Big brother's footsteps?

If you'd asked me at the end of last week (ie Saturday evening) whether we'd have any runners this week, I'd have said that we definitely wouldn't have. All the races up to and including Friday had closed, and we had no entries; and that just left Saturday's races still to close (on Monday morning) and I knew that there was no race at the weekend remotely suitable for anything we had readyish to run (ie Indira, who wouldn't be running, as she'd just run on Friday evening). What a difference a couple of days make. Come Monday morning, (a) it was abundantly clear, even to someone as innately cautious as I am, that Indira had come out of her race really well, (b) I looked at the calendar to refresh my mind on what mile median auction maidens there were coming up in January and was reminded (which I'd forgotten) that there was only one, and that, four days thence, had already closed, and (c) that, on checking to see what the entries for that race looked like, I found that so few horses had been nominated for it that it had been re-opened until 11.00 Monday morning, which was still a couple of hours away.

Hence the change of plan: she was one of two late entries for the race (taking the total of entries from nine to eleven - and one of those wasn't qualified anyway), and now, at 7pm tomorrow, she'll run in it, one of seven runners in the field. She should run well, even if she might find a small number of her rivals hard to beat. She'll probably go off either second, third, fourth of fifth favourite, largely depending on whether there's any confidence behind any of the unraced horses. She'll have a new jockey as Martin Lane is flying out of Heathrow at 9pm tomorrow, so Jimmy Quinn will ride here (and, as she's got 8 stone 2lb, Martin's probably not too unhappy to be missing her). Let's see what happens - and let's take inspiration (although, of course, she'll never have an unbeaten record at Wolverhampton, having finished fourth there six days ago) from the track record of her elder half-brother Rhythm Stick, who won three from at the track and who is seen here on the days of his first two of his victories, both in December 2010 - and that's a real reminder that, while it's been wet, we've had an unusually frost- and snow-free winter thus far.