55 out of 55 ain't bad

Well, we guessed our fate at an early stage as regards Ethics Girl's possible participation in the Cesarewitch, but I didn't realise by how far we'd miss out.  This is astonishing.  There had been two previous forfeit stages to weed out some of the huge entry, before Monday's five-day confirmation stage arrived as the third point at which one would pay to be in the race.  After this there were 55 horses still engaged, so with a safety factor of 34 and our mare (pictured a week ago) effectively being number 45, we knew that we'd need 11 horses above us to drop out between Monday and Thursday for us to get in.

Predictably we didn't get in - but compare our extremely slight disappointment with that experienced by the people who had been just outside the top 34: amazingly, all 55 were declared this morning.  That's surely got to be a something of a record.  If your horse had been number 35, you'd have felt at least 99% certain that you'd get a run.  As it is, horses 35 and 36 are the two reserves (who only get in if someone scratches by 9.00 Friday morning, ie more than 30 hours before the race) while number 37 definitely doesn't get in.  The first reserve Montaser is the third favourite, so his connections will have a particularly restless night hoping for their chance to run, while trying initially to get over the startling discovery that their participation was not guaranteed.  I recall a few years ago Jack Dawson winning a handicap at Chester in which the 18 declared runners were the top 18 of the entrants and being amazed at that occurence, but I'm sure that even that day not all the entrants would have been declared.  So to have 55 out of 55 declaring really is remarkable.

So no runners from this stable this weekend.  Not to worry: while Clive Brittain's motto has always been that they can't run well if they don't run, I've always looked at it the other way round: if they don't run, they can't run badly.  Not that I'm a defeatist, or anything like that.  In fact, I'd say that I'm an optimist, and here's evidence to support this contention: Simayill (pictured in the previous paragraph in the parade ring yesterday) again finished among the tail-enders at Nottingham yesterday, but I remain steadfast in my belief that she's a  good prospect.  Time, as ever, will tell.  It wasn't a bad trip to Nottingham, so all told it was quite a good day.  I only rode one horse and was happy with her (Grand Liaison) but even I, despite my bias in favour of our inmates over all others, have to admit that the most impressive gallop posted on the Heath yesterday morning was this one which I sneaked over to the racecourse at 8.30 to watch: Frankel and Shane Featherstonehaugh, leaving his stablemate Midsummer Sun (Tom Queally) well adrift up the Rowley Mile.

We'll be having, I hope three runners next week (one each on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday) with, I suppose the possibility of something at the weekend too if I can think that far ahead.  In the meantime, however, I'll devote a bit of time to thinking about how to put this blog forward for the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Far-fetched?  Well, perhaps not.  Obviously I'm not in the running for a Booker Prize as my grammar isn't bad enough and my apostrophization is generally correct - other than in the blogs occasional sentence, of course, which has it's apostrophe's deliberately misplaced to try to right that wrong, or wrong that right, whichever way one look's at it.  However, I think that I qualify perfectly for the Nobel Prize, having read today that this year's gong has gone to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, the special quality of his writing being its "hallucinatory realism".  If such a paradox can be detected in his works, why not here?  And what better way to illustrate so abstract a concept than with this photograph of our loading ramp two days ago in the morning sun, with its Virginia creeper, spiders' webs an' all?