Long time no blog. I’ve been out and about for a while now with no blogging time, so a fair bit to catch up on. Last Thursday I went up to Cambridge with Steve Morana, Betfair CFO. We spent the afternoon in the offices of a small company called Featurespace – they are data analysts specialising in fraud detection. I studied …
Asbo
My house is a building site at the moment – they’re working in half of it and we’re living in the other half. The whole place is covered in brick dust – it seems that no matter what we do to keep the dust out it finds a way through. The highlight of the week occurred a couple of days …
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 …
Thoughts on Melbourne
I’m back at my desk having flown in to a freezing cold Heathrow at 5:30 this morning wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I hardly slept a wink and I’m fading fast – as soon as I’ve done the blog I’m off to bed. I couldn’t have been more impressed with Melbourne – it’s got everything. It’s clean and well maintained …
Hot Horse
A quite incredible day in the financial markets today. Massive gains around the world were topped off with an almost unbelievable rise of 936 points on the Dow Jones – a move nearly twice as big as the previous all time high move of 499. It’s the sort of fillip the financial world needed to get moving again, and it’s looking …
Longshot
More disappointment on Saturday with Winker running no sort of race. In many respects it was a run that was too bad to be true – he was being niggled to go the pace almost from the start and we knew our fate before the half way point. I think the will is still there but he’s not moving like …
Sneaky feeling
Jane and I went to Ascot yesterday as guests of Watership Down Stud. I have yearling filly with them that I really like – Sadlers Wells out of Race the Wild Wind and a half sister to King Charlemagne and Meshaheer. The room was full of all types of racing people with a few theatre people thrown in (the stud is …
The Ballydoyle Three
So the Ballydoyle three finally paid the price for their crimes and that should be the end of the matter, for now at least. The reality though is that this was a total open and shut case – the rules are worded clearly and Johnny Murtagh had admitted the breach in the papers. The BHA had no choice but to bring …
Free to a good home
A good day on Sunday with King’s Head doing it nicely. He needs it G/F or firm and given that he has invariably delivered when he has had his ground I probably should have given him a stronger write up. He may come out again on the weekend – he has entries on Saturday at Market Rasen and Sunday at Ascot. Market …
A bad weekend at the office
Ugh. My hopes and dreams from Friday lie crushed and broken. Marine Boy‘s run was too bad to be true. He’s a lot better than that – in a sense I’d have been more concerned if he’d been beaten a couple of lengths. He scoped clean after the race and he trotted up fine – we couldn’t see anything wrong. …