Nice outing

As I explained in the chapter which I wrote last night, I had been looking forward to Frankie's resumption.  One never likes to see a horse off the track for a year, so it's great when they finally resume if they have had a long absence.  But at the same time, if a horse has had a few setbacks, there's always a certain amount of trepidation when he or she resumes, even if all has been running smoothly at home in recent weeks.

Anyway, it was lovely to take him to the races again - and the icing on the cake was that he seemed to enjoy the day too, and seems to have taken no harm from the outing.  You can see in that first photograph that Frankie looked very perky cantering down to the start, and basically he seemed very pleased with things all day, which was lovely. He was beaten a fair way today, but that's not the end of the world as at least we are now heading in the right direction with him, finally.  The main thing is that he is back on the track and that he jumped well, enjoyed the day and seems to come home unharmed.

Plumpton's a lovely course and today it showed up in a particularly good light.  We've been terribly wet for weeks and months and Plumpton has raced in some desperately wet conditions this season.  However, the past few days have been mild and dry and, remarkably, the track wasn't desperately heavy today.  Granted, it was at least soft all round and there were some very heavy parts, but in most places it was nearer to soft than to heavy, and in most places the turf was remarkably undamaged.

The groundstaff had obviously done a really good job to present such a good surface, and had done some judicious moving of running rails and hurdles to make sure that the worst of the ground wasn't raced or jumped on.  The one thing which they couldn't do, obviously, was move the fences, so the ground in front of some of the fences was understandably very battered - but even then it had been as well repaired as possible.  So all in all it was a very pleasing outing, taking a nice horse to a nice place.