Sunny mornings (and one sunny afternoon)

Great excitement: we've got some runners coming up.  We haven't had a runner for at least a fortnight, which is remarkable for the second half of August, but there you go.  We would have had Ethics Girl running midweek at Carlisle, and Ollie at Salisbury today, but heavy rain put paid to those plans.  It makes you realise that we've been relatively lucky here, even though the weather isn't great.

We've started off with lovely weather most days this week (as is suggested by these first three photos, of Simayill and of Magic Ice and Zarosa enjoying the morning sun yesterday and of Ed Walker's string doing the same today) but we've generally had the best of the day by about 8am and there's often been rain later on.  I went off to the ATR studios yesterday after a beautiful dawn and, while I knew that it had clouded over by the time I'd left, I was stunned when I got home to find how much rain had fallen. 

But still, it's clearly been a lot worse farther north and farther west - witness Cartmel and Newton Abbot both being abandoned.  Chester tomorrow is Ethics Girl's destination and I'm hoping for a couple of dry days: it was good to soft at declaration time yesterday which is softer than she'd prefer, but I'm hoping that it will end up as good ground by tomorrow afternoon.  Chester's a track where it's hard to know what to expect at the best of times, but let's hope for a sound surface.  We'll see.

Anyway, what was nice about today was that, for the first time this week, the sunshine lasted through until mid-afternoon.  Predictably it clouded over eventually and it's quite a gloomy evening again now, but there was hardly a cloud in the sky right up until lunchtime, which really was very much appreciated.  Simayill had been the first horse whom I rode and you can see the view which I enjoyed from her (in the Ed Walker string photograph above).

Silken Thoughts was my second mount and again you can see the conditions in which she exercised (ie the view, above, from between her ears of Railway Land stretching out in front of her).  Magic Ice came next, and alongside this paragraph you can see the conditions on Long Hill as I followed Zarosa, Grand Liaison and Ruby (with Terri, Iva and Hugh respectively) up the Polytrack.  And it was still glorious last lot when I was on Many Levels.

Just to complete the morning's photo-essay, I might as well stick in this final photograph of the focus of the exercise last lot: stalls work.  Lined up here left to right we have the Smart Strike colt (name Atomic Number about to come through, I believe) alongside Ollie (who has raced so didn't need to be doing this, but he was there so there was no harm in it) and Roy (with Iva, Gary and Terri respectively).  I'd just walked through in front of them on Many Levels and he'd been standing as well in them as these horses, so all in all that was very satisfactory.  And the weather, of course, was the icing on the cake.

Oh yes, the runners.  As mentioned above, we have Ethics Girl at Chester tomorrow.  She's never run at Chester but it ought to be fine for her.  Ideally we'd have run at a mile and three quarters this time (ie at Carlisle a couple of days ago) rather than go straight from a mile and a half to two miles, but the weather and the dearth of options have rather forced this upon us.  Still, it shouldn't be the end of the world.

And we've got Franny Norton on board, who not only has won on her a couple of times (and I am sure remains this stable's winning-most jockey over the years) but is also the leading jockey at the track.  Franny's been enjoying a resurgence this season, largely thanks to the patronage of Mark Johnston, which is great, because he has long been an extremely good and admirable hoop.  Anyway, Ethics is fine as one might be able to deduce from the contented look on her little face in the previous chapter's photograph - and Silken Thoughts, who runs at Folkestone on Sunday, seems similarly content as one might guess from her little face here.

We'll have a new jockey on Sunday as Silvestre de Sousa rides Silken Thoughts, which certainly shouldn't be to her disadvantage as he's proved himself to be extremely good at winning races.  At times he can seem extremely good at winning races almost irrespective of whether or not his mount has any ability, such is his gift; so as we're putting him on a really nice horse (albeit one burdened with something like 9 stone 12lb, which is quite a steadier) let's hope that he can work his magic again.  Anyway, I'm pleased to have him booked.

And to complete a trio of pleasing jockey bookings, the excellent Jim Crowley has been engaged to ride Simayill when she has her first run for this stable at Wolverhampton on Monday.  It's hard to know what to expect.  I haven't worked her particularly hard so there's a bit of guesswork involved in trying to work out how she'll run (well, that goes without saying, but what I mean is that there's even more guesswork than usual) but she seems a really nice filly for whom I've developed a really soft spot.  I suppose the best thing to do would be to ask Gus how she'll run.  We can see him in the previous paragraph wandering around under the supervision of Silken Thoughts today, but here we can see him getting the post-work oil on Simayill's exercise yesterday straight from the horse's mouth.

A joyous occasion

There'll be some rugs going back on a few of these horses tonight, which, sadly, is a sign of autumn.  We've had a succession of three lovely starts to the day (as seven photographs - taken four on Monday, two yesterday and one today - show) but the past couple of days it's quickly clouded over, with today the morning ending with us being drenched last lot, which wasn't much fun.  Still, the rain was, I gather, even worse late Saturday afternoon - but I missed it, having achieved the rare feat of having gone to Ireland and found better weather than we were having back at home.

Mind you, Saturday was probably the only day of the summer about which one could say that; but while Newmarket was being lashed by torrential rain, thunder and lightning as the final meeting of the year on the July Course drew to a close, the Curragh was enjoying a rather pleasant evening.  Which was lovely because that afternoon had seen the wedding in St Bridget's Church, Suncroft, of two of the nicest people, as well as two of the best jockeys, I know: Wayne Smith and Lisa Jones.  And I consider myself honoured and very privileged to have been a guest.

You might remember Lisa riding in this country a decade or so ago, when, apprenticed to our neighbour Willie Musson, she was one of the best apprentices.  She became I think only the third girl (after Emma O'Gorman and Alex Greaves) to outride her claim in Britain, which feat she completed memorably courtesy of a double on the final day of Glorious Goodwood one year, and her best season saw her finish, I think, third in the apprentices' title.  She rode several winners for us and was worth her weight in gold, being a massive help as regards work-riding on any day that she wasn't race-riding.


Over and above which, Lisa was/is, as her industriousness suggests, just a thoroughly decent, helpful, kind and genuine person. She found things tougher once she'd lost her claim, went to ride in Macau (where she became one of the few female jockeys anywhere in the world to ride a Derby winner) and eventually became engaged, and now married, to Wayne Smith, who rides there for part of the year and in Dubai for the bulk of the UAE season.  And, as I say, I was delighted to be present at the joyful celebration of their wedding.

What was particularly nice was that I had never met Wayne.  From afar he'd seemed the perfect husband for Lisa, who really deserves a husband as nice as she is; and now that I've met him, I'm particularly happy to see them wed.  Two things in particular impressed Wayne's decency on me.  Firstly, when I arrived at the church, I was feeling rather lost, knowing very few people there.  Almost immediately Wayne, who obviously had 101 things on his mind as he was about to get married and would have had much better things to do, came straight over to me to put me at my ease, extending his hand and offering the greeting, "Hello John.  I'm Wayne.  We're so pleased that you were able to come".

That action showed sensitivity to the comfort of his guests that went way beyond the call of duty, and at the end of the night (or, at least, the end of the night as far as I was concerned) I saw a similar example of his kindness and thoughtfulness.  At around 11.30 I prepared to leave the reception.  I offered  my thanks and farewells to Lisa's family and then to Lisa, and asked the latter if she knew where Wayne was as I would have liked to thank him and bid him farewell too.

She didn't know where he was and, although I said not to bother him if he was tied up, she rang him to see where he was so that I could see him - and it transpired that he was standing out on the main road at the end of the drive, waiting to direct a taxi which had been ordered by one of the guests and whose driver couldn't find the place.  While to a certain extent the host is the guests' prisoner and is responsible for the guests' welfare, I'd say that at 11.30 pm on the night of one's own wedding one would be fully entitled to let the guests sort out their own transport arrangements.

The fact that Wayne even at that stage was more concerned about his guests' enjoyment of the evening than his own tells one all one needs to know.  So the nice thing is that, particularly now that I've met Wayne, as well as wishing them both a long and happy life together, I can say with confidence that that wish will come true.

This chapter has probably already been considerably longer than it should have been, but I'll just jot down a few other memorable moments from what can be regarded as my summer holiday, all 30 hours of it or however long it was.

Although I didn't know that many people at the wedding in advance, I know a lot more of them now, and two people whom I was particularly pleased to meet were two former champion jockeys (pictured here) one of whom can be regarded as one of the all-time greats: former champion jumps jockey Joe Byrne and 9-time champion Flat jockey Johnny Roe.  His legend goes before him, and I was delighted when I happened to find myself sitting next to him in the church.

The following day I saw a similarly legendary figure, equine rather than human.  With an hour or so spare before I needed to head back to the airport and with the weather being pleasant, I treated myself to a quick trip to the Irish National Stud, which is always a joy to visit.  In their paddocks I saw one top-class stallion (Invincible Spirit) and three good ones (Big Bad Bob, Jeremy and Lord Shanakill) while in another paddock I saw four retired horses: Beef Or Salmon, Moscow Flyer, Tudor Loom (who must be a great companion as he isn't there as a high-achiever) and, treat of treats, the mighty Vintage Crop (pictured).  Is it really coming up 19 years since I cheered him home, the first winner of the race trained in the northern hemisphere, in the Melbourne Cup from high in the stand at Flemington?  How time flies.

Another nice day - helped by Ortensia

I'm pleased to report that we've had another nice day, which is a bonus as again it's looked gloomy enough at York on the TV, even if they didn't cop any more of yesterday's torrential rain.  And thank God that they didn't, because the track, loose though it was, still didn't produce soft ground, and so lovely Ortensia was able to get up from a seemingly hopeless position to land a truly memorable victory.

I really enjoyed watching that - and then I really enjoyed hearing that she is likely to stay on and run in the Haydock Sprint (another big race which could be run on ground very hard to nail down with a conventional going description) so we'll have her gracing our Heath for a while yet.  It makes sense: one doesn't just fly one horse around the world, but waits until there are others with whom to share the plane, and there will be a load of European horses, bound for the  Melbourne Carnival, going into quarantine some time shortly after the Haydock Sprint.

So it seems clear that she'd be as well staying where she is, having another run (in another Group One race in which she'd clearly have a favourite's chance) and then joining them.  It's hard to see that she'd face any tougher a task at Haydock than she did today, although of course there are Kingsgate Native and Hoof It who were both absent today but who could both conceivably provide opposition tougher than the horses she faced today.  But, even so, she'll surely remain the horse whom they all have to beat.

Anyway, we're holding on to nice weather which is lovely, but we might be struggling to do so for much longer.  It's clearly darker in the mornings which is rather depressing.  Happily, though, after an overcast start to the day (even if there was enough sun around for there to be some shadows cast when we were following Luca's string home along the side of the Heath first lot, as you can see in the first picture) we had some lovely very warm sunshine again, which was really nice.  It was even summery enough to make the cool of a canter through the trees (and, yes, this photograph was taken in Newmarket, not Chantilly) a refreshing change - and how often can one say that?

From St Kilda to Cambridge

If I were as gifted as Rupert McCall, I could come up with a poem to get across how really special was our evening in the Portland Arms in Cambridge last night.  I'm not, though, so I'll just say that Paul Kelly's concert (or rather, I should say, Paul Kelly's and Dan Kelly's concert, because his nephew Dan did a great job as second guitarist and second singer) was at least as good as I was hoping it would be.

It seemed too good to be true that we could spend the best part of two hours in a crowd of less than 100 in a room the size of our tack room a dozen miles from our home but half a world from Paul's: someone who has been making music so very successfully for over 30 years really doesn't need to go so far to earn so little.  But that's exactly what happened.  And the fact that it happened explains why it was so very, very good: some people are just born to perform.  It was as good as any concert ever could be - and the icing on the cake is that my well-thumbed copy of Paul's book 'How to make gravy' is now signed by the writer.  That tome is now even higher on my list of most-treasured possessions than it was previously.

No such excitements today, of course, but a pleasant day nonetheless.  It has indeed, I am afraid, proved to be the case that the lovely weather of the weekend hasn't stretched out into the week, but we can live with that as it's still very pleasant - here at any rate, even if conditions at York today looked pretty grim.  One of the highlights of the summer has been saying G'day to Ortensia and her rider Leah Gavranich several mornings a week, so it was good to bid them good luck today for their assault on the Nunthorpe in this morning's sunshine (which was considerably nicer than the dull conditions in this photograph of them doing their pacework on the first sand two days ago) - and then considerably less good to see two consecutive races from York on the TV run in torrential rain, which won't suit that mare at all.  Ah well, let's see what tomorrow brings.

Today was nice here, though, as you can see from a shot in the yard (of Gus following our farrier Darren Rose, which is a pretty standard routine, Darren and his assistant Bernie finding Gus their constant companion at any time when there might be a slice of hoof to be handed out) and on the Heath, of Roy and Terri (and the tips of Many Levels' ears, if you look closely at the bottom of the shot) going along the Cambridge Road all-weather.

Oh yes, what I was going to say earlier was that, if the name Rupert McCall seemed to ring any bells, the reason is that one of his poems appeared in the Racing Post during Royal Ascot.  You might recall it, a lovely little tribute to Black Caviar.  I wish that I'd kept that paper (although it could conceivably still be somewhere on the floor of this room which can be loosely described as my office) but, even if it isn't, I'm sure that it should be possible to track the poem down, because it too was one worth re-reading.

How to make gravy

We're holding on to this bout of summer which arrived in the second half of last week, which is great.  In truth, it is probably going to be the case that our full ration was just the three really nice days over the weekend, but we should be grateful for small mercies.  At least we had those.  And it's still nice enough now: maybe low 20s today, with quite a lot of sun and blue sky in the morning.  Still, it would have been a really special day even if we hadn't had the lovely conditions, a few pictures of which will illustrate this chapter.

Why is today so special?  Well, for a start it's Juddmonte International day, that race finally erasing its ghost of Brigadier Gerard with the magnificent win of Frankel, who now surely has to be regarded as the best horse we have ever seen (or ever will see) bar none.  He'll surely go for the Arc now, won't he?  It is Europe's biggest weight-for-age race and is his obvious target, with the only reason for not running in it being a fear of defeat.  But after today's magnficent win over a distance only 300m short of that of the Arc (and with Frankel hitting the line still full of running) nobody could seriously feel that Frankel wouldn't be as close to a certainty in it as you could ever get.  Not running him in it would be like not running Arkle in the Gold Cup, or not running Kingston Town in the Cox Plate.

Second thrill of the day came courtesy of Aisling and Gemma, who have treated me to a trip to Celik's Mensroom, which is surely the most metrosexual barber's shop in East Anglia, not to mention the most Turkish barber's shop in Newmarket.  I usually cut my own hair, so to have one of Celik's minions perform the task was a rare pleasure.  I am, by coincidence, reading Les Carlyon's book about Gallipoli, which either is or isn't ideal timing - and as Celik's man advanced with a pristine raser blade, I made sure to remind myself that that was all a long time ago.  And, happily, all was well which ended well.

And now we have the third thrill of the day to look foward to: the great Paul Kelly is playing in the Portland Arms in Cambridge this evening.  I am anticipating a really good show.  I have seen him once previously (in the Spiegel Tent in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh in 1999) and that was really good, and I am daring to hope that, great though that show was, I will enjoy this one even more.  I hope that I shall be as inspired as was the Brisbane poet Rupert McCall, who came up with this great poem after going to a Paul Kelly concert in The Gig in Brisbane sometime towards the end of the last century.

It's a lovely poem which gives you an example of the talent of Rupert McCall, who used to knock up such verses in double quick time to fill his slot on the radio.  (He describes it as having been "whipped up as a dedication to a great night and a great Australian for radio the next morning).  It takes true genius to do that - but the poem also gives a clue to just how special Paul Kelly is, to have inspired someone to write thus.  And if, by the way, you find some of the metaphors rather strange, they are borrowed from phrases from Paul Kelly's songs.

THE NIGHT OF THE KELLY  FIRE
If you made it to The Gig last night
I reckon you would know
That as far as Aussie music legend poet gurus go

The man who held the stage

With his harmonica and axe

With a voice that told its story

Like a train on haunted tracks

Like a man whose made some gravy

Like a love song to her door

Like a dog who's had his day

But like a dog who'll bark some more

Is a man who'll be remembered

Through the analog of time

Not for complicated feelings

But for passions sung in rhyme

Not for million dollar contracts

But for stories told in tune

Not for technotronic earaches

But for howlin' at the moon

Dancing like The Don

The music filters through my head

Fills me with the spirit

Of his boldest brother, Ned

No, we won't forget Paul Kelly

When the last has been recited

I won't forget Paul Kelly

Nor the fire he ignited

At the end of a perfect day

I had a look at the figures for yesterday and these confirm that it was pretty much the perfect day: daytime high of 31, night-time low of 21.  It might have got a bit cooler than that before dawn this morning, but again we've had another perfect day.  It started divinely: we get a good distant view from this flat of the top half of Warren Hill, but at a crystal-clear dawn this morning the hill was semi-covered by a layer of ground-level mist. 

This then covered the hill completely before within minutes starting to disappear altogether as the sun rose into the clear blue sky.  Any day other than Sunday and I'd have seen the mist at close quarters, so it seemed almost a shame not to ride over to see it - but instead I settled for observing it out of the dining room window and having a more leisurely start to the day, taking the only horse which I rode today out three hours later (pictured below).  And it's been a lovely day throughout: some cloud appearing during the day but dispersing again before dusk, which was almost as special as the dawn had been, as you can see in the final two shots.

Mind you, I am aware that such conditions are not ubiquitous in the British Isles at present: it's not just that Tramore was off on Friday and, although racing there today, doing so on a heavy track and in the rain; I note that the ground at Warwick, where they are racing on Tuesday, is currently good to soft, soft in places.  Warwick's only 100 miles from here, a bit less as the crow would fly, and I regard it as one of our local tracks, but as I found out when we went to Chepstow the other day, one doesn't have to head too far westwards to find that this spell of perfect weather is far from nationwide.

The good thing is that the Jockey Club clearly saw this lovely weather coming.  The past couple of years they've left odd bits of the Heath for hay, including the middle of Bury Hill, one of our regular haunts.  The grass there has been waiting and waiting and waiting to be cut, but of course it's not been easy to find the necessary dry week for the grass to be cut, dried and allowed to turn into hay, and then baled.  There were a few consecutive fine days three weeks ago or so, but that was clearly too uncertain a window.  So we've got to the third week of August with the hay still unmade, which is remarkable.

Anyway, they clearly knew what was coming because the grass was finally cut on Wednesday afternoon and is now drying very nicely (as you can see in the third picture - look beyond the head of Ollie, the horse to the right of my mount Silken Thoughts, and there it is).  So that's worked well.  I've found out, of course that this perfect weather won't last beyond today, but that's no huge surprise as days like the past two really are rare treasures; but, even so, it's still forecast to be low to mid 20s and dry for the next few days, so that's certainly much better than nearly all the days we've had so far this year, so we'll keep enjoying the conditions.

Perfect!

Well, today has been perfection.  Everything one would want from a day.  Almost unbroken sunshine with just a few white clouds in the sky on and off; very warm but not unpleasantly hot (although I think that it might seem very hot during the coming night) and basically it's the type of day that we spend eleven and a half months of the year dreaming about.

So, now that we have at last got perfect weather, let's hope that it lasts a while.  Of course, the problem I have for this blog is that, while the weather has been great, it's not much of a story - and yet it's been the story of the day.  And I've taken some lovely good-weather photographs and I'd like to put them up - but how to get enough text to pad things out around them?

Well, I might just run through the day.  It's been an unremarkable Saturday.  We've 19 horses here, of which 14 were ridden today.  At any time, you'll probably find a handful having a day or two off, either for having just run (Zarosa) or having had some treatment from Carol the back-lady, or just generally having a break, either short or long for some reason or another.  Of the 14 who were ridden, one walked, nine cantered and four galloped (two of them individually and two of them - Roy and Many Levels - as a pair).  And all went well.

And the one thing which they all had in common was that they all, like the people, were able to revel in the sunshine, as one can see from this photograph of the Smart Strike colt and Gus each enjoying a brahma in his own particular way.  The unlikely bonus which some of the horses had to top off a perfect summer's day was a good feed of grass.  This ought not to be the case as perfect weather isn't great for grass-growing, but of course this is perfect weather at the end of months and months of rain and rain and rain.

The upshot of all that summer rain is that the field which is shut off for the summer hasn't just grown a covering of grass: it's grown a fair dinkum forest of grass.  Ordinarily this field would be shut until we resume using it late in the autumn, but as the grass is so plentiful and so lush in it, it seemed sensible to use the field sparingly over the next week or two, because it would be sad to see this grass wither and die uneaten.  Anyway, the afternoon shift of field horses (ie the ones who are doing plenty of work) had a real treat, as you can see with Ethics Girl,  Batgirl and co happily stuffing their faces.

So that was the day that was.  I hardly dare look at the forecast for fear of discovering that this perfect weather is only set to last another 24 hours, which on past form might well be the case.  However, it could last longer - we're certainly due some settled high pressure - so let's hope that it will.  Tomorrow I am sure will be very similar, and let's hope that it continues through the week.  It won't be great for running horses other than ones which like fast ground, but that's a small price to pay - and the other horses have had more than their share of good ground or softer over the 'summer' so far.  And, of course, as the trip to the heavy track at Chepstow on Thursday emphasised, East Anglian weather isn't necessarily spread all over the British Isles - witness Tramore being off through water-logging yesterday.

We won't have any runners this coming week - Batgirl, for instance, was one of two entries at Yarmouth on Tuesday, but it's an easy decision not to run her when the ground is fast - but there's no harm in that in a week of very hot and dry weather.  She, incidentally, is in the foreground in the penultimate photograph of the chapter, ridden by Hannah, who is also in the chapter's final shot, which shows Roy walking perkily back from Racecourse Side from his gallop on the Cambridge Road all-weather.  As you can see from this shot and the other ones, today's conditions really are very good for both man and beast.

Eastern sunshine

Summer's doing very nicely now, thank you - or it is on this side of the country, at least.  Yesterday was a lovely day (in East Anglia) and today's been even nicer.  It's good that this evening is particularly lovely as tonight is Newmarket's best-attended raceday of the year (a capacity crowd of 22,000 is packing the July Course, primarily because Jessie J is singing - but also, one might hope, because the card includes a maiden race which, by virtue of having thrown up Frankel, Nathaniel and Colour Vision two years ago, might be viewed as a race to keep an eye on - and I note that Godolphin are trying to make sure that the omens are working in their favour because they have four runners in it - or maybe Sheikh Mohammed just wants to treat his entire family to an hour of listening to Jessie J, and can't get enough tickets any other way).

Anyway, yesterday was a lovely morning here, as you can guess from the first photograph of some of James Fanshawe's second lot on the side of the Heath (with the redoutable Dandino being at the front of it) and also from a snap of some more of his farther down the line, which picture is pleasing because Natalia Gemelova is the first rider in it, and she deserves to be mentioned in dispatches for her winner last week, which I think was her first since she moved down to Newmarket from Malton to work for James at the backend of last year.  It was lovely in the yard (as you can tell from the photograph of Gus and Magic Ice engaging in a bit of debate in the pens about who has the right to first drink from the water-bucket) and it was very nice on the first part of the journey to Chepstow.

But it might have been a different country when we got down to Wales.  We think that we've had indifferent weather here - but they must still be having the really unsettled stuff down there.  The track was called soft but heavy would have been a more accurate description, and even more startling was the jumps track (on which we can see Gus gambolling in the first racecourse picture - the second is of him on the Flat track at the entrance to the back straight, which was just as wet as everywhere else).  When one visits mixed racecourses in the summer, one expects to see (other than on tracks which stage summer jumping, of course) the Flat track nice and green courtesy of its irrigation, but the jumps track somewhere between light brown and yellow.

Well, Chepstow's jumps track is bright green, covered in lush grass and I'd say that the going on it would be good as far as jumps racing is concerned (and I mean proper good, not what is passed of as good during the summer jumping campaign) or soft as far as Flat racing is concerned.  And it was much less warm than here - which was just as well because when I got down there I realised that I hadn't brought a shirt with me, but as it was anorak weather (I did have an anorak, simply because of the 'never leave home without one' school of thought as regards anoraks and trips to the races) I simply put my anorak over my T-shirt and kept it zipped up all evening, which was quite the way to dress for the conditions anyway.

The good thing was that Zarosa ran very well.  She's so tough: three races over a total of six miles in 15 days, and she ran well to be placed in every one of them, and enjoyed doing so.  In fact, it worked out pretty much as I'd suspected: she did everything right, but she did just find the hilly two and a quarter miles on heavy ground too much of a marathon and she was outstayed by a couple of the more seasoned runners.  She looked the possible winner three furlongs from home, but the only other conceivable winner had got her measure by the two-furlong pole; and then she got really tired in the final furlong, and a seven-year-old jumper plodded on and caught her on the line for second.  The winner, incidentally, is another three-year-old, but he's a much more seasoned and mature one than she is, having had loads of racing, including over hurdles.

Just a couple of observations from the night.  I have had a couple of reasons to wonder whether I'm losing my marbles.  The Racing Post 'Travellers' Check' tells us that the Newmarket-trained horses had travelled 162 miles to get to Chepstow, but I'd love to know which route the paper recommends: I've found it to be just about dead on 200 whether one choses to go via London using the M25 and M4 or via Birmingham using the A14, M6, M42 and M5.  Furthermore, I read in today's paper that she pulled too hard, which she didn't: she'd done so at Yarmouth, but she only over-raced for about 100 yards yesterday, because once Jimmy Quinn got her dropped in behind  the leader after half a furlong, she raced the most professionally and smoothly I've ever seen her.

But most of all part of the fall-out from yesterday is that I've realised that I owe the Feilden family and apology: I mentioned a couple of chapters ago that the late Peter Feilden's grandson Ross Birkett had become one of our best amateur riders, but I didn't say that the same applies to Ross' younger sister Shelley: I watched on TV her riding a winner at Beverley for Alastair Lidderdale and was taken aback by how good she is.  She's still not very old and hasn't been doing it that long, so it's remarkable that she's already as polished as she is.  I best not say this too loudly, but she's probably going to end up even better than her mum, a former champion lady Flat amateur, was.  And that's high praise.  (And the picture of Camelot, fresh from his gallop at Leopardstown yesterday and seemingly well on course for the St Leger, in a bucket in the feed room this morning has no connection to any of that.  I just like it).