September 2024 Blog

For the last few weeks, I have been a member of the team of yardies up at the main yard and have spent busy and tiring hours doing everything from mucking out to turning out, refreshing water pots to refilling water buckets, swimming horses to putting horses on and off the walkers. Everything required for the welfare and preparation of the racehorses, bar actually riding them. I enjoyed my time with these colleagues: their good humour and hard work meant that a funny word or joke was never far away.

Mucking In with the Mucking Out

Some racing staff see mucking out as a necessary task, others don't. I see wherever there are stabled horses, there's going to be mucking out. We had weeks of being pretty short staffed, and there were many stables to clean out.

I got to know my twelve regular stables inside out, but my heart still sank if the horses had ever trashed their beds overnight. After a sigh and a swear word, my mucking out began: the swipe and sway of the fork, the scrape of the metal prongs on the concrete floor, throwing soiled bedding and poo into the wheelbarrow with soft thuds, packing in the old hay on top. I finished off with a flourish, a swish of sweeping the shavings back from the doorway.

A well-behaved horse always kept out of my way on the other side of his stable but an annoying one continuously did the opposite, barging past and positioning himself between me and the wheelbarrow. My language wouldn’t be muttered then, but emitted with the volume of sergeant-major and far from ladylike language.

To finish off, I refilled buckets with a rush of fresh water, which sloshed as I carried them. Twice a week we bedded up – a gorgeous forest smell of new shavings that conjured up images of lumberjacks, chainsaws and hollers of ‘Timber.’ To put down new beds always felt jubilant, eradicating that sharp stench of urine, but the new bales of shavings always took effort to break apart, clumps often getting wedged in-between the fork prongs. I bedded up in the banks, preventing them from becoming fusty.

In fact, the whole mucking out procedure took effort: keeping a bed clean relied on a daily removal of the dirty bedding and at least twice weekly going through the banks – then there's those water buckets that needed cleaning too. To bodge mucking out even for a day, made the task harder the next day and continuous laziness allowed the shavings to become brown and smelly, which are not ideal conditions for a horse to live in.

Adding to the mucking out, we dragged the overflowing wheelbarrows up the steep gradient to the top of the muck trailers before forking out the contents or tipping them in. Then, we forked flat the contents of the trailer from where previous barrow-loads had left mountainous mounds of yellowy shavings tangled with hay and poo. We always helped each other emptying wheelbarrows – the lads strong enough to make the contents resemble a thimbleful. Mucking out helped to keep me fit, strong and the bingo wings at bay but sometimes, I was so exhausted that, after the morning was up, all I wanted to do is sit down to recover.

Never underestimate the work of the yardies. Yes, riding out is vital but so are the unsung heroes behind the scenes who put in a lot of daily graft.

Yard Jeeps

There are a trio of yard jeeps, that we drive around the estate to check the fields, take supplies to the pens and the quarantine stables or use to run errands. One is permanently yawning, it's front bumper long gone and it's in good company. All are dented, muddied, their chunky tyres balding and are rattly, squeaky, rusty and clunky. Two are SORN and one barely scrapes through its annual MOT, and recently had a sidelight swinging like an eye popped from its socket.

On my first morning driving down to my pens, in 5 o'clock darkness, I took the black jeep with the provisions I needed. Apart from being hampered by the very dim headlights, I was beetling down past the schooling ground when a couple of warning lights flashed up and the jeep rumbled to a slow stop in the middle of the road at the bottom of the hill. I abandoned it there and walked the rest of the way, ladened with all the items. The Boss did get it back up to the top but it has been parked up ever since, not remotely wanting to start.

Home Sweet Home

When the pens opened up on the 20th of September, we were greeted by drumrolls of thunder, zaps of lightning and horizontal rain. It gushed out of drainpipes, overflowed from the guttering and hammered down. Dirt turned to soupy mud. The horses brainlessly remained outside their sheds, heads lowered, tails turned to the onslaught and muddy rivulets running off them. I was just missing working in the barn when the rain became hailstones bigger than imperial mints. These small clear spheres pinged off the ground, bounced off the jeep’s bonnet and actually hurt when hitting my skull. At the satellite yard, the hail fell in a carpet of tiny white balls, as if the sky had been a beanbag that popped, which crunched under foot and made the wheels of my car skid. It was an odd welcome back from the weather, especially in the middle of an Indian summer, but stormy conditions couldn't dampen my elation that I was back home down the pens with my beloved Monbeg Genius and eight other horses.

How do I write my blog?

Throughout the month, I initially jot down notes in a notebook like a diary, those snippets of happenings as the weeks progress, my handwriting as runaway as my thoughts. I also tap notes on my phone around the yard or in bed, similar to those scraps of paper I scrawl on. Some ideas come from nowhere and others are lovingly nurtured like seedlings. In the past, I have tried to retain ideas, memories or inspiration in my head but these often escaped me and I lost them – hence the scribbling.

Of these notes, a few fatten like a Christmas turkey into paragraphs, a few will never materialise further and others will be shelved for another day, boxed with lines of biro ink and the don't-forget-me dog-ear left on the page of the notebook. Any word or phrase might grow into a part of a blog, a colleague who might have been in a fortunate or unfortunate situation and of course, there are all the things that I’d love to write about but can't – the scandalous that that make racing yards akin to the raciest Jilly Cooper novel.

Winners are always great to write about because winners make our world go round and are why we do the job. Days at the races lead to fresh tales, descriptions of the canteen food and the horses themselves; not forgetting those emotions that intensify throughout the day.

Horses are a great inspiration with their wise-old-owl eyes; in particular, old handicap chasers could write books of their own. As well as days at the races, the sales or a driving job offer inspiration, and add many new smells, sounds and sightings. Birdlife is a plentiful source of inspiration as are the weather, snacks, the dogs and my colleagues, who I owe so much to in the creation of my blogs. I've always loved the people in racing, from the amazing things they say and what they get up to.

It's always been my dream to write a novel but so far, I've never done so. I keep another notebook stuffed with ideas and characters, but this is as far as I’ve got. I'm too cowardly, too busy, and not confident enough to make the plunge as many brave authors do.

I want to make a loud shoutout to my editor, Tina Sederholm, who dons many guises from equestrienne, instructor, poet and writer. At trainer Charlie Longsdon’s, she regularly schooled the 2021 Becher Chase-winner Snow Leopardess and four-time chase winner Tea For Free. Through her monthly tutelage, Tina has improved my writing no end, keeping my words on the straight and narrow. I strive to be as wise and knowledgeable as her one day – in everything about life, not just horses and writing.

My amazing editor Tina with Snow Leopardess, Tea for Free and away from horses!

Now it's October, as green leaves are becoming tinged with yellow, I'm allowing myself to dream of silvery frosts, crispy leaves and the first meetings at Cheltenham and Aintree, which hint of the big days to come later in the season.