An exciting day yesterday as my three fillies arrived at Watership Down from Japan. They flew from Japan to Amsterdam and were boxed the remainder. There’s a lot of risk in this type of journey and they seem to be injury free which is a relief. I’ll give them a few days to settle in before I go down to …
Hit and hope
Quality racing today but tough. I’ve been through the various cards and I haven’t found anything that I would consider standout. I’ve decided to follow David Pipe – he’s been in no form this season but he has plenty of good horses in the stable and he’s been getting the odd winner. He has eight runners today around the country. I’ve always …
Not in love with the game
I’m busy today with site meetings around the farm – we’ve got builders everywhere at the moment and the place is a mess. I’ve got one runner today – Viscaya goes in the 2:30 at Wolver. She was a speculative claim a while back – she’d shown a little form, something was clearly amiss and if we could put it …
Cossack dance
Exciting news – Park Acclaim foaled down a filly this evening, the first foal ever born to one of my mares. I don’t know if she’s a grey (Park Acclaim is grey, by Clodovil) – she’s by Motivator. I’ll post some pictures later in the week. Other horse news is poor. Big Paddy has been retired following further tendon issues …
Getting in the mix
I’m having a quiet time of it here on the farm. We’re very exposed here and it’s very cold – we’ve all had the flu and are mostly staying in. The kids (and me) have been spending a lot of time on the Wii, which can be a bit dangerous. There’s this game called Mario Kart where you career around …
Happy New Year
Happy New Year to all blog readers. Not a lot going on with my horses at the moment. Tifernati comes down to Gary Moore’s any day now, and we should know fairly soon what sort of prospect we have. Astrodome has a massive appetite and is eating Gary out of house and home – we need to get going with him …
Shepherd’s Pie
I’ll be brief again today as I’m on cooking duty – I cook a mean Shepherd’s Pie. Jane got me a couple of framed photos for Christmas – Bouguereau in the Derby and Winker in the July Stakes. They were fantastic professionally taken photos that I’d never seen before – I’ll post them in here when I get time. I couldn’t have been more …
Momentous day
I went to Lapland on the weekend, which was good fun. It was a real winter wonderland – pine forests of deep snow. We had a late night husky ride (they don’t half motor), a reindeer sleigh ride followed by a trek to meet Santa in a hut in the woods and a snowmobile trek. The cabin was decent but the …
Conspiracy
I’m going through a quiet period horse wise. Mon Michel is probably out for the season, and he was possibly my best prospect for this year. Tifernati was bought to go hurdling this year, but he had a massive wart on his backside which had to be removed – he should go in to Gary’s at the beginning of January. …
The Pro-claimers
I bought another mare at Tattersalls last week – Veiled Beauty is the dam of The Cheka, and I paid 160k Guineas for her. She’s by Royal Academy out of a decent Khaled Abdulla mare, and she’s in foal to Byron. I’ll be cheering The Cheka on as he goes for glory in 2009. Veiled Beauty will be the fourth and …