Summer 2015

Please forgive me for my lack of blog; I will endeavour to keep it up to date from now on.

We have had a very busy summer so far, which has taken our minds off the fact that the weather hasn’t been the warmest on record. In fact we even had a frost on the 30^th July!

We have bought some lovely new horses who have been in for about 5 weeks now. The majority of them are cantering and I have managed to sit on all the new horses and I must say they are a really impressive lot. We still have shares available in a couple of syndicates (which I will fill you in on later) but they are selling fairly quickly.

We have a lovely new secretary called Tessa Champion, who started just in time to help Katya and the lovely Chrissie to organise all the golfers at our Charlie Mann charity golf day in June. It was the first time in fifteen years that we had more players turn up than we actually needed. It was a fantastic day, the golf was won by Sylvester Kirk, Mark Grant, Dominic Ffrench Davies and Jason. Mark  Grant was definitely the secret weapon! We raised over £5000 for the Injured Jockeys Fund and I think everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and now Katya has organised it once, we are hoping to make it an even bigger success next year, so get your teams in early!!

Myself, Katya and Tess have been very busy over the summer working hard to get new owners in and we have got a bigger team of horses this year than last. We did have one wonderful week away in turkey though to escape from all the work! Katya, myself, Matilda, William, Charlotte and Patrick all went away on a gullet (which is a Turkish sailing boat) and sailed around the West coast of Turkey, stopping off at two different bays every day. It was a great success as we ate very good food, spent our days reading and swimming in the sea and the children didn’t see a television for a whole week!

We had a very good steeplechasers lunch on the 5^th July. This syndicate is now full and all the members seem very pleased with the horses that we purchased for it. From there we went onto the July meeting at Newmarket and bought a couple of really nice horses at the sales. One of them is the biggest 3 year old that I have ever seen called Capatosta (USA). I then drove up to Northumberland where my brother Robbie married his lovely new wife Emma on Holy Island. It was a really wonderful weekend where I managed to catch up with lots of relatives and old friends.

On the 16^th July, Andy Weller and Andy Durham came for lunch. Katya cooked a delicious lunch and Andy Weller actually didn’t leave until the next morning after finishing the evening with a late night Indian!

It hasn’t all been wining and dining though – we have managed to fit in some tennis, which is a sport that I really enjoy. I partnered an owner and friend of mine, Barney Windsor Clive, in mens doubles match against J Francome and J Rowlinson, and whilst we flew into the lead winning the first set 6-1, they then beat us in the next two sets 6-4, 6-4. Perhaps we could have more success in the mixed doubles as this might affect Franc’s concentration a little bit!!

We have had a very quiet summer runners wise as we do not have many summer jumpers, which has been a little frustrating. Having managed to do all five days of Royal Ascot, I thought I would never want to go racing again, but actually I am longing to get back into the nitty gritty of going racing on a regular basis! We have got Sureness entered next week at Fontwell and Southwell, and To Begin has some entries at Market Rasen next Saturday, so things are starting to pick up.

We have been schooling some of the younger horses recently – Dragon City and Airpur Desbois – in the sand ring and they both jumped beautifully. Schooling young horses for the first time never fails to excite me and these two really were very pleasing.

We also took Katya’s horse Agnes B up to Meridian Stud so that Elizabeth could have a lesson on her with Ruth Honey. She was very impressed with the way she went and thinks she is a very natural jumper. I have to say that if she doesn’t make it as a race horse (which we very much hope she will) she will definitely have another job as an eventer! We hope to run her in a bumper first but it is good for a young horses balance to school them over poles. Katya says it is the best birthday present she has ever had!

We also went to a big lunch at Newbury on the 18^th of July for John Hills memorial. There was a very big turnout, which is testament to what a popular person he was. He was a great friend of mine and is very sorely missed.

We went to Simon Christian’s 60^th birthday party at Oaksey House last Sunday and saw lots of people that we haven’t seen for a while. Again it was a very good turnout and I am sure Simon was thrilled to see so many friends. Well done to everyone who organised it!

I also went to the New Forest show with Sue Welch last week and was very surprised as the was  much bigger than I had anticipated. It was lovely to catch up with Sue and I look forward to having her Proclamation filly join our yard tomorrow.

As I mentioned previously, we have lots of lovely new owners, but most notably, we have just got our youngest owner on board. He is called George Fitzgerald O’Connor – he is only 6 years old and he has come into the Charlie Mann Racing Club. If George is the youngest member of our owner entourage, then I must also mention Tom and Liz Slater who most definitely travelled the furthest to visit us. They popped over from New York to go to a wedding in Hertfordshire on the Saturday and then spent the Monday morning with Tess, looking around the yard whilst we were away in Turkey.

Since the horses have come back into the yard from their summer holidays, they have most definitely had the “once over”. Not only has Matty, our Head Lad, done a great job in the hairdressing department, they have also had their teeth done and also we welcome on board a new Chiropractor called Stuart who came to the yard yesterday to treat a few of the horses. They all seem very happy with what he did and he even put his healing hands to our cat Oscar, who having been hit by a car and having his tail amputated thoroughly enjoyed having some TLC!

I am sorry for anything that I might have forgotten but there seems to have been so much going on this summer, but I am now back in my work routine and will be providing you with a regular blog from now on.

As I mentioned earlier, we do still have shares available in syndicate horses and also horses for sale as a whole – please look at our website for more details and contact me to discuss things further!