St Scholastica’s Day Update

Apparently St Scholastica, the founder of the Benedictine order of nuns, is traditionally invoked against storms and rain. The message from early 2026 is that she might have taken her eye off the ball a little in that respect.  

On to the horses. The next runner to appear after the last update was MONANSUNU, who blotted his copybook with an indifferent display of jumping at Kempton. From there circumstances conspired to ruin our most cunning plans. Firstly, we were going to drop LOLA DE MAGNY in a valuable mares only hurdle at Sandown where the entries were very low in number. Then Sandown abandoned all the hurdles on the card. The race was moved to Warwick but reopened and their better ground ensured a significantly higher entry level and less chance to nick some useful prize money. Our counterpunch was to have GODOT in one of the chases scheduled to replace the hurdles, which themselves were not overpopulated, only for the entire card to be abandoned. It really is like being in a fencing bout at times, thrust, blocked, cut, blocked, the buzzer goes and nobody knows who won. Instead Godot went to Plumpton, where he had a right off day for no obvious reason, although perhaps the ground was not riding as soft as expected. Fortunately things did pick up, because on that same card YASMINA got her first win. After her Windsor run she had a minor wind op, and we also went back to patient tactics. Early in the race Caoilin said that he feared she was a bit too relaxed for her own good, but when needed Yasmina picked up well and also stood her ground when getting squeezed up by the leader jumping left at the final hurdle. So what started in frustration ended up being a pretty cool day out.