Shirt-sleeve order

Hugh is currently on holiday for a couple of weeks, and it often seems to be the case that, coincidentally, we have a winner while he's away.  Let's hope that this tradition continues as we have three runners coming up, the first of which will be Simayill at Lingfield tomorrow (Wednesday).  Anyone who follows the fortunes of this stable's runners won't need me to tell him or her that Simayill (pictured trotting happily around the lunge-ring on the Heath a couple of days ago) has been very disappointing since joining this stable, but we continue to live in hope.

Our other two runners during Hugh's absence will be Douchkirk (Frankie) at Chepstow on Saturday and Alcalde at Warwick the following afternoon.  Both seem in good nick so it'll be good to have them running - particularly Alcalde, who hasn't run for over a year.  Despite that absence, he seems reasonably fit, and he and Frankie both coped well with a good work-out on the grass on Waterhall and Railway Land yesterday in some lovely weather, as you can see here with Alcalde being visible through Frankie's ears coming back up Railway Land.

The sun had come out mid-morning yesterday, making a lovely day, and today was even better.  We had a ground frost overnight, but from dawn onwards it was clear that, cold though it was, it was going to be a lovely day.  As soon as the sun started to come up the temperature started to rise and by midmorning we were enjoying a lovely day.  I think that the temperature got up to 15 degrees during the afternoon, which really is unseasonably and very pleasantly warm.  I don't usually expect to shed my sweater this early in the spring, but it was shirt-sleeve order from 10.30 am.

So that's lovely.  I see that the western side of the country is forecast to become wet, but I think that it'll stay dry over this side a while longer.  However, I don't think that today's perfect conditions will be repeated for a week or two.  Still, even so, we've been having a good run of weather and today was much, much better than one would expect to get in the first week of March - and it was very much appreciated by humans, horses, dogs and cats.