Various events

I felt like a proper trainer yesterday.  William's nephew Jamie (who starts his first job on Monday, for Nigel Twiston-Davies which is great news as I'm very pleased that Jamie is going to such a good stable) was here, and I used the fact of his riding three lots only to ride one myself.  And, here's the really good bit, during the three lots I didn't ride I went out to the Heath by car to supervise/spectate.  Just like a proper trainer.  It was really enjoyable, and I could certainly get a taste for it.

Anyway, I used the opportunity to take even more photographs than usual, so some of them can litter this chapter, starting with a shot of Silken Thoughts and Ethics Girl going up to the Links first lot.  Thereafter you can see some of two-year-olds galloping on Railway Land (great to be on the grass after the recent rains, and a mighty testament to the draining qualities of the Heath that it was still fast ground) and then a couple of what we might euphemistically call older maidens galloping on the Al Bahathri.

Anyway (and this is going in a direction, don't worry about that, even if it might seem initially that I'm just rambling) I'm reading a really good book at present: Les Carlyon's history of the Gallipoli campaign.  It's taking me a long time because there's so much in there, and it's such powerful stuff, that one only really should read a few pages at a sitting, as it would be wrong just to let it wash over one.  I was reading it in the canteen at Chester when Ethics Girl ran, and got talking to Jim Goldie on the subject.  Jim told me that his grandfather had fought there - and I presume that he came home, alive, if not unharmed (because surely nobody came home unharmed).

Jim said that what his grandfather had most mentioned, more than the being shot-at and shelled, were the heat, the flies and the disease, a natural consequence of the heat, flies and the plentiful rotting corpses.  It doesn't do us any harm not to forget, about the survivors as well as those who didn't come home.  Here's a particularly moving section.  Prompted by General Hamilton's observation of the pluckiness of the men under him, that "Men live through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years in Bendigo or Ballarat", the author observes, "Many of those who made it back to Bendigo or Ballarat spent the rest of their lives reliving their time on the escarpment.  They were with their families, back in their communities, honoured citizens, stalwarts of the empire; but they were as solitary as hermits and, had they wanted to, probably couldn't have explained why.  The rest of the world moved on to the boom of the twenties and the bust of the thirties; these men kept shadow-boxing with a demon called Gallipoli".  You can see why it's taking me so long to read the 600 pages of the book, because stuff like this can't, or shouldn't, be hurried.

Anyway, Emma's reading a book which I am sure that I shall read in time, a novel written by William Boyd, the author of one of my favourite books, 'Any Human Heart'.  But there's one thing very off-putting about this book: the front cover is adorned by a quotation, supposedly from 'The Times': "The literary event of the year".  For God's sake: everything is an 'event' nowadays!  A film isn't a film; it's a 'movie event'.  But one would hope, in a supposedly decent newspaper anyway, that a book would still be a book.  And one would have hoped  (in vain, apparently) that William Boyd would have had enough sense, when someone had written such a silly thing about his book, not to let these words appear on the front cover of the paperback edition.

Which brings us nicely round to the second highlight of yesterday (after my pretending to be a trainer for a few hours).  Emma and I were lucky enough to go to what could be described (correctly) as a literary event: the launch of David Ashforth's book, 'Racing Crazy'.  It was lovely to be asked, and even better to go.  I'm not going to read the book until I've finished 'Gallipoli', but I'll enjoy it when I come to it.  I know that I'll enjoy it.  I'll find that I've read probably every word already in the 'Sporting Life' and 'Racing Post'; I enjoyed them splendidly first time round, and they will be no less good on the second and subsequent readings.

With David there is always a brahma, and his comment was particularly good, "People told me I wouldn't be able to give the book away but they were quite wrong".  That's very much in the same vein as Bob Monkhouse's great one-liner, "They all laughed when I said that I was going to be a comedian; they're not laughing now."

Anyway, enough of that.  Tomorrow we're off to Haydock to see if Grand Liaison can defy a 6lb penalty for her win last week.  Her rating is due to go up by 11lb from Saturday so she's theoretically very well in, but there's obviously a lot more to it than that.  Not least the "heavy" ground.  Haydock's one of those tracks, like Chester and York, that one generally has no idea what the ground will be like until one gets there; but in this case it's fair to assume that it will be a quagmire.  Or will it?  Bizarrely, the GoingStick reading (8.0) is higher (ie firmer) than the current reading for Newmarket, where the ground is "good".  Okay, so (for reasons which aren't totally clear) we don't compare readings from one track to another; we simply compare them to previous readings at the same track  - except that earlier this summer, the GoingStick reading at Haydock (in June) was also 8.0, and the going that day was "good to soft, good in places".  Confused?  "Good".  Not to worry: whatever the ground is, let's hope that the filly (and Hannah) can go well.  Gus gave her a few tips this morning (as you can see) so she should at least be better prepared than were the British and Anzac troops at Gallipoli.