Making life complicated

You'd have thought that I'd be on the ball after having a few racing-free days after Tuesday last week, when Konigin ran at Yarmouth.  But I'm not.  Gee, Making Tax Digital could be re-badged Making Tax More Time-Consuming, or Making Life Unnecessarily Complicated.  With my VAT return due by 30th September, this has really been preying on my mind and on my time.  Keeping all the records in pen and ink is so straightforward.  Transcribing the records onto the computer is actually fairly straightforward too, but it's very time-consuming.  I think that I have all the information in the Quickbooks site now, but I still have to transfer it to www.hmrc.gov.uk, and the clock's ticking.

We also had the Open Day.  That's fun.  But, gosh, I slept well on Sunday night.  It was lovely to have so many really friendly visitors on Sunday morning, but I was more than ready to give my legs and my voice a rest come lunchtime.  There was plenty going on the Severals in the afternoon but closing my eyes for an hour before evening stables had to take priority.  We did very well for weather over the weekend - Saturday was lovely as was Sunday morning, and when the forecast heavy rain did finally arrive at 3pm, it only lasted five minutes - which was a massive bonus.

Yesterday morning was wet, but again we got off very lightly: 6mm of rain here, 60mm of rain in Wiltshire.  Happily it brightened up for our trip to Chelmsford for Das Kapital to run in the 8.30.  He finished fifth of seven, which doesn't sound very inspiring, but it was actually OK (for a horse who had never won a race).  It was what one often gets with small fields: most of the horses were in form and had a chance.  It turned out that five horses ran well and two were out the back and, although he was the last of those five, that wasn't a huge disgrace.

The winner had won well three weeks previously on his first run of the year, backed from 20/1 to 5/1, and won well again yesterday.  He has clearly improved a lot since he was running last year and is still well handicapped.  The runner-up had a third and a second as his last two runs.  The third had a win and a third as his last two runs.  The fourth had 43342 as his last five runs.  And we were fifth.  Nine lengths back to the sixth and then 12 lengths back to the other one.  Hopefully we can give Das Kapital another run next month and he can build on this.

We will obviously have more runners before Das Kapital is next in action, with, most imminently, Hope Is High entered at Chelmsford on Saturday night and Dereham at Epsom on Sunday afternoon.  We'll firm up running plans for them tomorrow, but they could be the next two runners.  It's a higher-grade race for Hope than she needs to run in, but it might be worth taking our chance.  Certainly, we won't need to be worrying about the ground at an AW course: it's fair to assume that there will be plenty of wet tracks coming up (which she wouldn't like) with the on-going downturn in the weather as we move farther into autumn.