Frustration

In one sense we enjoyed good journeys to and from Lingfield yesterday because the traffic was lighter than one might have expected - in fact, on the outward journey we had virtually no delays, which is rare - and consequently we made very good time, but in another sense it was bad: I put a lot of store by omens, and when I drove past a loaded hearse as we entered the village of Lingfield, I felt that I knew our fate.  And so it proved.

Gee, racing can be frustrating.  Simayill used to have a very negative attitude, as we discovered last spring the first time we tried to take her near Warren Hill.  She is now much, much less negative, and yesterday she looked the best I've ever seen her at the races (she's generally looked too weedy, but yesterday she looked, relatively speaking, big and strong) and she conducted herself in the most positive manner I've ever seen, leading the field out of the parade ring onto the track looking every inch a horse who was relishing the task in hand - and still she finished last!

Mind you, she finished by her usual abysmal standards relatively close to the winner, because in a freakishly-slowly-run eight-horse race the first two were clear throughout and the remaining six horses passed the post in a bunch.  But she, unfortunately, was at the back of this bunch.  The other races were run between 1.68 and 3.29 seconds slower than standard, while ours was run 12.07 seconds slower than standard.  Without doubt some of the jockeys bar Richard Hughes and Joey Haynes on the two leaders must have gone to sleep, but not ours: Tom McLaughlin was under instructions to bury her away as she over-races if she sees daylight.  She's so like Kadouchski, who had the same characteristics and, notwithstanding the fact that he did once win at Kempton as if to the manner born, he generally found the falsely-run AW tempo of no use to him, and some time before his death I'd got so frustrated by the races yet again not going his way that I'd decided never to run him on the AW again.

It's not really a case of the distance of the race: a horse who needs to be buried away and who has plenty of stamina is always going to be inconvenienced if the race is slowly-run, which most AW races are, whether the race is one mile or two.  In fact, other than Kadouchski's win over two miles, his best run on the AW was over a mile in a furiously-run apprentice races (when Hannah had her first ride) when he stormed home from an impossible position to finish fourth, beaten about a length, looking as if he was flying home when in reality he was just plugging along at the same pace while the leaders slowed down dramatically.  And, with her too, I'd imagine that her days of racing on the AW are over.

As, I'm afraid, is the lovely weather.  Monday was lovely, Tuesday, as you can see, was even better, and yesterday was still pleasantly warm.  Today we enjoyed the warmest start to the day we've had this year, six degrees at dawn so that it was a pleasure to wake up warm and still be warm getting out of bed, but we haven't seen the sun at all today and it's now raining.  The temperatures are set to nose-dive with the forecast for Monday being a night-time low of minus two and a daytime high of plus one.  So we'll just have to carry the memory of Tuesday's brilliant blue sky around in our minds to keep us warm from within.