Monty’s Award – July 2023 Blog
July has come around quite quickly this year, and so far I have not been to Worcester. Travel does broaden the mind, even when it happens to be to a place that you have visited before. There are exceptions to that. Kempton always seems to be a shambles, but then again, it is not much of a journey, so glory has not been earned just by getting there, even on a bad day for the M25. Did Hannibal get famous for taking his elephants down the road to buy a bag of chips?
{Do elephants eat chips? – Ed.}
Of course they do, they eat anything. Have you seen the size of them? Obviously I am not planning to march on Rome, but I may march on the Roman villa at Bignor, next time that I go to Fontwell. Glory may demand effort, but my instincts to be efficient do mean that a race, a conquest and perhaps a stop for an agreeable lunch should be combined where possible. This is why people like horses, as we tend to play by the rules and adhere to dining etiquette, whereas elephants just treat the whole agricultural sector as a glorified Pick Your Own location. Although we horses could be in trouble if cow parsley ever becomes a commercially viable crop.
Anyway, the reason why I have been quiet of late is that I had a bit of a knock on the hock. For some reason, injuries never get taken seriously when they rhyme. A bump on the rump. A cut on the butt. A sprain in the brain. All of them should be hushed up to keep credibility intact. Needless to say, as soon as I had time available to spend chilling out in a field, the dry spell was broken and it rained, but at least it was warm rain.
This month the question comes from Hugh Tocksetter, who asks whether horses like courses where they can see trains in action as they race. The first point in reply is that when we are concentrating on a race, there is not much opportunity to watch what is going on around you, unless having a day when indifference is the watchword. Beyond that, the answer is sometimes yes, as we do have horse nerds in the thoroughbred community.
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The train concept may have come from a film “Basil Radford and Janette Scott”. A spooky racehorse bought in error became enthused about its work when a train rushed by or an aircraft whizzed by overhead. Does one presume that Shovelstrode should install a train track around the gallops and associate the train noise with a jockey singing “Last train to Clarksville” to repeated mid race. Of course on National day horsey only had to jump the last to win albeit carrying 28lbs over weight and from out of the blue ……
The train track is not a bad idea, but it might have to be very narrow gauge!
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