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.