Virtutis fortuna comes

I'm afraid that the above headline is slightly misleading. I don't know quite what fortune is favouring in this instance, but whatever it was proved to our benefit today. The admirable To Be Or Not To Be was in at Yarmouth in what looked a very tricky little handicap. From which there were two scratchings - and these turned out to be the hot favourite and the clear second favourite, ie the two horses who on my reading of the form were far and away the two biggest dangers. This turned her from a fair EW chance into a decent win chance, and win she did, scooting home by over three lengths under the ever-dependable Tom McLaughlin. The stable has now had three runners this turf season on the flat, so her win leaves us with currently a 33% strike rate, which is rather nice.

The result was less favourable at a stormy Bath yesterday when Filemot's back legs slipped out from under her on the wet grass as she jumped. This was a relatively minor incident, but in a five-furlong race you need to be a class better than your rivals to miss the start like this and still be competitive; and she wasn't. She'd have needed to have everything go right to be involved in the finish, and sadly it didn't. Ah well - not the best day at the races, but far from the worst.

So that's been Tuesday and Monday. Before that we had Sunday, when I was delighted to find myself in exalted company on the readers' letters page of the Racing Post, alongside Bill O'Gorman, Laura Thompson and Peter Walwyn, to name but three. I was further pleased to rate a mention in Peter Thomas' good feature on William Haggas. The Racing Post seems to be making a real effort to put plenty to read in the Sunday editions - presumably because they were worried that not many people were buying the paper on a Sunday - and it's working, because it is now arguably the best paper of the week. James Willoughby's feature on what was inaccurately billed as the Newmarket Trainers' XI v. the Racing Post XI cricket match was interesting and typically well written, even if James forebore from pointing out that the Newmarket Trainers' XI (containing four trainers) is one of the country's most inaccurately named sides. So we had that paper to keep us amused, plus some excellent international racing courtesy of At The Races. This channel provides us with great entertainment, which is really good bearing in mind that, unlike Racing UK, it comes with one's general sky package, rather than at extra cost. On that basis, I do sometimes feel that Racing UK could pull its socks up a bit, notwithstanding the fact that it has what I regard as two of the three best presenters (James Willoughby and Nick Luck, the third member of this trio being ATR's Robert Cooper). Mind you, Racing UK deserves plenty of credit for its screening of the excellent Preakness Stakes on Saturday night, which was a wonderful race very well covered.

Otherwise, my main source of entertainment just now is Charlie Brooks' novel 'Citizen'. It's really, really good: nearly "unputdownable", in fact. The only problem is that it's so readable that I'm nearly finished it, and when I've done that I'll have to put it down for good, because, good though it is, it isn't quite good enough to read twice.