Drying in vain?

We've been having some rather nice weather, which is always appreciated at this time of year when conditions are deteriorating steadily/rapidly and the days are becoming ever shorter.  The past three days have all ended up very pleasant after some rather daunting starts to them.  Sunday started with cold mist and today started with thick fog, but arguably the most daunting start of all came yesterday, when the day began with a true 'Shepherd's Warning' over the deserted Limekilns, as you can see here.

That awe-inspiring dawn eventually led to a very pleasant sunny day, as had Sunday's misty start and as did today's foggy beginning.  I tend to be indoors during the first half of the afternoon so I can miss out on some of the nicest hours, and on Sunday that was definitely the case with the television showing the action from Longchamp.  Today, though, the best of the day probably came from mid-morning onwards, which one really couldn't have predicted early on.

If the fog was thick before 7.00 (as you can sort of see in the previous paragraph with the photograph of Mike De Kock's string of Seth Efrican travellers, here for a while en route to Dubai having come via Mauritius, coming out of the gloom) visibility was even worse a couple of hours later as we cantered up Long Hill (pictured in this paragraph).  However, only a few minutes later the blue sky above was starting to peep through, as you can see in the next paragraph's photograph of some of Chris Wall's horses - and the next lot  presented us with idyllic conditions, as you can see as Grand Liaison heads off towards Bury Hill in glorious sunshine in the subsequent photograph.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that the weather is quite nice and should be well on its way to bringing good ground to the Rowley Mile for Saturday's Cesarewitch, the track for which is currently rated good to soft.  That should be grand for Ethics Girl, denied her run at Ascot last Friday by wet ground.  However, I think that it is all going to be academic.  She's 1lb out of the handicap, being currently weighted on 7 stone 11lb, but that's not the problem: 34 get in, and she's 45th of the 55 horses currently still in the race.  30 of those ahead of her already have jockeys booked and declarations aren't taken until the day after tomorrow, so at present it looks, disappointingly, as if she won't get in.

So that'll leave us with just one runner this week: Simayill at Nottingham tomorrow.  I was rather taken aback by how badly she ran last time, but I'd hope that that was nothing more sinister than her being in the wrong race.  A very fast-run mile on the AW at Kempton saw her taken off her feet from the start, so she was struggling in the first half of the race and struggling even more in the second half.  However, 10 furlongs on softish ground on the turf at Nottingham tomorrow should see her able to travel much more comfortably through the race, and I hope that that will result in a much better effort.  We'll see.