A good Good Friday

Today's been a good Friday (ie nothing's gone wrong and it hasn't rained) which is appropriate as today is Good Friday.  It's a no-racing day and it's generally a no-news day too.  The one bit of news is that Musselburgh, which will stage a very well-endowed raceday tomorrow, has asked to be allowed to race on Good Friday as well as Easter Saturday (and on Easter Day too, I believe) and make a real Festival of it.

It goes without saying that this will be opposed by all too many people - but, really, bearing in mind that we race on Easter Sunday, is it any more disrespectful to Jesus to race on the day of his crucifixion than it is to race on the day of his resurrection?  If anything, I'd have said that it was less disrespectful.  And it is certainly less inconvenient to race on a Friday (Good or otherwise) than it is to race on a Sunday, simply because, while training horses is a 365-day a year operation, one tries to give as many people the day off on a Sunday as possible, while Bank Holidays generally aren't days off in the way that Sundays are.

We've got a runner on Sunday - Frankie at Plumpton - and we're looking forward to the outing, but it would make things a lot easier from the point of view of running the stable if he were running on Good Friday instead of Easter Sunday - and, as I say, from a theological point of view it would surely be more satisfactory too.  I think that there are several misconceptions regarding 'blank days' in the racing calendar, the principal one being that no racing taking place equates to no training taking place, which, of course, is very far from the case.

We probably have runners on approximately 70 days a year, but there's work going on in the stable every day.  And that would be the case whether those 70 race days were the only 70 days in the year on which there was racing, or whether there was racing on 365 days, 363 days, 362 days, 361 days, 356 days or whatever.  And we wouldn't have any more runners depending on whether there were slightly more or slightly fewer racedays: if a horse is going to have, say eight races in a year, he or she will do so whether there is racing on all 365 days or merely on most of them.

Most stables treat a Bank Holiday the same as any other weekday.  We do as regards the morning, but I'll treat the afternoon like a Sunday if we don't have a runner (ie I won't get anyone to come in to help me doing evening stables). So having a runner wouldn't mean anyone working who would otherwise be having the day off, which is obviously the case if we have a runner on a Sunday.

So if (ie when) you read what a terrible imposition it would be on the running of stables to have racing on Good Friday, take it with a pinch of salt.  (And, of course, what is also overlooked is that the stables which have runners every day are the ones with a big staff, and it isn't the same ones going racing all the time: if a lad looks after three or four horses, he might do roughly a dozen runners in a year, so it isn't a case of lads having a rare day when they don't have to go to the races, as one might think from reading press depictions of the situation).

It's funny, really, isn't it - and a sad testament on the fact that we now live in a totally secular society - that it is almost certain that the theological side of the situation won't be mentioned by anyone discussing the subject?  And, of course, it is solely for theological reasons that Good Friday is designated as a holiday.  But that's modern life - and I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who has made no observation of Lent, other than to stuff my face almost every day with some of the Hot Cross Buns which bizarrely started to appear in the supermarkets 40 or more days ago.

So that's good Friday.  Sadly, though, the Good Friday which these photographs depict wasn't really the Good Friday which we 'e
njoyed'.  As you can see, it was a glorious start to the day and first and second lots were stunning, but our the obligatory grey clouds had rolled in by 10 o'clock, in tandem with the bitter easterly wind picking up again.  A few snow flakes fell at midday, but they didn't come to anything - but at the same time I doubt that the few remaining streaks of snow around the Heath will have done much melting through the day.