Well, we survived St. Jude's Storm. I am aware that it was very damaging in other parts of this part of the country, but here it wasn't much at all. We had quite a bit of rain overnight Sunday into Monday, and then we had reasonably high winds on Monday morning, but it was very far from the worst day of weather this month, never mind this century. And by the time I went out on Gift Of Silence in the second half of the morning, conditions were lovely, as you can see.
You can also see in that first photograph that Gift Of Silence was nice and perky, which is particularly frustrating as this morning I deemed it prudent not to run her at Yarmouth today, where she was declared to run in the 2.10. She was, and is, 100% sound, but has some inflammation in her off-fore fetlock and, while her work has been good and she felt terrific yesterday, the inflammation has increased rather than decreased, and it would have been irresponsible to have run her. She's, as I say, 100% sound, but I feel that, had she raced today, she would no longer have been sound afterwards. So that's really annoying, particularly as I'd been looking forward to running her for the first time on very wet ground. Ah well, she lives to fight another day, so the watchword can be 'Manana', or whatever the Spanish for 'next year' is.
Anyway, that's been our year, really. One step forward and at least one back. But c'est la vie. Still, we'll have a trip to the races anyway this week as Forgiving Light (whose ears are pictured in the second paragraph and who has been here for a few weeks) will run in the amateurs' race at Nottingham tomorrow. Long-term I'd say that his forte might be winning point-to-points ridden by Kyran Tompkins, but in the meantime it won't do him any harm to have a run on the Flat - and if he's going to be able to be competitive in a Flat race, tomorrow's heavy ground might be the conditions to make that happen. We'll see - and if we head off with the same stunning weather which we enjoyed at dawn today, that'll be a good start.
Well, we survived St. Jude's Storm. I am aware that it was very damaging in other parts of this part of the country, but here it wasn't much at all. We had quite a bit of rain overnight Sunday into Monday, and then we had reasonably high winds on Monday morning, but it was very far from the worst day of weather this month, never mind this century. And by the time I went out on Gift Of Silence in the second half of the morning, conditions were lovely, as you can see.
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