A ghost galloping by

It's been a week or so of comings and goings. La Gessa's left us, to be covered by Avonbridge at Whitsbury. She'll be hugely missed, especially by Aisling.

Bilkie has gone too and has a lovely new home only a few miles away with Amanda Pickard, with Suze's horse Tolly as a stable companion. If this picture is anything to go by, he seems to be thriving in his new environment and will hopefully make a competitive little eventer for Amanda in time to come.

Allouette and My Obsession have returned and are both looking well. Desiree is still here but has embarked on her secondary career - as a broodmare. She went to Sulamani on Monday night and we now have an anxious few weeks waiting to find out if she's in foal. The decision-making over all this has been keeping me awake at nights and I know I will spend the next three years worrying about any resultant offspring.

No week is complete without a good book and a good film and I can heartily recommend one of each. I laughed until I had cramp in my cheeks when watching Little Miss Sunshine at Claire's last night. The wildly inappropriate dénouement is one of the most hilarious pieces of cinema I've seen in ages.

I've read lots of books about horses over the years but never one as brilliantly written and deeply moving as John Oaksey's book about Mill Reef, which I found on one of John's bookshelves recently. Written in 1974 in Mill Reef's early days at stud, it captures his story with the minimum of hype but the writer's admiration is so apparent and had me sorely wishing I'd been born a few decades earlier in order to have been able to appreciate the horse's spectacular racing career. So lovely to have been able to read Paul Mellon's eloquent Gimcrack speech in full, too. This book is a must for any racing fan.

Lord Oaksey's account of one of Mill Reef's gallops, where he seemd to float over the ground and hardly left a hoofprint in very soft going, was particularly enchanting. It's easy to get carried away with such mystical tales but being a slightly fanciful sort, I quite often wonder about the great horses who must have stretched their limbs over Newmarket's historic turf while I'm walking the dogs on quiet afternoons.
If you're there when the train rumbles through the tunnel under the heath then it can be particularly spooky as the ground vibrates as if they are galloping there still. It's somehow fitting that patches of forget-me-nots grow over the grass gallops on Long Hill and Warren Hill.

And just to keep all you Lemons happy, here's a pic of John riding out on Monday. The shorts have been somewhat shy in making their seasonal reappearance but they're out in force now, complete with obilgatory wellies, of course. In an intriguing mix of conformity and non-conformity, John is at least sporting a body protector, unlike many on the heath who are still not abiding by the new rule. I don't blame them, as they are hot and uncomfortable to wear and each rider should be able to make up his or her own mind if they wish to use one or not, particularly as they offer very little protection for the types of falls most commonly seen at exercise. In keeping with the nanny state rules that have been set down, we are, however, insisting everyone who rides out from here wears one even though it's a complete load of nonsense.