Three seasons in one day

The best laid plans of mice and men.  Reading the last chapter, one might have expected me to be at Kempton this evening.  I certainly was expecting to be there, because it never crossed my mind that Roy would be eliminated.  But that is what happened, even if I still don't quite understand why.  There were 22 entries, of whom a surprisingly high number (18) were declared.  The safety factor is 14, and Roy was 15 of the 18 who were declared, so he was the first to miss out.  But, as you probably know, 18 is the trigger point for a race being divided (on the basis that there will be nine in each division) so one might think that we'd be OK, finding ourselves in a 9-runner division of the race.

That, of course, is not what has happened.  There are only six races at Kempton tonight, which gives the scope for one or two to be divided.  Ours was the only race both to go over the safety factor and to have at least 18 declarations - but it has turned out that there have been no races divided on the card.  Mildly annoying and slightly puzzling, but c'est la vie.  So Roy and I are at home this evening - and, God willing, we will be heading down to Kempton in seven days' time instead.  All of which means that Magic Ice, having been our first runner of the year last week, will now be our second runner of the year too, at Wolverhampton on Friday.

It should be a straightforward trip over there because we have a big band of rain apparently heading over the country from the west over the next 36 hours.  I believe that there is snow over on the other side of the country at present (and in the north) but if the rain comes, that will go.  We look then to get frost and snow from Saturday onwards - but going to Wolverhampton on Friday should be straightforward.  I hope that the race will be straightforward too, because if things work out for Magic Ice (ie if she can get covered up behind a reasonably strong pace and can relax) she should run very well.  However, she's a five-year-old maiden now, and you can take from that observation what you will - but what I take is that her winning a race certainly cannot be taken for granted.

As you can see, we have been getting off very lightly the past couple of days.  The weather is very rough over on the west side of Great Britain (and in Ireland) and in the north (as one might expect) but we've had it very easy here.  Yesterday we had maybe three hours of lovely mild sunshine before rain squalls came rushing in, followed by an impressive rainbow (pictured in the first paragraph, followed by three photos from this morning) - prompting me to think that we'd had three seasons in one day (with only summer missing) which was certainly better than only one, because only one would mean uninterrupted winter..  But today's lovely sunshine (colder, with a very bracing wind) lasted for most of the few hours of daylight.  So, although tomorrow will be wet and it should be very cold and possibly snowy thereafter, at least the second week of January, which one would expect to be a difficult one, has been easy enough here so far.