News

Autumn is now upon us and I look forward to the advent of warm rain to keep the last of the insects at bay. As a bonus, it tends to see off the most annoying human beings too. Never underestimate warm rain, it wants to be your friend. Talking of friends, we have a new…
Read more

We have acquired LOS BLANCO from the Thoroughbid online sale. He is rated 120 as both a hurdler and a chaser in Ireland, having finished runner-up in both of his chase starts. A 16.1 hands seven year old by Masked Marvel, who has produced more than his fair share of top class winners (Set Jem…
Read more

Hello, helper monkey. I notice that you have been a bit slow to update the blog this month. {You seem very smug today – Ed.} Only as smug as I usually am, which is fairly smug. I was just wondering when you were going to update the blog to note that I broke the drought.…
Read more

Greetings from Belgium. Don’t worry, I am still in a field at Shovelstrode. I just had the urge to make an in-joke that excludes people who failed to read the July blog. The helper monkey tells me that humans tend to like a running joke. Well funnily enough, so do horses. How else do you…
Read more

It was impossible not to commemorate the Great Meteor of 1783. It entered the atmosphere over the North Sea, crossed England in a south westerly heading and went out over the channel and then it observed the Montgolfier brothers assembling the first manned balloon and disintegrated in despair. A mere three months later, the balloon…
Read more

The blog is late this month because I have been busy watching the World Cup. We don’t have an actual television in the field, but I directed the other horses to erect an elaborate system of mirrors so that we could get it from any nearby location with one. It worked pretty well, because we…
Read more

We had a new bloke in the field since my last update, Hallo Max. He seemed nice enough, but all of a sudden the field suddenly felt a bit…overcrowded. To the untrained human eye, it might look like a very big field, but I subscribe to the philosophy that anything which is not within touching…
Read more

Two major events in Tonga on past 4ths of June – independence in 1970 and the abolition of serfdom in 1862. What will they do for the hat trick? There has only been a small amount of action on course since the last update. Our chums down the road at Plumpton lost their Ladies’ Day…
Read more

On this day in 1455 the Wars of the Roses were deemed to have begun, at the Battle of Stale Buns, which, as we all know, is the closing event in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 2. For those looking for a more contemporary reference, on this day in 1987 the first Rugby World Cup began,…
Read more

Greetings from the undisputed chess champion of the bath field and the summer field. I have indeed united the belts (whatever that means), carrying my unbeaten run into the summer field defeating all the horses that have ventured my way. I have to say that the challengers took their defeats with good grace, apart from…
Read more