Paul Webber Racing

Well it's ten days late but it sure is about to be "deep and crisp and even" around these 'ere parts. We should get ten inches......... maybe we'll attract a new influx of lady owners as that would be a novelty at Cropredy Lawn.
The Met Office reports that we're heading into the coldest winter since the last barbeque summer, but up until tonight our routine has not been affected and the horses are healthy and raging. One or two have been bogged down by the racecourse ground but none have suffered from any inconvenience from the weather.
The gallop has been great and has attracted many 'winter migrants' from afar. It is all part of trying to train horses through the winter and it is at times like this that our team shines through. Every task is that bit more arduous and time-consuming, but everybody's commitment makes me so proud and inspires us all to carry on through.
Every year grumblings can appear about training fees and wages, but i can assure you that neither look unreasonable when you see the daily routine that everybody in Racing copes with in weather like this. Schools close, trains and buses go onto emergency schedules, the country will gradually gride to a halt, but where there are animals to be cared for, people will put in that extra effort and cope to see that all are cared for and exercised as much as possible.
We are unlikely to see grass for a while, so our attentions will concentrate around keeping the drive passable so that everybody can get here and the horsebox can leave to visit All-Weather courses that are not buried in snow. We had a contingency plan to gallop six youngsters in need of experience at Wolverhampton tomorrow, but even the Black Country has turned White!

My advice for this little pause in N.H. racing is to subscribe to The Week and when you do ask them to send you the last issue of 2009. The Week, is surprisingly enough a synopsis of the previous week's newspapers, that so many of us probably do not do justice too.
A few highlights to whet you apetite:

----From The Tabloids.
"A Russian man survived a five-stotey fall - twice. Alexei Roskov, 22, downed three bottles of vodka and hurled himself out of his kitchen window. He then got up, without a scratch, climbed the stairs to his Moscow flat and repeated the feat. "I have no idea why I jumped the first time," he said. "But when I came back up and I heard my wife screaming at me I thought it was best if I left the room again, out of the window."

----The spirit of Britain.
" A GPs' surgury in Preston, Lancashire, was docked £375 because it hadn't received any complaints. Under the current NHS system, surguries are rewarded for hitting targets, one of which is to show how they deal with complaints. Since the Preston surgury didn't get any, it lost out. A spokesman for the local NHS trust said it had to follow guidelines.

----The Christmas Read titled, " New Year's Day. What's the bloody point?"
I will not spoil this for you, it is just wonderfully original obsevations from a penniless writer from South Wales, Roger Lewis. He only gets £25 as an after dinner speaker........book him now!

Keep warm and steady on the ice.