Alpine paradise to Siberian tundra in 24 hours

Things could have been a lot worse today.  I've just seen the news and seen the trouble that so many poor people got into on the roads today.  We were lucky.  We weren't in until a late race at Lingfield.  It was clear from an early stage that racing was likely to become unfeasible, but obviously the clerk of the course couldn't call it off while conditions were fine at the course, just in the case the forecast happened to be right for a change.  It was finally called off around 11.50, at which point we were 40 miles down the M11 so we just turned around and came home, finding nothing worse on either the outward or the return journey than light snowfalls.

We'd have had a 5-runner race had racing taken place (there already having been four scratchings from our race by the time that racing was called off) but that's by the by.  Magic Ice (the tip of one of whose ears you can see here at around 1.15 this afternoon, when I took her out for a canter after we'd got home) can run instead in a similar race in six days' time; we didn't have to travel very far; and we had no problems on the short journey which we did make.  So all's good.

As you can see, we haven't gone quite from a paradise in the East Anglian Alps to a wasteland, but we have gone to something like a Siberian tundra.  Theoretically it's less cold today, but it seemed worse: not a breath of wind yesterday, and a bracing easterly breeze today.  And the perfect blue has been replaced by leaden grey, which has been sending forth a few snow-flakes as the day has gone on, albeit not nearly as many in most other parts of the country.  Still, life remains very feasible and the training of the horses continues uninterrupted.  And the good thing is that even if things get trickier, Gus will still be ahead of schedule as he got in a bit of schooling yesterday when conditions were so utopian.