Hurricane Nadine

The one consolation about the Open Day being dogged by deteriorating weather was that it could have been worse: it could have taken place the following day.  Admittedly Monday (yesterday) wasn't quite as cold as it got on Sunday afternoon when the wind got up, the rain came and the temperature plummeted, but it was even wetter.  Mind you, I was lucky enough yesterday as I didn't get too wet.  I only rode out two lots and it hadn't started raining here at that time; and, although it had started to rain before I left, that meant that I drove through some torrential stuff on the way to Kempton, but found that the rain had moved on from there (Newmarket-wards) by the time I arrived, and I was able to enjoy a suprisingly clement evening there.

The reason for the trip to Kempton was to run Simayill, which event turned out to be rather a damp squib.  It was rather the same as watching Silken Thoughts run over an inadequate trip at Folkestone two starts back: in a race about which the Racing Post said that "they went a very strong pace in this division with the field spread all over Sunbury by halfway", she was outpaced throughout and was thus too tired at the end to do anything other than weaken further.  Let's hope that, like Silken has been, she is shown to much better advantage next time over farther.

What didn't help was that the kickback was very bad yesterday, which would have made it even harder for those out the back - and I think that the picture of her in the first paragraph, coming back in after the race, shows how disgruntled she was by the indignity of it all.  Any day at the races always has its good points, though, and a bonus of yesterday's outing was seeing the debut of the filly whom the Racing Post has followed since birth, Born To Run.  She didn't cut much ice yesterday (and is shown in the previous paragraph coming back in under her stable's apprentice Noel Garbutt) but she looks a nice filly and is in a good stable (that of Hugo Palmer) so I'm sure she'll do OK in the fullness of time.

Anyway, as the final two photographs, taken this morning, show, we've got off relatively lightly from the tail-end of Hurricane Nadine, as compared to most other parts of the country, with the news this evening having shown floods in a variety of areas.  Some parts of the country have had something like three inches of rain in just over a day, while we've had only about a quarter of that.  It hasn't stayed quite as uninterruptedly sunny here as it seems from the dawn and the mid-morning photographs, but it's been basically bright and breezy, which is good as it'll dry the place up a bit.  And if the wind then drops, it might be quite pleasant.