Brought us sunshine

Very remiss of me.  It's three days since those two horses ran at Yarmouth and I haven't posted a review.  Which is bad - and the fact that we'll have another runner tomorrow, who obviously needs a preview, makes it even worse.  And we've had plenty of weather!  Plenty of good weather too, even if Friday was a shocker.  We got off relatively lightly at Yarmouth as it stopped raining there around noon and we didn't get wet, but in Newmarket it basically rained all day.  And the temperature didn't get out of single figures in either place.

Anyway, at Yarmouth, a course with extremely good groundsmen, the track had absorbed very well the inch or so of rain which had fallen over the previous 36 hours.  It was really lovely ground, no worse than good to soft, although I'd imagine that the times might have implied soft ground as there was a stiff headwind up the straight, which meant that for the majority of the races the horses were racing into a stiff wind all the way.  And our two horses both ran well again, doing the same as they'd done there three weeks previously, ie Gift Of Silence (paragraph one) finishing second and Wasabi (this paragraph) finishing third.

Gift Of Silence was a very close second, beaten only a head.  I thought that she was coming with a winning run, but really the winner was just a tad too strong for her, so we have no grounds for complaint.  And what was nice was that the winner Qanan was the third leg of a treble for one of Newmarket's nicest trainers, Chris Wall - who went from one extreme to the other in one day.  He'd got to the fourth week of May without having had a winner all year - and then had three in one afternoon, two ridden by Ted Durcan and one (Qanan, pictured) by George Baker.  And Wasabi too was beaten by good people, the winner of her race Sancho Panza being ridden by Shelley Birkett for her mum Julia Feilden.

So that was good (even if not victorious).  And since then what has been good has been the weather.  Saturday was not great, but at least it was dry.  Sunday, yesterday, was warm and sunny all day.  And today was even warmer, and again very sunny.  Bliss!  What made yesterday even more special was the fact that we moved the horses over from the field which they've been using all winter to the one which they will have for the summer.  And that means, for a few days at least, some lovely spring grass.

This was a source of great excitement for the horses, and for Gus too.  So there's been plenty of frolicking, and plenty of munching too.  There is already considerably less grass in the field than there was at the start of the day yesterday, but that's inevitable.  What will also deteriorate, over and above the grass, is the weather, as we're told that we'll get some rain tomorrow.  But yesterday was a lovely day, and today was even better, with hardly a cloud in the sky all day, as the chapter's final three photographs (with two of James Fanshawe's horses in this paragraph, and Marco Botti's and William Haggas' strings in the next two shots) show.

Tomorrow, though, is another day.  And it is a day which will see us head off to Lingfield's evening meeting to run Annia Galeria.  She's a sweet mare, one whom I know particularly well as I ride her nearly every day.  I've fallen off her too, but I won't hold that against her.  She can be a bit headstrong, but is basically very straightforward.  I imagine that she will be one of the outsiders tomorrow, but I hope that she'll run well, as she's fit and well at present.

Annia won in England in her younger days and won in Jersey a couple of years ago, even though her last season out there (2012) was less successful.  Let's hope for the best tomorrow.  She won at Wolverhampton as a three-year-old over five furlongs making all the running, but we've been working her behind other horses and she seems very settled, so she can run over a bit farther (seven and a half furlongs) and, I hope, take things a lot easier in the first half of the race.  I'd like to hope that things will work out well, but we'll have to wait 24 hours before finding out whether that will be the case.  Fingers crossed.