To Westley Waterless with Elgar

Ah, spring is here and Stan and Alice have taked to lolling around on top of the steaming muck heap. As you can imagine, they smell delightful.

I love England in the spring. Easter is always the proper start of spring for me and Easter Monday reminded me of everything I've grown to love about my adopted home town and the surrounding area. We had to return the trailer to Westley Waterless and to avoid the ghastly prattle of Jeremy Vine and the even more inane noise from Q103, we tuned into Classic FM for a rousing burst of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Perfect English music to go with a brilliantly-named English village.

And so to real life. After a brutal and wet winter on the shelterless heath, spring is welcomed heartily in Newmarket. By this time next week the newly shortened Craven meeting will be in full swing. Our intended 2yo runner Racie Gracie has developed a sore shin so will miss her debut there but it won't be too long before we see her in action.

It's great to see our horses gradually shed their winter coats and turn from hairy donkeys into beautiful, gleaming throroughbreds. Lady Suffragette is the most forward in her coat as she's been racing through the winter and I was immensely proud of her at Towcester on Sunday, despite the fact that she was really full of herself, towing me around the pre-parade ring and giving me a painful nip on the arm as she was being saddled.

She looked a million dollars and her game run was just typical of such an honest little horse. Her erstwhile yearling partner and fellow Mull Jill Dawson is the real eyecatcher to me at the moment. She has an incredibly athletic physique which was well hidden when she came back from her winter break. It's amazing how quickly she's changed in the last few weeks, from hobo to supermodel, seemingly in the blink of an eye.

Jill's a monster of a horse with the nature of a colt rather than a filly but that's what we love about her: a right little madam who loves her work, loves her grub and hates being fussed. She's last on my list of mane-pulling candidates. She makes such a huge drama out of it that it's a job I dread and she's currently looking a bit of a hippie.

At the other end of the scale is Anis Etoile. I walked into her box on Monday and she was lying down. Most of them jump up as soon as there's a human in the box but not this laidback creature. I sat down next to her and she rested her head on my knee. She still didn't bother to stand as I started grooming her. Fuss, it would seem, is one thing she adores. She's a proper princess.