Nice beaver

Well, if we're going to have a winner while Hugh's away, we've got to come up with something this weekend.  He's away all next week (Cheltenham week) too, but we won't have any runners then.  Brendan Powell observed during the week that he's got the team in cracking form in the run-up to Cheltenham, the only pity being that he isn't going to have any runners there; well, we're in the same boat as Brendan, with the slight difference that we don't have the team in cracking form.  Still, it'll come.  We recently watched the excellent 'The best exotic Marigold Hotel' and the great sentiment from that was, "Everything will be alright in the end - if things aren't alright, then you're not at the end yet", so we've just got to get to the end, as we're clearly not there yet.

So it would help if we could have a good result this weekend, with Frankie (Douchkirk, seen above ridden by his trainer, on a day in January when the Heath was considerably more picturesque than it was today) tomorrow being our first hope.  And if you're wondering, by the way, why I've picked today as being so much less picturesque than when we were covered in snow, it isn't because we had bad weather as such today (that's going to come shortly, although it did rain most of the afternoon today) but because for much of this morning you'd have struggled to see much farther than 50 metres in front of you, as you can see here.

Hard to believe that significant snowfalls are forecast, but there we go.  We'll just have to see what happens. And, even if we do have a week or so of grim weather, we can always console ourselves with the thought that we're surely heading towards spring: not only are we now more than a week into March, but we also saw today three of the horses who've been taking things easy over the winter do their first piece of fast work of the year (Zarosa, Grand Liaison and Platinum Proof aka Tommy, seen below on Railway Land once the fog had lifted a bit, ridden by Terri, Carolina and Iva - and don't read anything into the finishing order, by the way, as they were going up there one behind the other, in the order specified by me).  An easy gallop, sure, but a pleasing step in the right direction, that direction being the one heading towards the new season.

Looking ahead to Cheltenham (which seems to be compulsory) I'm hoping that Mail De Bievre can win the Queen Mother Champion 'Chase.  "Why?", you might ask; and it would be a fair question, bearing in mind that Sprinter Sacre and Finian's Rainbow are both in my XII To Follow, and I'd never heard of Mail De Bievre until last month.  Well, as I may have mentioned previously, the Racing Post is having real problems with its front-page headlines.  Not content with having Festival records apparently tumbling, it decided this week that, 'It will take a good one to beat classy Jezki - Power' was a good line with which to lead.  Robbie Power, rider of Jezki who has the best form in the race and who has been favourite for the Supreme Novices' Hurdle, saying that it would take a good horse to beat him was not, surely, the least un-newsworthy event of the previous day, was it?  There's nothing newsworthy whatsoever about someone pointing out that Jezki has a good chance in the race, whether that someone is his jockey or the man on the Clapham omnibus.  Had Power said that he wasn't expecting Jezki to run well, that would have been different, but as things were ...

So, we must conclude that the Racing Post headline-writer is really struggling at present.  But if Mail De Bievre can win the Champion 'Chase ...  Well, you might have noticed that when he ran at Newbury, the commentator called him My De Beaver.  So this sets us up perfectly.  If he wins, the front page will have to borrow my favourite phrase from the 'Naked Gun' movies.  A beskirted Priscilla Presley is up a ladder fetching a book from the top-shelf in the library, on a section of shelves where there happens to be on display a stuffed beaver in a glass case.  Needless to say, Leslie Nielsen, while standing on the bottom of the ladder and looking upwards (no doubt as frustratedly as Gus when he found the most colossal cat I've ever seen sitting out of reach on top of our boundary fence today), rolls his eyes as only he can and admiringly remarks in his inimitable fashion, "Nice beaver".  So that, surely has to be headline on Thursday's front page, if only the horse can turn Sprinter Sacre over.  So that's good: I've done their job for them.  I will, though, have to leave it up to them to work out how they can fit in Priscilla Presley's equally classic reply, "Thank you - I had it stuffed last week".