Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming, saying something about a queen

I've got a new horse to follow, even if he's one whom I shall follow with rather mixed feelings.  Moth is one of several horses in my XII To Follow list who is permanently out of racing action - along with lovely St Nicholas Abbey (who, thank God, appears to be winning the good fight) and Saburo, who I believe is no longer alive - and she earned her place in my affections because of her name: not only is Moth a nice name anyway because moths are rather appealing creatures (unless they eat one's clothes) but it's a particularly nice name for me, as it rhymes with my nickname Wath.

Anyway, with Moth retired, another favourite has come along to take her place in my affections.  This horse ran in the juvenile maiden at Goodwood this afternoon: the Richard Hannon-trained After The Goldrush.  He's in my list of horses to like not only because After The Gold Rush is, of course, one of everybody's favourite Neil Young songs, but, more particularly, because this was the name which I was going to give (granted availability) to Minnie's Mystery's Gold Away filly (ie a full-sister to Dream Walker, of whom regular readers of this blog are probably getting fed up of reading) who would currently be a two-year-old if she were still alive.

This filly is pictured in the first paragraph on the only day when I met her (28th January 2012).  I'd already decided that her name should be After The Goldrush (not, as one would obviously have preferred, After The Gold Rush, as that would take up one character too many, 18 being the maximum allowed, with a space counting as a character) by the time that she was kicked by one of her paddock-mates at her home, Haras de la Cauviniere, in the second quarter of last year.

Unfortunately, the injuries which she sustained in this incident proved eventually to be terminal, and she had to be put down on humane grounds in the third quarter of last year, which was a real blow; although in my case it was a blow less hard than it might have been because I had never had the chance to befriend her.  Anyway, great minds clearly think alike, and music impressario Chris Wright has used the name too for his horse of the same age (with less justification for, while Gold Away is a suitable prompt, I can't see that Kyllachy ex Fine Lady has much of a connection to the song).

I'd like to think that we could both have had the name, as his horse has a GB suffix and mine had an FR suffix - so it would have been good having two After The Goldrushes running in two-year-old races in Britain this year.  I'd have had to badger Richard Hannon's office to find out when and where the other one was running, because wouldn't it have been something to have had them both in the same race?  It's thoughts like that that make you realise that the antipodean way of adding Our..., or My ..., or The ..., to the import's name is quite a good idea after all (although if the import's name already has 18 characters I don't know how that works).

Anyway, as the subsequent photographs in this paragraph suggest, this morning was another belter.  We didn't have such idyllic conditions lasting through the day, as some clouds had appeared by 8 am and we only had intermittent sunshine thereafter, and we did have one intense 10-minute rainburst mid-afternoon; but the start of the day really was very, very special. You can see Bean and Gus in the morning sun in the photograph in the second paragraph, and then we have a few photographs taken from the back of Ethics Girl.

God willing, we'll have a runner next week, and she'll be the one.  She's entered at Brighton on Thursday in the Brighton Cup, which she won last year.  Any horse needs plenty of luck to win any race at Brighton in a full field.  She had all the luck last year, and this year she'll be tackling the race with another 4lb on her back, so it's not going to be easy for her.  Her jockey from last year who rode her so well, 'The Dazzler' Holland, has emigrated to join the arms race in North Korea, and most of her other jockeys have been deported too (eg Alan Munro to Singapore, Richard Mullen to Mauritius) but no doubt we'll find someone else worthy of the treat of a ride on this loveliest of horses.