International weekend traveller

We have a day at the races tomorrow (Saturday), or a night anyway: I've managed to find a race for Senator Matt, and it happens that the race is at 8.45 pm at Chepstow, which is 200 miles from here, in another country.  That's not great planning, but in every other respect the planning should be relatively good.  Senator Matt is a lovely kind, honest horse, is in great condition (as this recent photograph confirms) and he'll do his best.  However, he has struggled in his maiden races, and needs to lift, even in the lower class of handicap conditions, for a bit of extra distance.  He'll have that tomorrow - and as the race is over a mile and a half, he'll have that extra distance without having to contest a real marathon.  And the ground should be quite nice.  So that's good.

It's been hard to get him in a race, so I'm pleased that now that he is in one, it should be one which gives him every chance of doing whatever he can do.  Let's hope that he runs competitively - and if he doesn't, it certainly won't be for the want of trying on his part (or ours, I hasten to add) because he's a real enthusiast.  So, all in all, the fact that his race is a long way away late on a Saturday night is not really of any consequence.  So he runs tomorrow; and then on Wednesday I hope that Magic Ice (pictured here in her stable recently) will run.  She too has been struggling against The Eliminator, and I'd been thinking that her next entry would be on July 19th (bearing in mind that I was wanting to run her over a mile, and wasn't wanting to run her from out of the handicap, or on the AW, or at Brighton) but that's an awful long time to wait, so I've put her in over a mile and a quarter on Wednesday.  Pleasingly, she should get a run.  So, God willing, we'll be going to Nottingham on that day.

These past two paragraphs, of course, mean that we have got this blog back onto the track along which it is meant to run (ie revolving largely around this stable and its inmates).  However, I can't resist the temptation to revisit yesterday's topic.  The question has been raised about why are the H&S issues which have caused so much anguish never been considered a problem in the past.  Well, I think that I can answer that with this photograph of a letter which arrived here this week.  Basically, the Great God Health & Safety is becoming an ever greater god with each year that passes, and its tentacles are continually finding previously uncharted territories - as, I think, this letter suggests.  Until recently, it would have been inconceivable that an envelope could be thus addressed - but nowadays one really isn't surprised to by something like this at all.