Overtaken by events

Overtaken by events.  My confident prediction in yesterday's chapter that we would have two runners at the end of the week has not proved to have been accurate.  There was a further 13mm of rain at York overnight and the GoingStick reading is now down to 5.7, which is the lowest it has been since 2013.  Those 13mm in theory only changed to ground from 'soft, good to soft in places' to 'soft', which doesn't sound much of a change, but one doesn't get half an inch of rain without the ground softening rather more than that slight change might imply.  Under the circumstances, it would be a hopeless task for us to try to run him there on Saturday, so I didn't declare him.

I was tempted to declare him and then watch tomorrow's (ie Friday's racing) to see how very soft it really was.  But I would only have been doing that hoping against hope that it wouldn't be too soft for us, and doing that would mean that if we withdrew him on the basis of 'Self-certificate - Ground', he wouldn't be able to run for a week.  (One can only come out on the basis of 'Ground' if the official going has changed since declaration time, or if one brings the horse to the track and then decides that the ground is not suitable for him.  I would imagine that the official ground won't change, that it will remain 'soft' all the way through, so we would have had to have used a self-certificate).  And there's a suitable race for him (if the stormy weather relents) at Nottingham on Wednesday, so it would not have been wise to rule him out of that, all for the sake of declaring in a race which he almost certainly wouldn't have contested.

Let's just hope that we get a good run from the one runner which we will have this week, ie Dereham at Kempton tomorrow.  We should do, but one can't take anything for granted, particularly with a horse who has never been placed and who will probably be one of the outsiders.  It would be a nice boost if he could run well.  I had a nice boost this morning as I saw our old friend Brief Goodbye, formerly a stalwart of this stable.  The last horse to race for our much-missed friend Joe McCarthy, Brief won seven of his 50 races and was a proper trouper, generally competing in fairly decent company with wins at Newbury, Sandown etc.

He's 20-years-young and is still a key member of the teaching staff at the British Racing School, whither he retired after concluding his racing career at the age of eight.  He has taught numerous young people plenty about riding and that is exactly what he was doing this morning in the string of British Racing School horses and pupils who had, presumably, cantered on the Heath before we saw them crossing the Bury Road to leave it onto the Severals (in this photograph) and then set off up the Bury Road to return home.  He's still full of beans, a real sight to bring a smile to the face.  We need those in any autumn but particularly the autumn of 2020.