A few welcome hours of sunshine

I don't know if it's good or bad that we've had a little window of sunshine; otherwise we've been assailed by rain, rain and more rain.  The ground at Huntingdon had held out for being potentially not too bad for Sunday as we had had minimal rain on Friday and Saturday, but then Sunday dawned with the course's local forecast predicting up to 10mm of rain through the morning.  It started raining here at around 7.30 am and then just continued solidly all day.  One agonises under such circumstances about whether or not to scratch the horse, but all of a sudden not running just seemed a very easy decision - and Ethics Girl turned out to be just one of 29 non-runners on the card.  Her race was down from 14 to 10, but worst hit was the Macer Gifford Memorial Handicap Chase, for which 12 horses had been declared but from which eight were scratched.  Anyway, it was just the foulest day imaginable (although, again, the scenes in New York and New Jersey a few days previously highlight that the crassness of that observation).  This photograph underplays its depressingness - even if the pigeons seem happy enough to sit out in the rain.

By comparison, yesterday was a delight.  The slight frost with which the dawn arrived was a small price to pay for the sight of clear skies, which allowed us to enjoy several hours of (cold) sunshine under blue skies.  That was just so lovely and welcome as you can see, offering a tantalizing hope that we might be treated to a few of the 100 or so days of dryness required to dry the property ouit.  And then today was even more splendid at the outset.  I'd spent the night in the At The Races studio in Milton Keynes enjoying our annual Melbourne Cup overnight brahmafest with Matt Chapman, and I emerged from it around 5.00 am to find a hard frost under clear skies.

But as light began to appear in the sky ahead of me as I drove home, it seemed crystal-clear that we were in for another similarly splendid (if cold) day, as shown by the sunny scene in the stable in the last paragraph once the sun was up, with the north-facing roof in the shade still being white with frost and the puddle still being ice-bound.  Under the circumstances, I found it almost impossible to believe my ears when the radio informed me that we could expect a cold start to the day and a bright morning before a band of milder weather, cloud and rain moved in from the north-east this afternoon.  Surely that couldn't be right, and surely the still, bright, cold, clear morning would last for more than a few hours?

Well, even by the time that I was getting myself organised for a couple of hours of much-needed sleep early in the afternoon, the sky had completely clouded over and the rain had started to fall.  And it's still raining now.  Unbelievable.  Let's hope that it's stopped by tomorrow, when I'll be heading off to Nottingham with Carolina and Roy (both of whom are pictured here on yesterday's joyously crips morning).  There's so little turf racing towards the end of the season (which is strange, but this year it's rather good as the freak weather conditions - if there is such a thing in a country where you know that you have to expect the unexpected at the best of times - have meant that most of the turf tracks are completely saturated, and we really only have two maiden race options this last week if we want to race on turf (which I'd do by choice, especially with a lightly-raced horse).

I don't like running unseasoned horses any farther than necessary as the longer the race, the more it can take out of them; and ideally I'd have run Roy and Many Levels over seven furlongs again this week, the same as at Newmarket a couple of weeks ago.  However, our only two options are Nottingham over a mile tomorrow or Doncaster over six furlongs on Saturday.  It's thus become a relatively easy decision: Many Levels travelled fairly well over seven at Newmarket before not really finishing the race off, so six should not be unfeasible for him; but Roy was struggling from an early stage at Newmarket before plugging on late in the race, so a mile seems to make more sense for him (even if, as I say, in an ideal world they'd both run in the same seven-furlong race again).  Still, one doesn't want to agonise too much over these things, and it's still early days for both horses.  Let's hope that they can both have a safe and enjoyable trip to the races this week.