Long, busy, lovely week

Nice to hear from the old Walrus on this blog again and apologies once more for a lengthy absence.

It's been an enjoyable if tiring week, the highlight undoubtedly being Kadouchski (pictured right with Gemma) winning today. I was watching at home, having only arrived back late last night from three days at Cheltenham for Racenews. John and Hugh set off on their way very early and I was too feeble to tag along, choosing instead to wade through umpteen e-mails and not do a very good job on catching up with work. The smiles on Hugh's and John's faces in the winner's enclosure after the race will have told anyone watching what his win meant to us. He's a wonderful little horse, of only moderate ability, but one with such genuineness that a win was well deserved. Let's hope there'll be more to come from him.

At Cheltenham over the weekend there were too many great moments to go into lengthy detail but in brief I will mention Jason McKeown and his whip-nicking - a breathtakingly cheeky maneouvre but immensely entertaining. Punchestowns goes into the book as the most impressive winner and Fair Along as the most satisfying, certainly for young Rhys Flint who rode him beautifully, but also for me as I've long admired the horse and am kicking myself for ejecting him from my 12-to-follow list this year. Nigel Twiston-Davies has come in for much praise recently and rightly so. While Imperial Commander's victory was another impressive performance, Ballyfitz's win gave me the greatest pleasure. He's not a horse I've followed particularly but I will from now on. His no-nonsense, quite dogged way of running somehow reminded me of my old favourite See More Business. I'd love to see Ballyfitz go on to greater things. Special mention must also go to the very sporting Barry Connell, who took on the professionals and showed them a trick or two when steering his own lovely horse Shinrock Paddy to an all-the-way victory in the bumper. Good onya, Barry.

The Open Meeting was my second visit to the Cotswolds this past week as on Wednesday I was at Overbury Stud to photograph Kayf Tara (left, with Overbury's excellent stallion man Dan Matty) - a labour of love if ever there was one. Anyone who has been bored or stupid enough to read this blog for a while will know that he's one of my all-time favourite horses and that Desirée is currently in foal to him. Well, the old boy looked tremendous in the autumn sunshine that blessed us for the day. I also saw about five of his foals while I was at the stud and now really can't wait to see my own foal next May. On the subject of foals, Oscar has fully recovered from his injury and is back to annoying Chilli Cracker's Avonbridge foal in their paddock at Colton Farm Stud.

One of the results of the very weak back-end yearling sales is that I have inadvertently acquired a nice Doyen filly. She's been named Ruby In The Dust. We're going to give her some time to mature, probably over in Ireland, before bringing her back here next summer to start her training in earnest. As you can tell, she's extremely unlikely to be a two-year-old prospect but I hope we might have some fun with her and I plan to put a syndicate together at some stage to race her, so let me know if you're interested. She's out of a mare by Halling, bred on a very similar cross to Godolphin's G1 winner Folk Opera, and by a stallion who really should make the grade but probably won't be given a chance by commercial breeders (which would be a terrible shame, in my opinion).

Before I sign off, I must mention Natagora, the feline version, rather than the equine one. She has given us real joy in the few months she has been here and has gone such a long way to making up for the heartbreak of losing Sid. She's a true brahma of a cat and now has to share the house with her new best friend Alamshar and the noisy Giant, who has decided she'd like to live indoors now as there seems to be better grub on offer and the dogs aren't really that scary after all. Natagora's less famous namesake makes a final appearance in Newmarket, scene of her greatest triumphs, at the December mares' sale on 3 December. I will be there to pay my respects.