Some happy news

It looked on Racing TV as if racegoers at Dundalk were enduring heavy rain all night yesterday, but we haven't received the threatened change in the weather yet.  Well, we've had a slight change in that it's cooler and fresher, but it still isn't cold and it still isn't wet.  Whether we shall get any rain later in the week we shall have to wait and see but, as so often happens, it seems as if East Anglia is missing much of the rain which has been arriving from the west.  Which is fine by me: I am never unhappy not to be being rained on.

I would have been scanning the weather forecasts to see what conditions would be pertaining at Leicester on Saturday (not that I would have been any the wiser because I don't know what Loving Pearl's ideal conditions are, as she's only lightly raced and we've never run her) but I haven't declared the filly.  As so often happens when one is getting a horse ready to resume, one finds that one needs a bit more time than one had planned/hoped.  So I hope that she shall instead resume over a mile at Newmarket in three weeks' time, in a race which we had planned would be her second run of the year.

Looking farther ahead, Roy is entered at Brighton on Tuesday and Parek  (Sussex Girl) at Yarmouth the same afternoon.  Roy is an intended runner, but I suspect that Parek won't run.  She ran a very nice race on Tuesday on her resumption, doing everything right under a very good ride from Oisin Murphy and finishing second to a well-bred handicap debutant who turned out to have got in very lightly, winning easily.  Ordinarily and ideally, I would give her more than seven days between her first and second runs of the year; but I entered her for Tuesday simply because the weather forecast suggested that there might be a lot of rain, and one probably wouldn't want to miss the opportunity to run her on a wet track.  But it's looking as if Yarmouth won't get much rain and the ground will still be on the fast side; if so, we'll wait a bit longer.

Not that Roy will know it, but he'll have one more sibling if/when he runs on Tuesday than he did when he ran last Saturday, his dam Minnie's Mystery, aged 21, having produced a filly by Dunaden early yesterday morning.  That's such happy news.  She had been retired from breeding as her previous two foals, currently aged two and four, had both come with difficult births.  But last year she seemed in such good shape that the vet advised that there was no abnormal risk to her in putting her in foal again.  I just made sure that I didn't use a particularly big stallion as much of the problem with her two difficult foalings had been that on each occasion the foal had been very big.

Anyway, all has run as smooth as silk.  She produced a lovely filly at 2.15 yesterday morning at Redenham Park Stud in Hampshire, where she has been living in the lap of luxury since coming back from France in the second half of 2017 after what seemed at the time to be her retirement.  She coped with everything very easily and within an hour she had had a bite to eat and the foal was up and suckling.  Couldn't have been more straightforward.  I was so keen for her to have a foal by Dunaden, a horse whom I revere.  I was so keen for the birth to be easy.  And I was so keen for the foal to be a filly, on the basis that this very likely will be her last foal, and I'd love to have a daughter from her to breed from in the fullness of time.  So that was just perfect.