in to the enclosures and found that it was actually good to firm, firm in places, so I hadn't lost my judgement after all.  But on such a lovely smooth, well-maintained track with its uphill finish, one doesn't really need to worry too much about the dangers of firm ground.

We felt that it was worth giving Sandown a try as the 7-furlong races (or 1400m races, as we're being encouraged to think of them at Sandown, Epsom and Kempton) don't have much, if any, downhill in them, and we'd always felt that the sections of undulating tracks which had found out Batgirl (pictured her down at the start under Frankie Dettori - alongside the 33/1 winner, funnily enough, on whom Katia Scallan showed that time spent walking the track is rarely wasted) had been the downhill sections.  But yesterday the uphill bit proved a stumbling block too.  Still, no harm done; and when one spends a perfect summer's day at Sandown and there's no harm done, one can't be unhappy.

Sandown, as I have touched on above, is in the news along with its former United Racecourses sister tracks this week for being the first to include the distances in metres alongside those in furlongs.  There's no harm in this, other than the fact (which we've all been too polite to point out) that it's wrong: 400m and two furlongs are not, of course, the same thing, two furlongs being a bit farther than 400m.  One would, though, have to caution that changing to metric from imperial opens up a massive can of worms in that all the track records become redundant, so for the first few years each track record is meaningless, being the best time recorded since the change in distance of the race, rather than ever.  Having the Derby over 2400m, for instance, would be terribly sad, because part of the charm of the race is that it has been run over the same course and distance for well over two centuries.  To change its distance would be very sad - because I can't see that they'd keep the distance the same and run the race over an official trip of 2412.68m, or whatever it is.

In one sense it becomes rather nice that, after a change from imperial to metric, one then has permanent record holders and the horses who hold the records at the time of the change go down in history with their marks standing forever, but that's not quite the point.  So there's no harm in doing what's been done (as is shown in the previous paragraph's photograph) - but please let's not take it any farther.  There's too much history at stake - it's bad enough losing one of my very favourite tracks (Folkestone - which must surely have been profitable - but then there's probably more money to be made for the plc by using the land for something else, which is a thought to scare the sh*t out of us if we think through its potential extrapolation) without rendering as academic a few centuries of record-keeping as well.  Anyway, let's not worry about that, especially when the sun's shining (even if this morning, pictured, was a hazier start to another beautiful day than we've become used to).