A rare bank holiday weekend with no runners as most of ours are now on their holidays and those in training for the summer have options in the next week or so.
On Saturday morning James Fairrie was here to watch Ben Buie work (Harley Cornock) with Gold Mountain (Mark Caswell) and he was delighted with how he looked and how he worked. It was great to see James and we look forward to Ben Buie being out again next month.
Although we had no racehorse runners we did have a shetland runner as Freddie & his pony Brewards Kerwen (Blackie) headed to Heathfield Show in East Sussex on Saturday as part of the Shetland Pony Grand National team. They compete all summer raising money for The Bob Champion Cancer Trust – such a worthwhile charity. It was their 3rd competition of the year and although the morning’s race didn’t go to plan with too many brakes stopping the pony too well – they came off for the afternoon and Blackie and Freddie absolutely flew to register their first win together. I’m sad to have missed it but thanks to Tim Vaughan’s wife Abbi for a brilliant video as their daughter Grace was also in the race and she won the morning’s race which was her first shetland winner too. Lucky kids.
Most of the horses did a quiet canter today and Nick Partridge the Farrier was in as usual – no such thing as a bank holiday Monday with horses! Lots of our team of staff are away this week but we’ve not got that many in full work so we can manage. It’s a juggle ensuring they all take all of their holidays but at the same time we have enough cover for the horses that are in training and those running too and life is actually more straight forward when we are busier in the winter as we have the full team in. It all seems to work itself out though.
Now we are hoping that the black clouds around us actually give us some much needed rain – everyone else seems to have had it and we could really do with it.