I dreamed I saw the silver space-ships flying in the yellow haze of the sun

Again, thank you for the comments after the last chapter.  I think that I put Hope Is High into the title of that chapter, because hope is always high, in this human's breast anyway.  I have found, of course, that hope is generally followed by disappointment.  Not on this occasion, though: two runners this week, two winners!  And that follows last week's tally of two runners for a neck runner-up followed by a winner, so that means we have had three consecutive winners within a seven-day period.  That's not headline stuff, of course, particularly in a week in which we've seen Ulysses, Enable, Marsha and Cracksman win big races at York - but it has made for a memorable period in this little neck of racing's woods.

Kilim's victory was just such a thrill.  Such a pleasure and such a relief.  She has been here just short of a year, and we went to Brighton on Tuesday seemingly not much closer to victory than we had been at the outset.  One could even have said that we were farther from it.  Certainly its spectre seemed to be receding on the horizon, rather than growing ever larger.  Still, against that it was true that she had shown enough glimpses of promise to say that she should be up to winning something; and her several heavy defeats had usually been explicable.  And I had had it in my mind for months that Brighton would suit her, when and if we ever got her there.

All too often, as we know, one has cause to reflect upon the truth of the observation that the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.  Once in a while, though, gloriously, everything falls into place just as one has hoped and dreamed, planned and schemed.  This was one such occasion.  Everything was just so.  She had no weight and was ridden perfectly in a race in which everything was right for her and whose conditions might have been framed by me solely for her benefit - and she won by a hard-fought half-length.  She's a dear filly and she tried her heart out for her win, but even while justly lauding her thus we perhaps should say that the credit has to be shared with Nicola Currie, who rode her perfectly.

So Tuesday's victory was lovely.  There was a time when I harboured an idea that, if and when Kilim discovered how to win, she might continue to progress, and win more races.  Can she do this?  I suppose that there is still an argument to say that this may be the case.  I'm generally an optimist, so I suppose I should still be sticking to this theory.  However, dispassionately I feel that it is at least as likely that, having had everything in her favour and having only just scraped home, that might prove to have been her day of days.  Only time will tell, of course - and the nice thing is that, now she's won a race, it doesn't really matter.  She's achieved her goal (or, rather, my goal for her).  With every horse, the first win is the most important one, but never more so than with a very well-bred filly.

It is, of course, lovely if a winner can go on to become a multiple winner.  We were reminded of this the next day, ie Wednesday, at Bath when Hope Is High took her tally for the year to three, and her career total to four.  And she has still never finished out of the frame (in 12 runs) since arriving here (after three unplaced and fairly unpromising runs) in February 2016, bless her.  She ended up odds-on favourite at Bath, and victory for an odds-on favourite can sometimes sound a fairly straightforward procedure.  That was anything but the case, though, as her victory was an even more close-run thing than Kilim's triumph - and that's saying something.

I had declared Hope Is High to run under a 6lb penalty thinking that it was probably the correct thing to do, but feeling that one could have argued the case both ways bearing in mind that I reckoned that the most likely rise in her rating would be no more than 7lb.  And my predictions about how these horses' ratings will change are usually very accurate.  However, on Tuesday morning, ie the day after I had declared her and the day before she ran, I was stunned to find that she had gone up 13lb (from 59 to 72).  I would have expected this (or more) had her win been at a mile (or shorter) - but at a mile and a half, when the place-getters were not well-handicapped horses, this took me by surprise.

The upshot was that I was very glad that I had declared, and that we would get this once-off final opportunity to run off 65 before our rating went up to 72 three days later.  Even so, even acknowledging that (in the BHA handicapper's mind, if not in my own) we were 7lb well in, I still didn't regard her as an odds-on shot.  Stall 13 of 14 (which became 12 of 13 after one scratching) on a difficult, turning track where hard-luck stories abound, and a burden of 9 stone 12lb meant that she was very beatable in my eyes.  So, having seen her go from 15/8 to 11/10, and then to even money, 10/11, 5/6 and even 8/11 by the off, I just shook my head and wondered who on earth was still backing her at those prices.

As we know now, she did indeed win.  But victory seemed unlikely for most of the race.  A wide draw from that start on that track was always going to make things awkward; and sometimes tactically there isn't a right answer.  We did get over to the inside, but in the process we got worryingly far back - but she's a very genuine mare as well as, by Class Six standards, a good one, and Silvestre is a very determined jockey.  He managed to find a good passage through the field without going wide and without striking any interference on the way through.  Inside the final furlong it began to look as if, against all odds, she might actually finish in the first four.  And she just kept coming.  She led three or four strides from the line, and won by three quarters of a length.  No worries!  (Well, not in the final second of the race, anyway).

Thrills don't come much better than that.  Twice in two days, too, because both wins really were thrilling ones. One has all too many extended periods when one can't take a trick, and all you have is disappointment and frustration.  So this, which has been by our usually meagre standards a purple patch, is a source of joy, a rare example of a dream come true.  The weather has come good too, just in time for the August Bank Holiday weekend (and that doesn't happen very often) so all's well with the world, at present anyway.  Roy will go to Epsom on Monday and it might be asking too much for the sequence to be extended in what will be a fairly competitive and good race.  But next week is another week.  We'll worry about that when we get there.